Statehood
WEE yah, HEY yah,
WEE HEE yah HEY yah.
HEEEY yah.
HEEEY yah.
Indian Gibberish Wedding Song, 1957. Author best forgotten.
1907 – 1957
“Uncle Joe! Uncle Joe! Tell us a story!”
It took me months in the fourth grade to live down the nickname of “Uncle Joe.” Mrs. Melton, the music teacher, a budding theatrical impresario, had prepared a “pageant” for the kids to present to the student body and parents. It was a lovely story and a well-known one to Oklahomans, losing little of its glory for being basically untrue.
We believed it, and proudly, and probably Mrs. Melton did, too. It was, after all, in all of the history books.
I was chosen as the narrator. At nine years old, I had only to look about 59 or 69, this being the 50th anniversary of statehood. So with string-mop beard and deep wrinkles drawn on my face with eyebrow pencil, I held my arms out in a symbolic embrace of my large stage family. Eager children were in front, soon joined by ghostly noble Indians to stage right and ghostly noble (white) settlers to stage left.
“I shall tell you the story of the Wedding of the Oklahoma Territory to the Indian Territory.”
“Oh, yes, Uncle Joe! We love that story.”
“Well, my children, as you know, Oklahoma was the 46th out of the 48 states to be admitted to the Union. But fifty years ago, Oklahoma was still only a territory, like Hawaii or Alaska today. Right next door was Indian Territory.
“And the Great White Father in Washington decreed that there could be only one State of Oklahoma. And thus it came to be that the Indian maiden was married to the white settler in a ceremony symbolizing the union of their two territories.”
Ceremonial music played on a scratchy hi-fi in the elementary school “cafetorium” as the Great White Father pronounced his blessing on the young, innocent couple.
Fifty years later, I remember the chant sung by the fourth-grade Indians, the white robe worn by the symbolic Indian maiden and the noble and conflict-free way in which the love story was presented.
Except it didn’t happen that way at all.
*
In 1800, Oklahoma was home to approximately 60,000 Indians. By 1889, there were 80,000. The Territories’ total population in the 1900 census was 400,000 and was estimated to be 700,000 in 1906 – Indians to the east and the settlers to the west – with more than 300,000 of these inhabitants claiming membership in the Five Civilized Tribes.
The pressure from settlers made statehood inevitable, but in what form? One large state? Two small states? Oklahoma Territory becomes a state and the landlocked Indians are left to their own devices?
As always, the civil servants (bean counters, chart makers and plan formulators) had their way, but how to break this to the Indians? For reasons obscure to me – given that Louisiana had become a state with a set of laws based on the Napoleonic Code and not on English Common Law – Washington insisted that real property law in the new state must conform to Common Law, which was the basis for the laws of all the other states, save one. Title must be held by individuals, and must be capable of being passed down to heirs.
But Indians did not own land. They had never owned land. Land was for all; it was incapable of being “owned.” Mankind merely occupied it, or the tribe controlled it, but the idea that “these acres are mine and those are yours” was more than just a foreign concept: it simply made no sense. Even after Reconstruction stripped much of their lands from them – relegating reservations to 160 acres per tribal member and opening the surplus lands for settlement – the tribes had continued to hold their lands in common and without survey or private title.
The Great White Father therefore established the Dawes Commission, whose mission it was to survey the Indian lands, to decide who was an Indian and who was not, and to “allot” parcels of land to the qualified, including the Indians and – in some instances – their slaves.
The Dawes Commission compiled the Indian Rolls – which my great-grandmother Susie Crick refused to sign – establishing just who was full-blood, three-quarter blood, half-blood or less than half-blood, and therefore, who was to be allotted a parcel of tribal land. These parcels ranged from as small as 40 acres for Cherokee minors to 320 acres for certified Choctaws and Chickasaws.
As early as 1898, the GWF (always planning ahead) abolished all tribal courts, and decreed that all of Indian Territory was subject to federal jurisdiction out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, notorious for its recent overlord, Isaac Parker, the “hanging judge.” The Dawes Commission, among its many other accomplishments, stripped the last bit of sovereignty from the tribes by “negotiating” that all Indian governments would cease to exist in 1906.
As usual, the Indians sent delegations to Congress, protesting the allotment scheme and promoting an Indian state to be called “Sequoyah.” As usual, the Creeks rebelled. As usual, the Indians were given no choice in the matter. The Oklahoma Enabling Act was passed in 1906, decreeing that the two territories would be joined into a single state, setting forth the parameters for a state constitution and authorizing a constitutional convention of delegates from both territories.
*
My fourth-grade Indian pageant should have had a weeping bride being brought to the altar in shackles, forced to marry her uncouth suitor. And she should not have been wearing a virginal white robe, having been repeatedly raped by the white man over the centuries.
But given our inferiority complex, our next-to-the-last-state, dirt-poor, dust-bowl history, we had little to be proud of other than Indians and oil. And, as folks said in those days, “why dwell on the unhappy part of the past?”
*
William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray was elected president of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention.
Alfalfa Bill had always been something of a hero of mine, based on what little we had been taught or I had heard. President of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, first Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, two-term congressman, ninth governor, presidential candidate, firebrand and all-around colorful character.
And, oh, that marvelous droopy, soup-strainer moustache.
I knew people who used to eat breakfast at the same Oklahoma City restaurant every morning as Alfalfa Bill. He would order a whole, sliced, raw onion and munch it down with his steak and eggs. You evidently didn’t want to get into too intimate a conversation with Bill Murray.
A life-long agrarian, Murray contended that “Civilization begins and ends with the plow.” In the early 1930’s, he organized an unsuccessful colonial expedition to Bolivia, hoping to found an agrarian utopia based on cotton. Later, after returning to Oklahoma and being elected governor, he became a pint-sized Huey Long, publicly championing the little man while making sure that his patronage powers did well for him. He promoted free textbooks, secured an appropriation to provide free seed for kitchen gardens for destitute people and allowed citizens to grow vegetables on state property.
Murray used the Oklahoma National Guard as his own personal police force, including ordering them to collect tickets at University of Oklahoma football games and to take over thousands of oil wells to slow down the excess production that was glutting the market and causing prices to plummet.
His most famous exploit, and the one which first brought him to my attention, involved several toll bridges built by the state of Texas over the Red River, which separates Texas from Oklahoma. Murray was fervently opposed to toll bridges and ordered the Oklahoma state highway department to construct a free bridge on a different state highway crossing the river. When Texas obtained a court injunction ordering the free bridge closed, Murray summoned the National Guard, blocked access to the toll bridges and forced the reopening of the free bridge.
Prominently driving the lead bulldozer blocking the major toll bridge was Alfalfa Bill Murray. That’s my kind of governor. Or he was, until I began my research for this book.
*
Nearly twenty years before his bulldozer heroics, my erstwhile hero’s first proposed constitution for the new state contained such severe restrictions on the civil liberties of black citizens that President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to veto it. The convention delegates simply shrugged their shoulders and drafted a squeaky-clean constitution which, no sooner than it was ratified by Congress, they proceeded to amend in their first legislative session.
Alfalfa Bill was Speaker of the House when state constitutional amendments were passed mandating segregated educational facilities for whites and blacks, segregated hearses, segregated water fountains and segregated transportation facilities.
We didn’t learn this in school, any more than we learned about the shotgun wedding between the Territories – with the shotgun paradoxically pointed at the bride.
*
Murray’s second draft of the Oklahoma Constitution (minus the racial restrictions which were later re-inserted) was actually pretty progressive, compared to most other state constitutions. It prohibited child labor and convict labor, mandated an eight-hour work day on public projects and established an initiative process whereby citizens with enough signatures could place a petition on the ballot for approval or rejection by all of the voters.
The initiative process was referred to as “direct democracy” when it was proposed in California four years later, but Oklahoma got there first.
It was a progressive and reformist time in the country, except for the White House. Roosevelt didn’t like the state’s second proposed constitution either, but felt politically unable to veto it. Instead, he sent his hand-picked presidential successor, then-Secretary of War William Howard Taft, to Oklahoma to campaign against its adoption by the citizens.
The Democrats countered by inviting the country’s most famous speaker, William Jennings Bryan, to stump the state to urge adoption of the proposed constitution and support for Democratic candidates in the upcoming election. Bryan declared the constitution “the best…of any state in the Union,” and “one of the great documents of modern times.”
The proposed constitution was ratified overwhelmingly by Oklahomans in 1907, as was a separate constitutional amendment for prohibition.
Equally overwhelming was Bryan’s loss the following year in his third presidential bid.
Bryan’s final defeat wouldn’t come for another 18 years yet, with the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925, and the “silver-tongued orator” would continue to help shape progressive (for those days) American politics until that time.
A bigot, braggart and blowhard, but a champion out-of-step with his time, Bryan not only lost a handful of presidential elections, but saw the free-silver monetary policy for which he fought for decades (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”) defeated or ignored, again and again, in Congress.
Bryan just might be the most famous loser in American history. Yet it can be argued that, for all his failures, he ensured the passage of the most progressive state constitution of all the forty-six, and that he closed the American frontier and placed the hasp on its gate.
Give Bryan his due: the closing of the frontier was no mean feat. And a glorious feat it was…if you were European…as was Bryan.
But if you were Native American or African American, the clanking sound of that gate signaled the end of any hope of freedom or dignity for the best part of the rest of the century.