Closing the Frontier: Radical Response in Oklahoma, 1889-1923
John Thompson, 1986
John Thompson was apparently motivated to write this history of his home state by the discovery that riots his grandmother remembered from her youth “did not coincide with the history textbooks.” Thompson began with Webb’s Great Frontier, which he said was “inextricably bound” with corporate capitalism. Sweeping Braudel, Wallerstein, Turner, Billington, Gates, and Bogue into the net as elaborators (albeit sometimes unconsciously) of Turner’s Frontier thesis, Thompson claimed the speed of development in search of quick profits was a key to disaster in Oklahoma, both in the arid west and the more industrial eastern portion of the territory.
Thompson’s claim is interesting, because he extended it beyond simple land speculation and oil development. Competition among speculators and developers, he said, “prompted bribery and fraud and helped corrupt the political and judicial institutions of new societies.” It was not the freeholder or small-time bandit who really benefited from the lawlessness that lasted until statehood in 1907, Thompson said, but large-scale capitalists from the east. They were able to operate without checks during the territorial stage and once they seized control of state government, they institutionalized their dominance. The result has been hidden by Dust Bowl histories, which tend to blame Oklahoma’s 440,000 migrant refugees on ecological disaster. Thompson said “Despite the common misconception that Oklahomans were ‘dusted out and tractored out,’ an estimated 97 percent of the net population loss occurred in the eastern half of the state, which was not crippled by dust and underwent almost no farm mechanization. These migrants were instead dislocated by landlords, merchants, and bankers.”
Populists, Socialists, and Neopopulists were much more prevalent and developed their programs a much higher degree of sophistication in Oklahoma, Thompson said, due to the confluence of pioneer values of “individualism, cooperation, and democracy,” and the abuses heaped upon the Oklahoma poor by capitalists. “In 1904, Standard Oil controlled 84 percent of the nation’s oil production,” and much of that oil came from its Oklahoma subsidiary, Prairie Oil and Gas. Possibly the bigger point, which was perhaps not evident there because there was no antebellum counterpoint, was that Oklahoma’s history corresponded to the end of the frontier period, when conditions were very much different from those encountered by migrants a century earlier. Again (I keep coming back to this), I think the big change was in capital and credit consolidation under Abraham Lincoln.
Thompson said, “From 1925 to 1930 the driest county in the state averaged more than nineteen inches of rain a year.” This goes a long way to explaining why credulous people from elsewhere believed they could make a go of farming in Oklahoma. It doesn’t explain why the rest of Oklahoma society let it happen, though. Thompson said the downfall of the socialists in Oklahoma was the Russian Revolution. “The flexibility that had been the strength of the old Socialist party was replaced by the dogmatism of the new Communist party,” he said. This is an interesting idea in the larger national context, but I’m not sure it’s a satisfying answer locally.