Oklahoma, the O. K. state

Some intriguing aspects of the young Sooner state that cause it to be looked upon as the ideal commonwealth

GEORGE MILBURN

■ Some people seem to think that Oklahoma is just another newspaper invention, like

love nest and blessed event and Santa Claus, and they are dubious about there being such a place at all. No straying citizen of Oklahoma has failed to hear a skeptical note in their voices when they ask, "Just where is Oklahoma?" It is easy to detect their belief that the state is only an implausible and entirely mythical region in which the press associations like to pretend that odd news originates and from which novelists are fond of having minor outlandish characters come. If these doubters would consult any really up-to-date atlas or dictionary, of course, they would find that there actually is an area of considerable extent—70,057 square miles— in the south central part of the United States, called Oklahoma.

■ Oklahoma may be approached from the north by way of Kansas, from the east by

way of Arkansas, from the south or west by way of Texas: three states which define its boundaries, but which by no means define its character. Once the incredulous stranger has passed its drab purlieus, he will recognise where he is by the air he breathes. But if there should remain the slightest question in his mind, he can easily reassure himself at frequent intervals along the highway, where engineers, notoriously insensitive to atmosphere, have planted steel markers bearing the sign, black on yellow, "O.K." It is highly significant that Oklahoma is the only part of the Union that not only can, but does, designate itself, "the O.K. state."

Lately, in some of those Babylons far distant from God's country, there has sprung up a wicked tendency to use Oklahoma to typify the old-fashioned hick state. Do not be taken in by this. Just why it should lie remains a mystery to the state's loyal, literate inhabitants, who have never let down a moment in keeping abreast of the times. They are astounded to find people in the East, who pronounce the word, not Oakluh-home-uh, melodiously as it should be, but Ah-kler-hah-mer, which is harsh and wrong, placing the state in a category with such stodgy farming areas as Iowa and Kansas. An alert state Chamber of Commerce is agitated. It busies itself with getting out brochures extolling Oklahoma's commercial potentialities. And the daily newspaper editors, not in the least averse to displacing important foreign news by spreading across front pages a six-column photograph showing the fine litter of pups recently born to the white collie owned by Mrs. R. F. Timmons of Neucoma Park Addition, are quick to cry down any bucolic public figure who arises within Oklahoma's borders to confirm the odious belief that this proud name has any hayseeds on it.

There is no question about Oklahoma's being the youngest state in the Union. Arizona and New Mexico, the only two later additions, were old in Spanish and Indian civilization, really much older than any other part of the country. But the greatest part of Oklahoma remained shut off from the rest of the world well into the Twentieth Century. There is scarcely a house in the state that is as much as thirty years old, and the introduction to mechanical civilization was almost as abrupt as that of Russia today.

It has been such a short time since it was an insult to ask a man why he came to Oklahoma that social barriers are still vague and are determined largely by the size of checking accounts. Society editors in Tulsa and Oklahoma City have begun using the word debutante, but hesitantly, and in the larger Oklahoma towns, membership in a national collegiate fraternity or sorority is a most important criterion. So nearly everyone who is anybody among the second generation tries to get down to the state university for at least one semester. The Indians, of course, are the first families of Oklahoma, but not even they are native. The five civilized tribes were driven out of their ancestral homes by covetous crackers and conveyed to the barren land by a government more ruthless than they ever were. There is hardly a white adult in Oklahoma today who did not come in from some other state. Not from any one section, particularly. As many came from the East and North as from the neighboring South. There are few foreign-born and relatively few Negroes, but nearly everyone is an outsider. Even "Alfalfa Bill" Murray was contributed by Texas. All the states of the Union helped make Oklahoma what it is today, and that is why the state is simply a reflection, often a distorted and exaggerated reflection, of American life.

® Certainly government in Oklahoma represents the ultimate reduction of democracy to absurdity. The state's political history is a running farce that would make Of Thee I Sing sound like a Herald Tribune editorial. It began along in the territorial days of 1906, when hotcha statehood conventions, attended by more giddy horseplay than a Kiwanis necktie-pulling, brought together as crafty a bunch of swindlers as ever gilded a brick. Two chaplains shot craps to see who would have the honor of offering up prayer at the first session of the state legislature. Real estate speculators stole the state capitol, lock-stock-and-barrel, and moved it thirty miles off, where it stands to this day. The egregious Teddy Roosevelt and W. J. Bryan were the state's godfathers—Roosevelt an unwilling one, because, as a Republican President, be was reluctant to add another Democratic state to the Union. Bryan was on hand in full regalia at the writing of the state constitution, dead-set on bringing in another prohibition state. The prints of his pudgy fingers are still on that ponderous and archaic document, although "Alfalfa Bill" Murray is blamed with its authorship.

Every four years, Oklahoma spends a sight of money electing a new governor and a short while later it spends a sight more in extraordinary legislative session impeaching him. The people have elected seven governors and not one of these has escaped the threat of impeachment. The fourth governor saved his hide by only one vote when he hauled a friendly state senator out of a hospital and had him toted into the legislative chamber on a stretcher. The fifth governor of Oklahoma was the incredible Jack Walton, who practiced extortion so boldly as to astound even the local politicians, placed the entire state under martial law, and set up machine guns to keep the legislature from meeting. But the stubborn representatives simply retired to a hotel ballroom and ousted him anyway. This mountebank had no sooner fled the state with his spoils than the people chose as governor one Henry S. Johnston, a Ku Klux organizer and a Rosicrucian. He moved into the statehouse with his personal mahatma, Super Akaslia Yogi Oussan of Punjab, India, and all the occult paraphernalia for forecasting the future, transmuting metals, and efficient governing. These arcana, however, proved unavailing against the mulish legislature, which could not be expected to be sensitive to science. They put up with that hocus-pocus for two years, waiting for the proper zodiacal signs to come around, and then they tossed Governor Henry S. Johnston out on his tin ear. The most recent governor the citizens of Oklahoma have had the pleasure of electing is that salty old fraud, William Henry Murray. Ilis antics and utterances were so freakish that he not only won the immediate adulation of most Oklahomans, but lie attracted national attention as well. This notoriety gave Alfalfa Bill the quaint idea that he was wasting his time on a one-horse state, and that he ought to run for President. Since that momentous decision he has run so far that Oklahoma has seen less of him than have distant states. There no longer seems to be any question that impeachment proceedings will be brought against him at the legislature's next session.

■ The state legislature, in addition to impeaching governors, gives the voters their money's worth by passing laws to prevent whale fishing and steamboating on the turgid Arkansas River that cuts across the state, to set movie admissions for one-eyed men at half-price, to make the legal length of bedsheets nine feet, and to effect a few other trifling remedies in a state that was O.K. to start with. All really crucial matters of state, of course, are dealt with by calling out the state militia, which is composed of high school youths who have grown a bit too old for the Boy Scouts, and is not nearly so formidable as the newspapers try to make it. Martial law is declared by an Oklahoma governor on the slightest pretext. The state's constitution gives him this delightful power, and who could forbear toying with it? Hence Governor Jack Walton's military censorship of the press, Ku Klux extermination, and statewide curfew; Governor Henry Johnston's military dispersal of the legislature; Alfalfa Bill's widely-publicised toll-bridge war and military oil shutdown.

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Indeed, the military has always played a large part in Oklahoma affairs and the state's history moves forward in time to the eccentric tread of one comic opera army after another. First there was Captain David Payne and his bedraggled band of Boomers camping on the Kansas border and making forays across into the Indian land, much to the annoyance of federal troops. The Boomers, egged on by railroad companies, persisted and it was their agitation that finally lead to the territory's being opened to white settlement. About the time of statehood came the Crazy Snake Rebellion, the Indians' final show of resentment at being bilked again. Ibis called forth the Indian Territory Volunteer Militia, which the federal government declared outlaw, but in which the present Secretary of War, the Hon. Patrick J. Hurley, was a captain.

Following quickly on this valiant force was Alfalfa Bill Murray's legendary Squirrel Rifle Brigade, which started as a newspaper columnist's jape and reached its climax with Murray's solemn ultimatum that the march on Washington would begin if the ferocious Roosevelt did not recognise Oklahoma forthwith. Today a colonel's commission in the Squirrel Rifle Brigade is the highest honor Oklahoma can bestow upon any citizen. At the time of the l nited States' entry into the World War, a regiment of radical farmers staged what was known locally as the Green Corn Rebellion. Their plan was to seize and burn the oil refineries and cut the pipe lines, stopping the war by shutting off the lubrication. Vigilantes and government agents ambushed their bivouac and those who were not killed in the brief battle were shipped off to federal penitentiaries.

The extremes of wealth and poverty are great in Oklahoma. The Osage Indian tribe became at one time the richest people per capita in the world, through the discovery of oil in their nation. There were a few millionaires in other tribes, too, but most of the Indians are as povertystricken as the white cotton-farmers. The Osages have been extremely slow to take up alien customs, and, strangely, not even sudden wealth could make them abandon their tribal dress, blankets and buckskin, their ritual dances, and their cookery. The anomaly of these primitives driving about in expensive automobiles gave rise to many strange stories, the most often repeated of which, perhaps, tells of the chieftain who bought a motor hearse and rode about Pawhuska in it, seated in a rocking chair, gazing out through the plate-glass sides. The truth is that none of the Indians spent their money with as much abandon and vulgarity as the newly rich whites. In Tulsa a seamstress set up a tyranny over these washerwomen and boarding-house keepers turned millionaires, telling them exactly what to buy and when. Until she took charge, women had been appearing on downtown streets in the afternoon, clad in evening gowns. Tulsa still marvels over the solidgold bathroom fixtures in such-andsuch a mansion, and how one Croesus, finding that an artist he had hired to decorate his dining room had covered the walls with nudes, made the unhappy mural painter go straight back to work and draw clothes on the figures. "I'm a great admirer of the female form," he remarked, "but I ain't never seen no pictures like that outside of a saloon."

Oil, however, is not responsible for all the strange things in Oklahoma. Driving along the countryside near Ponca City, one is likely to look out and see a herd of camels moseying across the prairies. That will not be the drink. The camels are real, remnants of the defunct 101 Wild West circus, and the drink is good. The only choice, it is true, is between corn whiskey at five dollars a gallon and home brew at twenty-five cents a bottle. But of what there is, there is plenty. Its sale keeps the farmers alive, and they have lately entered the export trade. Politically, Oklahoma is the dryest state in the union, excepting only Kansas and Arkansas. There are a few "beer kitchens," but speakeasies are utterly unknown.

The State has, in addition to its prohibition statute, a law against bank robberies, but it is all to no avail. Every other bank cashier in Oklahoma has his coat sleeves pulled out at the arm pits from reaching up. The outlaws conduct their interviews with all the gallantry and swagger of frontier days. While there is no such thing as organized racketeering, as the more populous centers know it, and there is seldom any bloodshed, still these mild bandits do achieve some local newspaper fame. Lately one "Pretty Boy" Hoyd and his band have been getting the blame for nearly everything. "Pretty Boy's" whereabouts are usually known, and the officers have been talking about attending to him. but he has such a dreadful reputation, they hesitate. The bankers and bonding companies, of course, are pretty indignant, and they pass resolutions and things when they have their conventions. But the citizens are not much aroused, since there is a feeling current among them that when thieves and robbers fall out, then honest men will get their due.

Alfalfa Bill is fond of making public prophecies, saying that the state is on the verge of anarchy. If by this he means the abolition of state government, many Oklahomans are ready to accept his warning, not as a dire threat but as a happy promise.