LIKE so much else in the state, Oklahoma’s economy, it seemed, was born grown. Within a few years of the early land runs, the stereotype of the typical Oklahoma farmer as a plowman with a wife and children, cows, chickens, and pigs, a garden, and some cotton or corn to sell for cash was a thing of the past. The combination of technological advances, railroads connected to eastern and world markets, good soil and climate rapidly changed subsistence farming into an intensive agricultural system.
Cotton production dominated the pioneer era in Oklahoma Territory, as it had in Indian Territory. Although the Civil War destroyed the extensive Choctaw and Chickasaw plantations, southern farmers working as tenants on Indian lands after 1866 revived cotton-growing. And with the opening of the southwestern and central portions of Oklahoma in the 1880s and 1890s, thousands of new acres were planted in cotton. When the Twin Territories merged in 1907, cotton farming was the new state’s economic mainstay.
Other staples of national and international consumption dominated other parts of the state. The Kansans who settled in the northern and western parts of the territory planted wheat, which soon surpassed corn as the leading grain crop. Ranching suffered a temporary decline as land-hungry farmers swarmed onto former grazing areas; but it revived somewhat, as people gave up claims that were unsuitable for farming or went bankrupt through lack of developmental capital. In all these endeavors, the long-term trends extending into the twentieth century emphasized scope and complexity, though Oklahoma was glorified as the last haven for the small family farm.
The years between 1898 and 1920 were a high point of prosperity for the American farmer. Industry spread rapidly from the Northeast around the Great Lakes. As some fifteen million immigrants entered the country, the nation’s cities burgeoned. Oklahoma’s raw materials found good markets, as cotton became clothing, cattle became food and leather, and wheat became bread. International demands for these basics were also strong throughout the first generation of statehood. The Oklahoma farmer who started well and planned carefully seemed bound to succeed.
Recognizing the enormous potential of their agricultural wealth, many early Oklahomans followed developments in scientific farming. An agricultural experiment station was opened in territorial days at the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College in Stillwater. After statehood, additional agricultural schools and experimental farms opened; and Langston College for Negroes, established in 1897, was designed chiefly to train black farmers. The state constitution required agricultural courses in the public schools. And the farmer benefited from advice and direction generated from federal agencies.
Yet that advice had a double edge. Most farmers were interested in increasing yields and conveniently overlooked warnings against soil depletion. Settlers kept coming, and the best lands disappeared rapidly. Homesteaders arriving later had to farm the unfamiliar and often marginal lands of the dry plains. Yet they could take heart from the widely held theory that crops increased an area’s humidity and the likelihood of rain. Most of these farmers merely repeated the optimism that they had seen or heard of elsewhere. Like many generations of Americans before them, they cleared and overplanted wherever they could.
The wet cycle of the late 1890s continued into the new century. Cotton, corn, and wheat led the production lists, but a variety of other grain crops were grown to feed livestock. Technology enhanced yields, as steam, then gasoline engines replaced mules and horses. The farther west these techniques and crops traveled, the greater the danger to the soil. But amid the era’s agricultural bonanza, it was easy to overlook the eroded gullies and leached soils that foretold disaster.
The boll weevil that plagued southern cotton farmers was slow to appear in Oklahoma, and cotton acreage expanded rapidly. Before World War 1, Oklahoma outranked the states of the old Cotton Kingdom in bales produced, and in 1925 was second to Texas. Wheat acreage expanded on as great a scale, and the sudden boom of 1914–1918 pushed up production of almost every kind of agricultural raw material. While high prices and good weather held, these gamblers in overalls were safe. But drought, insects, or a drop in demand would spell severe retrenchment or ruin for many.
When the war ended in 1918, Oklahoma agriculture was clearly overextended. Cotton, a ruthless consumer of soil fertility, was planted in every county. Wheat grew well beyond both its natural and economical boundaries. And the state depended on exports of fuel, food, and fiber to the rest of the country. The postwar national recession thus became a major event in Soon-erland. Farmers who had counted on paying debts with inflated dollars faced foreclosure when prices dropped. Banks failed, and the price of oil declined from $3.50 per barrel to $1.75 in a year. Labor troubles inevitably erupted in the coal fields, in railroading, in the building trades, and in manufacturing. Every wage-earner felt the pains of adjusting to harder times, but the change was sharpest for the farmers who composed most of the population.
Other sectors of the economy gradually improved after 1919. But while the oil industry roared during the 1920s, agriculture remained depressed in Oklahoma and the nation. Farm tenancy, always high in the state, rose dramatically, as many marginal farmers lost their land. In 1920, more than half the state’s farmers were tenants. Some of the farmers so classified actually owned land and rented additional acreages, but most tenants were transients who owned no property. It was customary for many such “to break loose like the tumbleweed every year and go rolling across the prairie until they [lodged] against a barb wire fence, only to break loose . . . and go tumbling on again.”1
With no personal stake in the lands they farmed, these tenants seldom practiced crop rotation or soil conservation. Mismanagement continued until depression and drought in the 1930s finally forced Oklahoma farmers to change the wasteful practices of their youth. There was simply no new land to plant. If agriculture were to survive, prodigal pioneer farmers would have to learn the Indian lesson of stewardship of the soil.
The farmer remained the state’s symbol, but there was even more spectacular development in mineral resources. Long before oil riches transformed Tulsa from a muddy Creek village to the world’s petroleum capital and tales of rich Osages distorted the nation’s concept of Oklahoma Indians, commercial mining was well established.
The fabulous tales of golden kingdoms that drew Coronado across the plains in the 1540s persisted into the twentieth century. There were legends of a buried Spanish hoard of gold bars stacked like cordwood in a cave in the Wichitas. One mining company hoping to find this treasure spent ten thousand dollars on a smelting plant that eventually produced two pennyweights of gold, one bar of silver, and two bars of copper. Prospectors’ camps and gold towns flourished like mirages on former Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche lands. Thousands of worthless mining shares changed hands. And the dream of hidden El Dorados persisted among local folk well into the twentieth century.
Despite the absence of the gold so common in other western territories, Oklahoma did possess valuable minerals. Lead ore, found in lumps above ground and used for bullets in the frontier era, was common in northeastern Oklahoma. Repeated rich strikes near Miami, along with the discovery of zinc, created boomtowns that rivaled the gold camps of Colorado and California. In about fifty years, a billion dollars’ worth of minerals was extracted from the Tri-State District where Oklahoma joined Kansas and Missouri.
Coal was also abundant in eastern Indian Territory, where it was strip-mined for domestic uses and blacksmithing in early days. But there was no market to stimulate commercial coal mining until the coming of railroads in the 1870s. At the end of the Civil War, an Arkansas Confederate colonel, J.J. McAles-ter of Fort Smith, happened to see a geologist friend’s notebook containing an account of a government party that explored Indian Territory before the war. The notes indicated high-quality coal deposits near the juncture of the Texas Road and the California Trail in the Choctaw Nation. McAlester decided to seek his fortune in Indian Territory. Without divulging any information about the coal discovery, he moved to Buck-lucksy in the Choctaw Nation. With some lumber and a small amount of canned goods, he opened a typical frontier store. Marriage to a Chickasaw girl entitled him to dual citizenship in the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. Under Choctaw law, any citizen had the exclusive right to own and work mines within a radius of one mile of his discoveries. McAlester formed a company with several other intermarried Indians and began to plan mines. But he needed a secure market. In the early 1870s, he hauled wagon loads of coal to Kansas for officials of the MKT Railroad to inspect. Congress had offered a right of way to the first railroad to operate in Indian Territory, but the MKT was uncertain of which route to take out of Parsons, Kansas. McAlester’s coal helped persuade its officials to route a southern line through the Choctaw coal fields.
When the tracks reached Bucklucksy in 1872, the MKT graciously renamed the town McAlester. Although Colonel McAlester owned and operated the first shaft mines at nearby Krebs, Jay Gould’s Missouri Pacific Railroad and the MKT quickly dominated Oklahoma coal production, opening shafts at Lehigh, Coalgate, Dow, Bache, Hartshorne, and Henryetta.
Unemployment in eastern coal fields in the 1870s caused numerous miners to accept the railroad’s offer of free transportation to Indian Territory. And scores of skilled immigrants from the British Isles came to the Oklahoma mines. A generation later, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh surnames were common in the southeastern part of the state.
Indians were reluctant to work underground mines, but many Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen abandoned subsistence farming to dig for coal. The pick and shovel fit their hands as easily as the plow handle or mule reins and held a prospect of success that farming could not match. During the long, bitter strikes over union recognition between 1898 and 1903, hundreds of Alabama blacks were imported as strike-breakers.
Other immigrants—Lithuanians, Slovaks, Poles, Magyars, Russians, and many Italians—also came to the Oklahoma mines. They were willing to work for low wages and long hours in the hope of ultimately buying farms. The Italians predominated, and by the turn of the century there was a colony of more than a thousand at Krebs, with hundreds more scattered in nearby communities. They were generally penniless southern Italians, filled with the hope of saving money to buy land. And even the harsh conditions in the mines were an improvement over their lot at home. Most were single men, living in groups to cut costs. They had such a reputation for frugality that in 1905 an estimated $50,000 lay buried under the town of Krebs. Mutual-aid societies were common among the Italians, but they were seldom, if ever, political. They were conservative, family-oriented, church-centered people who had no taste for the radical politics that appealed to so many western miners.
The Oklahoma miner’s basic wage of $2.45 per day in 1903 was higher than that in the east, but Oklahoma mines were more dangerous. Little machinery was used because of the surfeit of willing labor. Operators accepted only lump coal, and in some mines men worked knee-deep in water or crawled on all fours for twelve-hour shifts. After 1894, as the shafts deepened, fatal explosions and cave-ins were common. In 1906, one man died for every 73,000 tons of coal mined in Indian Territory.
Labor unions developed slowly in the Oklahoma fields. But in 1903, after a five-year strike, Peter Hanraty, a United Mine Worker organizer, negotiated a settlement on behalf of the Oklahoma miners. The landmark agreement specified an eight-hour day, established grievance committees, and allowed a check-off system for union dues. The operators agreed to accept sack as well as lump coal. Through Hanraty, the UMW became influential in early state politics. As vice-president of the constitutional convention of 1906, Hanraty secured many enlightened labor provisions in the new constitution.
The coal industry declined temporarily with the development of oil and gas, but production soared during World War I. Between 1917 and 1920, there was a serious shortage of miners, and Oklahoma operators paid six dollars a day to likely prospects. Coal production peaked in 1920 at five million tons, but mining was a sick industry. Wartime demand had caused too many mines to open. There were strikes, closures, and bank failures as prices and wages declined after 1918. Rather than refurbish decrepit mines, many operators simply went bankrupt. Oklahoma’s then known best-grade coal was also exhausted by the 1920s. With the discovery of the rich oil and gas fields in the mid-1920s, coal was no longer a competitive power source. As one operator prophesied, Oklahoma’s “future belongs to oil.”2
That remark was true. In 1859, when the first commercial oil wells were drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania, petroleum was accidentally discovered in the Cherokee Nation. While drilling a water well to boost salt production at Grand Saline, Lewis Ross found oil. Petroleum seepages, which Indians called “oil springs” and used for medicinal purposes, were fairly common, but commercial drilling was unknown. Indian Territory was too remote from refining and marketing facilities to prompt much more than curiosity or wonder.
Cudahy Oil Company drilled the first commercial well at Bartlesville in 1897. But because of the distance to market, the well was capped until the Santa Fe Railroad reached the area. Yet the excitement and frenzy that that brief boom generated was repeated over the next four decades, as Oklahoma produced one bonanza oil field after another. The local editor vividly described the invasion of adventurers:
Here the representatives of nearly every civilized nation on the globe are to be found—the sturdy Norseman from the “Land of the Midnight Sun,” the industrious German, the Englishman who has had his eye-teeth cut, the excitable Frenchman, the “Wild Irishman,” the carefree son of Italy, the polite scion of the Montezumas, and the patient laborer from the Isles of Greece. All are here animated by a common desire—to capture and sequester the Great American Dollar.3
Exploration declined in the late 1890s, as oil men waited for the Dawes Commission to complete allotment and to establish a more favorable leasing policy for Indian lands. The Curtis Act of 1898 required that mineral lands be leased for the benefit of each tribe, but companies of Cherokees and Creeks continued to negotiate individual leases with outside investors and drillers. The technicalities yielded. On June 25, 1901, when the message “Oil is spouting over the derrick” crackled along the telegraph wires, a new era of Oklahoma rushes began.4 Promoters from Kansas and Texas crossed the border, and others from New York, Chicago, and Pennsylvania scrambled for leases in the area. The Interior Department delayed another year before approving individual lease contracts for citizens of the Five Tribes, but wildcat drilling and speculative madness were in full swing. Just as the relentless Boomer agitation for land in western Oklahoma triumphed in 1889, so men’s hunger for the new wealth beneath the land hastened the fall of those barriers that had kept Indian Territory a refuge.
Discovery followed discovery, and each new well seemed more productive than the ones before it. By the summer of 1905, there were 255 producing wells in Indian Territory. The Prairie Oil and Gas Company was laying a pipeline to refineries in the north. In November, shallow oil sands rich in kerosene were discovered ten miles south of Tulsa on the Ida Glenn farm. Almost overnight, the Glenn Pool flow of from one thousand to three thousand barrels a day was the most sensational small field in the world.
By the end of 1906, Oklahoma oil wells had produced more than twenty-seven million barrels of oil, worth about fourteen million dollars. Oklahoma proudly entered the Union as the Southwest’s leading producer of crude oil, a lead she maintained until 1928, when Texas passed her. The atmosphere of oil development in the 1920s was charged with hyperbole and superlative. Each discovery broke old records and added another layer of legend to the history of Oklahoma.
Oil men, whether workers or owners, were a special breed, as the career of Thomas B. Slick typified. A lease promoter for a Chicago financier, Slick paid one dollar per acre for leases within a ten-mile radius of a discovery well at Cushing in 1912. To keep the strike secret while he obtained a monopoly, he hired all the livery rigs in Cushing and paid the town’s notaries to take a day off, so that no one else could file. Although the secrecy of the Cushing strike was never duplicated, Slick’s ingenuity characterized the men who made it big in Oklahoma oil. Harry Sinclair, J. Paul Getty, E. W. Marland, Frank Phillips, and scores of others were a peculiar type of frontiersman. An aura of recklessness and extravagance distinguished them from the more sober pioneer in search of land. They talked easily of millions of dollars. The gambling and uncertainty, the scope of operations and risk, obviously enamored them as much as either money or oil. Slick realized two million dollars from the sale of his Cushing properties and retired at twenty-six. A few years later, he returned to the oil business to make another thirty-five million dollars. His inability to quit was common among early oil men. “I’m not working simply for the money. I’ve got enough. I keep at it because of the love of the game,” he said. “I get a kick out of it, even when I don’t win. It thrills me to know that I’m doing a man’s work, producing something, and as long as I can win at it I’ll keep going.”5
A year after the Cushing discovery, the Healdton field near Ardmore came in. The enormous production of these two fields made Oklahoma the nation’s major oil producer. Cushing’s peak was 310,000 barrels a day in 1915, and the Healdton field’s was 95,000 a day in 1916. The flood of crude drove down prices from $1.05 to $0.35 a barrel in 1915, and thousands of barrels sold below the market price. The situation was so bleak that wits suggested barbers raise the price of a shave because oil men’s faces were so long.
But the outbreak of war in Europe and rising sales of automobiles in the United States soon caused oil prices to climb. Farmers anxious to take advantage of wartime prices purchased gasoline-driven equipment. Between 1912 and 1915, the nation’s oil consumption doubled. The state’s oil- and gas-producing fields increased from 39 in 1908 to 110 in 1915, and refining capacity more than tripled.
As the country prepared to enter the war, the search for new oil intensified. Operators who had dismissed geologists as witch doctors, a few years earlier, now employed them to direct explorations. New fields were discovered throughout the state, and old wells were redrilled to tap deeper pools. During the war years, Oklahoma wells produced nearly a hundred million barrels per year, as the price soared to $3.50 a barrel. New methods of exploration, the use of special scientific techniques, and improved drilling all expedited the location of ten more major finds in the 1920s. The prolific Burbank and Tonkawa fields appeared in the early 1920s. Oklahoma kept the national lead in oil production, with the California basin second and Texas third.
By the mid-1920s, the Greater Seminole Field, which encompassed five counties and seven major pools, pumped 10 percent of all the oil produced in the country. Despite an ominous downward trend in the price of Oklahoma crude, oil continued to flood the market. Attempts to limit drilling and pumping failed. Big companies proposed to store excess oil. The small operator feared that his pool would be drained through other wells if he did not pump. Production advanced, and prices retreated, and excess oil often fouled the land.
Natural gas, nature’s means of pushing oil to the surface, was also dissipated as wells were drilled too close together or allowed to flow wide open. As gas pressure diminished, the oil “dried up” and had to be pumped. In many fields, the natural gas was simply burned off in dramatic flares. At Cushing alone, the yearly waste of gas was equal to the heating capacity of five million tons of coal.
As the petroleum market deteriorated, the Oklahoma City field, with wells a mile deep, roared into existence in December 1928. Gas pressure was so strong that many wells gushed for days before being controlled. The “Wild Mary Sudick,” drilled in 1930, rampaged for eleven days, spraying two thousand barrels of oil and ten million cubic feet of gas every hour. With high winds, the threat of fire was so great that residents could not even strike a match to cook meals.
The oil boom affected Oklahoma as dramatically as the land rushes of the preceding century. Although essentially an extractive industry, like farming, oil generated feedback in refineries, filling stations, and the manufacture of oil-field equipment. Oil and gas tax revenues also brought the state new wealth. Petroleum, combined with wheat and cotton, gave the state its first glimpse of self-sufficiency through an integrated economy.
However much oil as an abstraction affected the economy and society, its real importance was worked out in individual lives. Some fortunes, whether won or lost, were fabulous. Some of the money was squandered, but most of it went into the stream of capital that was developing the state and the nation. For every millionaire and philanthropist like E. W. Marland, there were scores of lesser-known but wealthy and generous men. In due course, they and their heirs returned some of their fortunes to the state through gifts for universities and museums and for the improvement of the small towns from which many came. Their philanthropies were insufficient to the state’s needs; yet, they were uncommon, given the lack of stewardship associated with new money of any kind.
Few Oklahomans actually became truly wealthy through oil ownership, but the great discoveries made many landless people affluent. Oil-related industries built prosperous towns and ensured jobs for people who otherwise would have been poor. Thousands of small ranchers and farmers with royalties from a single lease were able to improve their homes, travel, send children to college, or buy livestock. The “stripper wells” that produced only a fraction of a barrel a day were to many Oklahoma farmers “what cows’ teats are to Wisconsin dairymen. We milk them every day.”6
The myth soon grew that Oklahoma Indians were all rich from oil leases. Many, like Jackson Barnett, did become overnight millionaires; still others prospered for a lifetime. But the discovery of oil was as great a tragedy to many Indians as removal or the allotment system had been. By the time of the great oil booms, many Indian allotments had passed to white owners through embezzlement, forgery, or deliberate mismanagement in the probate courts.
Only among the Osage were mineral rights reserved to the tribe as a group, with lease sales and royalties divided equally. With the discovery of the Burbank field in the 1920s, the Osage became the richest Indians in the world. Stories of their extravagant spending filled the national press. One correspondent who visited Pawhuska reported that Indians who owned ornate silver flatware still ate with their hands. They washed vegetables in cut-crystal bowls and stored baseball bats in cloisonné vases. But the Osage wealth also produced the cultural achievement of the Tall Chief ballerinas, Maria and Marjorie, and novelist-historian John Joseph Mathews.
A people unaccustomed to such wealth were victimized, as well as ridiculed. Between 1921 and 1923, systematic murdering and kidnaping alternated with legal deception, as whites plundered the remains of the Indians’ inheritance. The Osage were primary targets, but many Creeks and Choctaws died mysteriously after marrying whites or making wills. No Indian earning royalties from his rightful allotment was ever completely safe from terrorism.
In the midst of all these booms, society often seemed a caricature of normality. Beginning with the discovery of oil at Red Fork in 1901, little settlements erupted in the wake of each strike. Almost overnight, as in the land runs, but with a different atmosphere, whole towns of cheap wooden or cloth construction appeared. Some buildings bore labels—”hotel,” “restaurant,” “opera house”—all designed to separate men from their money with the minimum of fuss. Congestion, prostitution, violence were the hallmarks of oil towns. And the open saloon roared until accidents, absenteeism, and violence forced the operators to dry up liquor sources.
Most oil towns vanished quickly; but if their pool was substantial, they often became significant. Cushing changed from an agricultural trade center to a refining town. A few places like Wewoka boomed in the 1920s and used the revenue for permanent improvements, such as streets and public buildings. Keifer, the Glenn Pool boomtown, boasted a high school with a marble staircase, just before the bust. But Tulsa, with no oil of her own, became the most permanent of the boomtowns. Starting with little more than a three-story hotel—the Pig’s Ear Cafe, which served good meals and had a bathtub in the hall—aggressive Tulsans set out to win over oilmen. They bridged the Arkansas River and persuaded four railroads to link them with the Glenn and Cushing pools and to refineries in Kansas. They drove the hogs away, paved the streets, put up office buildings, offered free construction sites to refineries and tool manufacturers. They established banks where a good geology report was acceptable as collateral for a man who wanted to sink a well. They did everything to change Tulsa from a tough cow town in Indian Territory to the petroleum headquarters of the world. In true boomer style, they set their sights on the great cities of the world as future peers and planned accordingly.
Profits from oil built palatial residences, as well as tasteful middle-class homes in Tulsa. A tradition of civic pride and a desire for public decoration developed there unequaled in the rest of the state. Oil millionaires used their money in diverse ways. Harry and Leta Chapman bequeathed millions to endow Tulsa University. Frank Phillips quietly paid off all the church mortgages in Bartlesville, home of Phillips Petroleum. His brother Waite endowed the Boy Scouts with Philmont, a vast New Mexico ranch, and added the Philtower, a Tulsa office building, to pay the bills. He bequeathed his art collection to Tulsa, with his Italian Renaissance home and gardens as a museum. The Thomas Gilcrease Institute’s collection of nineteenth-century American art, rare western manuscripts, and Indian art was purchased with an oil fortune that began with royalties earned on a Creek allotment.
Such a record of philanthropy was encouraging, yet the great bulk of oil wealth went to private expenditure or reinvestment in the fields and the production system or, like so many other Oklahoma products, it was exported to eastern interests. Oil helped build Tulsa, but it was equally important in enriching distant entrepreneurs and interests in New York, Chicago, and Houston.
The often breath-taking glamor surrounding the stories of striking Oklahoma crude obscured the effects of an uncertain national economy as the 1920s closed. The rest of the nation began to feel the deepening depression in 1929 and 1930, but Oklahoma’s economy seemed expansive on the surface. Chronic malaise in agriculture seemed almost normal. Oil prices fluctuated, but there was plenty of black gold, even at low prices. There was high unemployment in coal mining, but it had always been a boom-and-bust industry. Refining and subsidiary businesses seemed sound. Cities like Tulsa, Bartlesville, and Oklahoma City had budget surpluses. Boise City in the Panhandle was becoming a railroad shipping center. Its neighbor Guymon took on the look of prosperity that came with brick buildings and improved streets. Personal income was at an all-time high, except in the southeast quadrant of the state, where depression seemed uninteresting for being permanent. It was easy to ignore warning signals that the state’s basic economy, under all the gloss of expansion, remained static.
The situation in agriculture was most ominous. Careless, wasteful agricultural practices had literally destroyed thousands of acres. Ugly red gullies defaced hillsides. Spindly crops straggled in exhausted soil, and dusty fields turned easily to powder in the summer sun. Flood damage was as extensive as periodic drought. Farmers who had plowed marginal lands to reap wartime profits continued to overproduce in the 1920s, merely to survive, as prices declined. They gave little thought to the disasters that would follow any weather change.
Despite agricultural problems, the national depression appeared first in the Oklahoma oil industry. The East Texas gushers that roared into production in 1931 signaled the end of Oklahoma’s supremacy in oil. In their first year, these new Texas wells produced more oil than all of Oklahoma’s pools combined. When the price dropped to sixteen cents, then ten cents a barrel, oilmen followed the farmers’ lead and simply pumped more.
Producing cheap energy and food for the rest of the country, Oklahoma’s prosperity thus depended on an expanding national economy. When that faltered, as events of 1929–1931 made clear, the forty-sixth state faced intense danger. With an unstable extractive economy and an immature political structure, the state was destined to be a major casualty in any national depression.
The first stage of depression unfolded in familiar patterns. The prices of all produce declined, while debts appreciated, and farm foreclosures increased between 1931 and 1933. Retail sales dropped, along with business and factory employment, and the depression spared neither town nor countryside. Yet a certain stoicism pervaded the scene, especially among farmers. When blue northers raked the state, and there were six men for every job, many unemployed “decided that the hills of Cherokee County [were] not so bad after all.”7 Fortified with visions of fresh eggs and robust chickens for at least a subsistence diet, some 37,000 Oklahomans left cities for farms in 1930, while only 19,000 made the more usual change from rural to urban life. Most farmers stubbornly insisted that they would ride out the economic storm. Accustomed to winning in good seasons and losing when it failed to rain, they planted more land.
Weather, rather than Wall Street, brought the depression to Oklahoma in full force, making it seem both intensely personal and blindly impersonal in scale. In the fall of 1930, the Oklahoma Farmer-Stockman reassured readers that “the dry weather and hard times are but temporary.”8 Wheat farmers stoutly refused government relief. But by 1932, seed wheat refused to sprout, and even the weeds died from lack of moisture.
In January 1933, the calamity of blowing dust and violent weather fluctuations began in earnest. Strong dry fronts sandpapered the crops with fine dust, and static electricity burned tender shoots. The temperature rose to a record sixty degrees in February, then plunged a record seventy-six degrees in a few hours. Arctic winds swirled in, but contained no snow, and without moisture the wheat shriveled in the soil. By the end of 1933, some seventy dust storms were recorded at Goodwell.
With no rain in the state from February to July 1934, eastern Oklahoma’s cotton and row crops were ruined, and only 3 percent of the western wheat crop was harvested. Although blowing dust diminished somewhat in 1934, it returned with full fury in 1935. These dust storms entered national folklore as examples of man at the mercy of nature. Awesome, majestic, frightening, they advanced on spectators as if they were rolling walls. Since the dust absorbed sunlight, the storms added the terrors of darkness to those of suffocation. In the black blizzard of April 14, 1935, people became lost in their own backyards. Travelers stranded in darkness at noon crawled along fences to farmhouses, or groped for ruts in the roads with bare toes. One man who was carefully holding on to his two small sons learned to his horror that he had only one child by both hands.
Man was not alone in his distress. Blowing sand blinded cattle, which ran in circles until exhausted or suffocated from inhaled dust. Newborn calves usually died within a day. Hordes of birds unsuccessfully tried to ride out the storms. Jack rabbits “huddled close to the ground, facing away from the storm, while the approaching eddies turned them into hillocks of dust and left only their twitching noses visible.”9 Caroline Henderson, a farm wife in Eva, recalled seeing plants sitting high above the surrounding earth, roots exposed by the wind’s force. Cattle tracks made when the ground was frozen remained like tiny mesas as the surrounding soil blew away. Uncertain weather plagued the entire state with differing effects, but the northwestern quadrant bore the brunt of nature’s revenge.
People reacted differently to the storms. Most fled for shelter, but others watched the displays of blue-gray, russet, and mauve colors that often preceded the “rollers.” Dust affected every one’s life, and Oklahomans responded with new varieties of the frontier humor that had softened hardships in earlier times. They told of the bachelor who used the sandblast coming through his keyhole to clean pots and pans. Men allegedly shot ground squirrels tunneling upwards through the air. And farmers mused that, since the wind was rotating the soil, there was no need of rotating crops.
Between 1933 and 1937, the Goodwell weather station reported 362 dust storms, an average of one every five days. The strongest fronts swept on into the eastern United States and even carried dust out over the Atlantic. But this pervasive and dangerous dust was only one aspect of the weather change. Tornadoes often followed the dust. And torrential rains falling on parched, hard ground ran off as destructive flash floods. Huge hailstorms often pummeled crops and destroyed buildings. In 1936 a strong earth tremor even shook Cimarron County. Rains early in 1935 coaxed a green cover over the soil just in time for a ravenous plague of hungry rabbits and grasshoppers. Like Job, of the Old Testament, the Oklahoma farmer had good reason to hate his life.
One bad year surprised no one; two seemed merely a longer sentence. But the succession of dust storms seemed endless and inevitably affected men’s spirits and ambitions. In 1934 Margaret Bourke-White, writer and photographer, toured the drought-stricken plains and was impressed with people’s optimism. A year later, she noticed distinct changes. The hopeful spirit was yielding to a “no use” syndrome. With another duster anticipated any minute, there was “no use digging out your chicken coops . . . no use trying to keep the house clean . . . no use fighting off that foreclosure.”10 By 1935, a steady stream of people were looking for an alternative to stoicism. Unemployment increased in the cities, and more and more marginal farmers sought a new frontier. A great exodus began.
In the wake of that heart-rending migration, an elaborate mythology arose, which obscured the facts and ultimately altered Oklahomans’ self-image and the view of the state in the nation’s consciousness. The national press inevitably capitalized on the “newsworthy” aspects of the depression, especially dramatic dust storms and migrants. The Dust Bowl became synonymous with drought. The term Okie, spat out like brackish water, connoted society’s riffraff in search of relief checks in the golden west of California.
The news story that popularized the term Dust Bowl originated in Guymon, when Robert Geiger described the black blizzard of April 14, 1935, over the Associated Press wires. Geiger correctly included in the Dust Bowl area parts of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and the Oklahoma-Texas panhandles. Texas and Cimarron counties in the Oklahoma Panhandle did receive the hardest dust storms. The most evocative and famous picture of the fray, of a farmer and his two sons struggling toward a barn in a dust storm, was taken in Cimarron County. And Dorothea Lange’s pictorial chronicle of Oklahomans on the road to California created the impression that all of the depression’s misery centered on the Sooner state. In short order, the nation’s readers and newsreel watchers almost automatically agreed.
Yet, as so often in Oklahoma’s history, the facts did not sustain the enduring myth. The cotton-tenant farmers of the southeastern counties, not the wheat farmers of the northwest, were the Okies whose images burned into the nation’s retina. The boll weevil, low prices and excess production, high freight rates, and heavy debts all depressed the cotton industry in the 1920s. Mechanization and fluctuating weather compounded these problems. Even before the depression, many tenant farmers had moved on to other states. As the depression deepened, and various efforts at amelioration failed, the Oklahoma tenant, likely as not, packed his car with furniture and took his family in search of a new frontier.
That exodus was never significant among the wheat farmers. Most managed to hold on, however dispiriting the situation, because they owned their land. The population of Panhandle counties declined somewhat because of a lower birth rate and an increase in dust-induced deaths among infants and the elderly. Some wheat farmers moved to cleaner, nearby communities, but few left the state permanently. The case of Dietrich Ehrlich, a Russian emigrant who abandoned his farm in Shattuck because of eye problems, was not unusual. When a freak duster destroyed his hay crop in Brighton, Colorado, he came home. If he had to endure the weather, he decided he might as well be in Oklahoma.
Most people who had invested their lives and fortunes in the high plains country seemed to agree with Caroline Henderson: “To leave voluntarily—to break all those closely knit ties for the sake of a possibly greater comfort elsewhere—seems like defaulting on our task. We may have to leave. . . . But I think I can never go willingly or without pain that as yet seems unendurable.”11
The myth that drought and dust caused the migration persisted among migrants as well as in popular legend. In a Works Project Administration study of more than six thousand migrant households in California, 44 percent of the Oklahomans interviewed gave drought as the greatest single cause of migration. But the six Oklahoma counties with the highest percentage of families blaming drought were not in severe drought, and all had river water. Floods actually displaced more Oklahomans than did dust storms, especially in 1936 and 1937, as the dry cycle began to end.
But the drought and its symbol, dust, continued to grip the state’s and nation’s imagination. It was easy, in an industrial state, where men’s policies seemed to create prosperity, to blame the same men and their systems for depression. But in a state like Oklahoma, where most people earned a living from the soil, drought-induced depression seemed a vengeful act of nature and a general explanation for society’s ills. Oklahomans were ignorant of the forces restructuring the agrarian economy. They were equally unable to acknowledge their own wasteful farm practices. Catastrophe as an act of God thus seemed more explicable than the reality of men’s stupidity or error.
More than 500,000 people fled the Dust Bowl states during the depression. Of these, some 300,000 settled in California. Although the phrase-mongers and publicists were reluctant to accept any responsibility for creating the image of a “Golden State” that attracted so many people, more than 100,000 Oklahomans believed the glowing advertisements offering work and housing in an ideal California climate.
The Oklahoma migrants went to California for what it represented, success, and what it promised, self-sufficiency. They sought farms, not welfare checks. Few groups in American history ever believed so strongly in self-reliance or were so oriented toward the social conservatism that family, religion, and community represented. Nearly all prized independence and were inured to hard work and thrift. Rugged individualists, they frowned on accepting charity except in times of true crisis. “We ain’t no paupers,” one Oklahoma migrant told Dorothea Lange. “We don’t want no relief. But what we do want is a chance to make an honest living like what we was raised.”12
Traveling in family groups and remaining in Sooner enclaves where possible, the Oklahomans became more visible than their counterparts from other states. Fundamentalist religion sustained their sense of hope amid misfortune. The shack towns they established in the southern San Joaquin Valley and in the northern arm of California’s great central valley represented better housing than most had ever known. To local officials, these makeshift homes were eyesores; but to the migrants, their whitewashed walls represented optimism for the future, in a place of their-own. And whatever their success or failure in California, these migrants retained an affection for Oklahoma.”A fellow don’t appreciate home until he comes to California,” an Okie mused.13 While few of them returned to Oklahoma, they believed life there to be slower, more congenial, and more friendly than in California.
In the broadest sense, the Oklahoma migrants were casualties of modernization. Neither vagabonds nor hoboes, they had simply dropped from the economy’s margins. Oklahoma’s economy was also stabilizing after a long period of booms and busts in both agricultural and mineral production. This subsidence coincided with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years, causing thousands to leave the state. They left not so much from despair as from optimism and the hope of success elsewhere. The truly despairing did not migrate, but sank to subsistence living or welfare. And like the European immigrants of an earlier generation who contributed so much to the national economy, the Okies’ labor helped to underwrite tremendous expansion in California.
The conditions that uprooted 100,000 Oklahomans also produced fundamental changes among those who remained. In strictly economic terms, the reduction of the farm population was beneficial. There was a rough, if ironic, justice to Will Rogers’s remark that the Okie migration to California raised the cultural caliber of both states. Oklahoma agriculture simply could not support marginal farmers any longer. Their departure helped stabilize the total state agricultural system.
The Dust Bowl years also altered the frontier attitudes that nearly destroyed the state’s terrain. Oklahomans began to see their eroded land as a monument to the cut-and-run views of the past. They began to plant grasses where their ancestors had burned ground cover. They grew trees, instead of felling them. They trapped water, rather than wasting it. And hardest of all, in a land where men judged themselves by the straightness of a furrow, they learned to plow in graceful arcs to save the soil. The disaster of the 1930s also forced many thoughtful state leaders to ponder the perils of an export economy. Stability and growth must clearly come through diversification, planning, and conservation.
Federal largess was not a major factor in recovery from the depression. By the time most government relief programs took effect, the rains had returned. Wheat and cotton acreage allotments curtailed production, and prices slowly crept upward in the late 1930s. Government subsidies and relief checks were important chiefly in helping people to avoid foreclosure and retain their land until the weather changed.
The oil industry, so dramatic an early victim of hard times, seemed the first sector of the economy to revive heartily. Governor Murray’s closing of the state’s wells until prices stabilized helped temporarily. But gasoline and auto sales began to revive in the mid-1930s. And under Governor Marland’s leadership, the Interstate Oil Compact among the petroleum-producing states to limit production helped assure a stable market price.
By 1937, the worst seemed over. That year, a natural-gas boom began in the Panhandle. Increasing rains halted wind erosion. Starting in 1936, cane, sudan grass, and barley were planted widely as cover, and by 1938 the Soil Conservation Service noted that the land was recovering. After the harvest of 1939, incorrigible boomers and some more cautious folk were calling the dust a thing of the past. The wish doubtless fathered the thought, but time proved that optimism essentially correct.
While the physical scars of the Dust Bowl era faded rapidly, the image of Oklahoma formed during the period seemed etched forever on American thinking. The term Okie replaced Oklahoman. The term derived from news stories in California in 1935. Although Kansas and Colorado lost far more acreage to wind erosion than did Oklahoma and although thousands of people from Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Colorado joined Oklahomans on the great trek west, their pejorative nicknames did not become common parlance. How different the history of Oklahoma might be if newspapermen had written Kansies, Arkies, Texies, or Colies rather than Okies.
Uttered with the same venomous connotation as kike, nigger, wop, or dago, the epithet had profound effects on Oklahomans’ self-image. The term and its symbolism repudiated the heroic frontier imagery of the past and cut the foundation from the vaunted ideals of individualism, self-help, and stamina in the face of adversity.
When John Steinbeck used a fictitious Oklahoma family to immortalize the plight of migrants and tenants, Oklahoma’s spokesmen responded furiously. Steinbeck’s novel repeated most of the errors of fact concerning the migrants’ origins and ideals that no amount of correction seemed able to alter. But the state’s spokesmen realized at once that this stereotype would dog their future. Somewhat unfortunately, they chose not to explain but to denounce it as a complete fabrication. Congressman Lyle Boren, son of a tenant farmer, denounced the book in the House of Representatives as “a lie, a damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”14 Boasting that he had not read the “obscene and inaccurate book,” one Oklahoma City Times editorial writer condemned it as hearsay. Another declared: “It’s enough to justify a civil war.”15 Still other respondents adopted a good-riddance attitude, seeing the migrants as shiftless people who had failed to take advantage of the state’s “noble purpose and determination.”16
Not everyone shared that self-righteousness. Many Oklahomans obviously wanted to understand and explore, if not explode, the book’s myths. They thronged libraries and bookstores to buy or borrow copies. The owner of a large bookstore in Oklahoma City reported record sales. “People who looked as though they had never read a book in their lives came in to buy it.”17 Standing-room-only crowds jammed the halls when the book was reviewed, dissected, refuted, and otherwise debated.
The Grapes of Wrath perpetuated many of the inaccuracies and myths surrounding the Dust Bowl days. Yet the essence of what Steinbeck wrote was true. Many Oklahomans had never shared in the state’s fabled prosperity. The migrants’ lives were more true to the facts than those of the apple-cheeked boys and golden-haired girls who frolicked in the hit musical Oklahoma! at about the same time. The migration symptomized great economic changes and revealed anew how many people remained at the mercy of obscure natural and social forces that they could no more control than they could stop the dust.
The 1930s were unhappy years in Oklahoma, especially for their residual adverse stereotype. The coincidence of William H. Murray as governor was also unfortunate for the state’s reputation: “Alfalfa Bill’s” embarrassing antics seemed to embody the pioneer heritage gone to ruin. Images were transposed: the sturdy yeoman now became the backward Okie. They and Murray seemed to typify Oklahoma to the rest of the nation and to many Oklahomans themselves. The pioneer had become the hick.
Oklahomans did learn some painful lessons about their past and future during the depression years. Because of the alternating ravages of drought and flood, they became almost obsessed with controlling water in the 1950s and 1960s. Senator Robert S. Kerr became adept at securing federal funds for flood control and water conservation projects throughout the state. His greatest monument became the Arkansas River waterway, boosted as Oklahoma’s outlet to the sea.
In 1943, while surveying the widespread devastation of flooding in Oklahoma, Kerr became convinced of the primary role of water in the state’s future. He also saw the economic development it could bring as a link between city and countryside. “Here was a ready made issue which no one in politics was using,” he noted shrewdly.18 Kerr’s commitment to that and allied projects was total, and he literally altered the state’s face and future. The navigation system, with seventeen locks in 448 miles of altered channel, included scores of reservoirs, dams, lakes, and recreation areas. Its projects extended into Kansas, Louisiana, and Missouri. In addition to navigation, the system provided flood control, soil and water conservation, some hydroelectric power, and recreation. Its impact on the state’s economy was steady and enormous. As the New York Times noted in 1961, “New lakes not only make people happier, they have a direct effect on bank deposits.”19
Water transformed Oklahoma after World War II, as oil had earlier. In addition to major lakes, the state built 1,800 small reservoirs and almost 200,000 farm ponds. Oklahoma’s ratio of water to land exceeded that of Minnesota. At the same time, state agencies spent great sums on an outstanding park system, attractive both to Sooners and tourists.
These water policies produced many direct economic benefits, and helped refurbish some agricultural activities. Irrigation became more practical in some parts of the state. The cattle industry revived after the 1940s, as many tracts of land went back to range grass and as water supply became more predictable. South-central Oklahoma began to look as it had in 1889 and 1893, a new “Hereford Heaven” of blooded stock and horse farms. Beef and dairy cattle soon outnumbered people. In January 1971, the American Cattleman’s Association predicted that Guymon would become the fat-cattle and slaughter capital of the nation. As the cattle industry prospered, so did rustling, this time in modern guise. Rustlers often used citizens’ band radios and helicopters to locate and herd their quarry into fast trucks. The value that many Oklahomans placed on cattle was often amusing, if not amazing. When Governor Roy Turner’s prize bull, “Old 81,” died of old age in 1953, he was buried in a tile-lined vault with a stone marker befitting the sire of more than a million dollars’ worth of blood stock that had enriched many southwestern herds.
Though cotton did not return to its old dominance, wheat production revived steadily. Planting of sorghum, soybeans, maize, alfalfa, peanuts, and broomcorn increased dramatically. Grain elevators dominated the skylines of Enid, Fairview, Cherokee, and other northwestern towns. Many a visitor remarked on their resemblance to the Gothic cathedrals that rose above European towns.
Mining activity also increased somewhat after the war, involving stone, clay, sand-gravel, gypsum, and volcanic ash. Coal did not recover, and Oklahoma became a net importer of it because her own stocks were unusually high in sulphur content. A new coal boom awaited improved technology that made both its recovery and burning environmentally safe. And while little new oil was discovered in the state, older fields were revamped and repressured to bring up deeper reserves. Oklahoma experts and roustabouts alike pioneered oil fields as far away as the Persian Gulf, Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and the North Sea.
The new level of activity in familiar endeavors such as farming, cattle-raising, and mineral production after 1945 was reassuring. But thoughtful Oklahomans understood, after both depression and war, that only a diversified economy based on manufacturing could function well. The first stages of industrialism exploited raw materials. The second now involved the proper use of labor, water, space, and fiscal policies.
Manufacturing that used mineral and agricultural resources and the skilled labor trained in wartime industries grew rapidly after 1945. The making of glass and pottery, manufacture of cement and building materials from stone, metalworking, and food processing were all significant new industries in the 1950s and 1960s. Many garment plants were also established in small towns around the state because of an abundance of skilled women employees.
The most dynamic increases in manufacturing occurred in the transportation equipment industry. Shortly after the war, J. Paul Getty revamped Tulsa’s Spartan Air Craft to manufacture house trailers. They were in great demand, both as expedients in a housing shortage and as leisure vehicles. Within a few months, Spartan was the nation’s largest manufacturer of house trailers. It had models for the middle-income family, as well as one custom job with a raised throne for the king of Saudi Arabia.
New manufacturing plants were especially important to the state’s smaller towns, still in danger of stagnating and becoming refuges for the elderly as young people left the state or moved to big cities. Although the state’s over-all population continued to decline after 1945, that of its chief cities increased. Population shifts in Oklahoma continued to be rearrangements of the state’s existing population rather than influxes of outsiders.
In the late 1960s, the state’s business and political leaders actively sought to divide Oklahoma into districts for future planning. Local chambers of commerce and service groups joined in extolling the special virtues, resources, and talents of people in eleven of these districts. Recognizing that Oklahoma had an image problem, Governor Dewey Bartlett launched a national publicity campaign in the mid-sixties to give Okie a boastful connotation. Thousands of lapel buttons with the vertical legend “Oklahoma Key to Industrial Expansion” were distributed. State agencies and businessmen alike joined the concerted effort to bring new industry to Oklahoma.
A favorable tax system, vocational training programs, and special inducements to interested businessmen slowly gained success. Improved highways, space for expansion, and a relaxed life-style apparently supportive of “old-fashioned values” also helped. Numerous national firms located regional headquarters in the state. American Airlines, Cities Service, Avis Rent-a-Car went to Tulsa. A large Xerox plant and a huge proposed General Motors fabrication facility chose Oklahoma City. And many companies decided on smaller towns, both out of necessity and for special reasons. Weyerhauser naturally built pulp and milling plants in the forested southeastern counties. But Westinghouse located a plant near Norman; Uniroyal at Ardmore; Sylvania at Shawnee; and the nation’s first iodine-recovery plant was built near Woodward’s salt plains.
By the early 1970s, this variety of industrial enterprise was as prevalent throughout the state as were oil derricks, cotton gins, and cattle pens. Oklahoma-based firms manufactured everything from aero-space equipment to recreational goods. Hartshorne, once a worn-out coal town, produced sophisticated electronic equipment used in guided missiles. Enid turned out bicycles in the shadow of her grain elevators. Oklahoma Indian tribes acquired a western-hat company at Lawton and announced plans for a line of sporting goods and play-time products to be made at Shawnee, Ponca City, and Anadarko.
Wind tunnels at Perkins; millwork at Ada; steel fabrication and petrochemicals at Wetumka; a uranium plant at Sallisaw; carpets at Pawhuska; sailboats at Henryetta; barbeque smokers at Boley; dresses at Caddo; rods and reels at Broken Arrow; optical lenses at Muskogee; and pecan harvesters at Madill were dramatic testimony to the diversity of the state’s changing industrial economy. Frederick, in southwestern Oklahoma, seemed to sum up the whole trend. With a population of fewer than 10,000 people in 1966 and an area of four square miles, it hosted producers of helicopters, granite building materials, bras, leather goods, and was the site for a cattle-feeding lot.
Industrial output and income rose steadily in the 1960s, and quickened even during the recession of the 1970s. Investment in new plants and equipment reached $87 million in 1967; $300 million in 1969; and it was more than $500 million in 1974. That was not on the scale of Texas or California, but Oklahomans revealed little desire to follow in those giants’ footsteps, at least not without avoiding the problems that came with growth. Employment in manufacturing nearly doubled between 1953 and 1973, topping 152,000 in the latter year. In 1974, barge traffic through the Port of Catoosa on the Arkansas system jumped 600 percent as the state’s largest wheat crop sailed to foreign markets.
Business executives inspecting possible sites for new plants were well aware of the state’s central location, generally temperate climate, and low taxes. But the labor supply seemed to impress potential employers more than public facilities or tax incentives. In choosing Ardmore as the site of a large tire plant in 1968, Uniroyal executives mentioned the “competence and reliability” of the work force as the major factor in their decision.20 Oklahomans retained a reputation for hard work and willingness to learn.
Many employers reported that the productivity of employees at their Oklahoma facilities was as much as one-third higher than in other states. McDonnell-Douglas, one of the nation’s major aero-space contractors, reported after twenty years in Tulsa a below-average record of employee absenteeism. In former coal mining and lumbering areas of the southeast, residents falsely stereotyped as lazy and inefficient proved otherwise in the new furniture, clothing, and electronics plants located there. Jim Rice, owner of a firm producing sophisticated communications and telemetry equipment, found that “these folks don’t want welfare. All they want is the chance to do a job.”21
Oklahoma’s modern version of the old factories-in-the-fields ideal revitalized many faltering rural communities. It also provided a new generation of young people with an alternative to emigration or big-city life. By the early 1970s the state population began to grow slowly. For the first time since the end of the oil boom, people from other parts of the country came in some numbers, and young Sooners elected to stay. The state’s great variety of landscape, water resources, and unpolluted environment made it doubly attractive to many in search of a relaxed pace of living. That very environment, properly protected and nourished, should become the state’s single greatest asset in the future. With renewed confidence that many of their traditional views are virtues and not vices, Oklahomans are trying to shape a modern economy without sacrificing the warmth of neighborliness.
In the years since 1945, Sooners have recaptured much of the optimistic spirit that marked the state’s founding. Steady and diversified economic growth cushioned the state against recession in the 1970s. As an energy exporter, Oklahoma has dramatically improved both its general economic health and its fiscal soundness.
The social effects of this long curve of modernization are equally striking. Contrary to mythology, some 68 percent of the state’s population lives in towns of more than 2,500. Half its people live in the urban areas surrounding Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Secondary cities such as Ardmore, Altus, Lawton, Enid, and Muskogee are growing. The major cities have undergone renovation, and they face new construction, on a scale to match the early Boomers’ dreams.
Economics is more than making a living. Greater sophistication in economic activity is bound to require greater complexity in culture, education, and other intangible aspects of the state’s life. Oklahoma faces a new set of frontiers, relating to life-style and purpose, quite as challenging as those frontiers that lured her first settlers.