Foot-loose and fancy-free By Angie Debo

For tribal citizens, however, those governments were quite important. Both the full-bloods and their mixed-blood cousins were proud of their Indian heritage, and intermarried citizens also recognized the significance of tribal traditions. Not the least element of that heritage and those traditions was the set of tribal governments that had begun right after the removals.

Although the forms of these tribal governments looked much like those common in most of the United States, the reality behind them was unique to Indian Territory. For example, although each tribe had at least two political parties, in no tribe were these at all related to the Democratic and Republican parties that existed throughout the rest of the nation. Instead the tribal parties continued to reflect distinctly Indian differences, many of which went back to pre-removal divisions. Thus the Creek Nation’s political parties in the late 1800s still reflected the ancient split between Upper and Lower Creeks. Similarly, the Cherokee parties continued the rivalries between the Ridge and Ross factions.

In practice the Indian governments exercised only the most limited powers. Although they continued to maintain fine schools for their own children and effective police forces for their own citizens, their authority over most of their residents were minimal. For example, tribal courts did not have jurisdiction over non-tribal members in the region which led to a large number of outlaws from the surrounding states taking refuge within Indian Territory. Also, the federal constitution’s “commerce clause” allowed Congress to have ultimate power over the Choctaw Nation’s coal industry rather than the Choctaw legislature.

The whites and blacks who settled within Indian Territory, despite political standing within the tribes, still held Republican and Democratic party conventions and acted like their counterparts in the surrounding states. Although they knew that their actions were not valid, they were hopeful of a future when the Indians no longer possessed control over Indian Territory and they would be able to implement their own political agendas.

These “outsiders” within Indian Territory selected their party allegiances based upon their attitudes regarding the Civil War and its aftermath. Blacks and those whites from the North favored the Republicans while those whites from the South favored the Democrats. In that Indian Territory was surrounded by former Confederate states, it attracted far more Democrats than Republicans. Should tribal government disappear, it was almost certain that Democrats would be in charge.

Another difference separated the political affairs of the Twin Territories. Unlike the tribal dominance in Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory did have a formal territorial government, established by the Organic Act of 1890 that officially created Oklahoma Territory.

Modeled on similar patterns for the transition from territory to state status since the ratification of the constitution, the Organic Act provided a simple structure of government. A governor and a territorial secretary exercised executive authority, both appointed by the President. Legislative authority rested with a bicameral legislature selected by the territory’s residents. Three judges appointed by the President oversaw the territorial courts.

Party control in Oklahoma Territory generally went to the Republicans in that they held a slight majority, a majority that could be overcome if the Democrats would side with a minor party of any reasonable size. In that the President appointed the governor, secretary, and judges, whichever party controlled the White House controlled executive and judicial control in Oklahoma Territory. For thirteen of the seventeen years as a territory, Republicans controlled the presidency. Only one of the territory’s nine governors was a Democrat.

In the Twin Territories progressives saw a magnificent opportunity to achieve all of those things and to achieve them all at once. Statehood would require Oklahomans to write a constitution. Progressives hoped to place every one of their ideas right in the heart of that constitution.

The progressive agenda found favor among many Democrats, especially in Indian Territory. Uniting with other of like mind, they met in Muskogee in 1905 and gave form and substance to their ideas. Proposing to create a state of Indian Territory alone, they gave it a name—Sequoyah—and wrote a constitution for it. Contained within the proposed constitution was nearly every item on the progressive’s wish list.

Of course, Sequoyah never became a state. Progressive or not, any state formed from Indian Territory alone was certain to be Democratic. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican controlled Congress had no interest in such a prospect. Instead, they insisted on a joint statehood of Democratic Indian Territory and Republican Oklahoma Territory that had some chance of sending Republicans to Washington. To prepare the way for its entry into the union, Congress approved the Oklahoma Enabling Act in 1906.

In preparation for those elections, the progressive Democrats from the Sequoyah convention reminded potential voters of the progressive ideals that they already supported. They also vowed to support an additional list of progressive reforms proposed by both the Indiahoma Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Labor, whose members were both Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans remained largely silent during much of the campaign for the upcoming election of convention delegates, believing that registered Republicans would select Republican delegates and Democrats would select Democratic delegates. However, Republicans were soon forced to voice a stance on an issue that arose during the campaigns.

Most southern states had laws requiring racial segregation. These Jim Crow laws were a major reason that many blacks had migrated to the Twin Territories. Now, the Democrats in those territories, due in party to their southern legacies, began to demand that Oklahoma’s new constitution must embrace Jim Crow laws too.

In that segregation was popular among most whites, even white republicans. This led the territory’s Republicans into an impossible dilemma. If they opposed Jim Crow, many of their white supporters might vote Democratic. If they supported segregation, their black followers might not vote at all. Calculating that black voters had nowhere else to turn, the Republicans made their decision and cast their support for Jim Crow laws as well.

On the day of the election for delegates to the constitutional convention, the majority of whites voted for the party that committed itself to the progressive reforms, the Democrats. Most black voters, refusing to support a party which endorsed segregation, did not vote at all. After years of Republican domination in Oklahoma Territory, 100 of the 112 convention delegate seats went to the Democrats.

Meeting at Guthrie through the last weeks of 1906 and early 1907, the Democratic victors proceeded to keep nearly all of their many pledges. One result was that they produced the longest written constitution produced up to that time. Another result was that Oklahoma’s constitution was regarded as the most progressive for its day. Strict corporate regulation, safeguards for farmers, protection for workers, rights for children, new instruments of popular rule—all of these and other provisions found their way into the 250,000-word document. There, too, was the mandate of segregation in the new state.

When the constitution was submitted to the people for final ratification they were to vote both on the constitution and for those individuals who would become the first state officials in the event that Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt approved of the finished constitution. In the debate over ratification, Republicans encouraged voters to vote no on the constitution and while Democrats reminded voters that it was they who were chiefly responsible for its progressive provisions. This led the vast majority of the people, who supported the progressive agenda, to fear that Republicans, who were against the final constitution, might attempt to destroy its provisions if elected. When the results were counted, the constitution was overwhelmingly approved and Democrats were elected to every statewide office in the new government.

The Good Angel of Oklahoma:

Kate Barnard
By Margaret Truman³⁷
For a few brief years at the beginning of this century, Kate Barnard was a power to be reckoned with in Oklahoma politics.

A small, pretty woman with olive skin, black hair, and deep blue eyes, Kate appeared on the political scene in 1907 just as the “Twin Territories”—Oklahoma and Indian—were about to merge and become our forty-sixth state. It was a rare opportunity to mold the future and Kate Barnard played a major role in the drama. A new commonwealth was about to be formed, a new constitution written. Kate Barnard was determined that this constitution would aid Oklahoma’s poor and dispossessed—especially the children.

An intense sympathy for the losers, the dropouts, the failures of our competitive society burned deep in Kate Barnard’s spirit. Her mother died when she was only 18 months old and her father’s job as a land surveyor kept him away from home for long periods of time. In her long days alone, she sometimes dreamt of doing something bold and heroic which would win his admiration. It is easy to see why she was instinctively sympathetic to anyone—especially children—who lacked a caring parent or friend. She knew only too well the hollow ache of that pain.

Kate thought that happiness had finally arrived when she and her father moved to Oklahoma City in 1892. But Mr. Barnard chose to settle on land he owned in one of the city’s slums—where Kate got her first glimpse of mass misery. Not everyone who followed the frontier was a self-reliant Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett type. A dismaying number were failures who thought geography was the answer to their woes. But they only repeated their dismal performance in a new area and their wives and children remained victims of poverty’s grinding humiliation and deprivation.

While she continued to give away food and clothing, Kate organized Oklahoma City’s unemployed into a labor union. She gave frequent public speeches encouraging the Constitutional Convention delegates to address compulsory education, abolition of child labor, and the creation of a Department of Charities and Corrections to supervise the state’s social welfare programs. All three proposals became major issues in the state Constitutional Convention and all were adopted by the delegates. Thus it came as no surprise when the delegates nominated Kate for the job as the first Commissioner of the Department of Charities and Corrections.

Kate’s popularity combined with her gifts as a public speaker made her virtually unbeatable. She looked sweet and innocent, but there was an inner toughness beneath her charm. On one occasion, she was scheduled to speak in a town where fifteen coal miners had recently been burned to death because of inadequate safety conditions at the mine. The town fathers warned he not to come, but Kate went anyway. When she arrived, all the public halls suddenly became “unavailable.” Unintimidated, Kate staged her rally on a street corner.

As soon as she began to speak, the negligent mine owner pushed his way to the front of the crowd and stood there, arms folded, glaring at her. He was a thick-necked barrel of a man with a violent temper. He had obviously used this tactic in the past to silence other visiting speakers. But it did not work with Kate Barnard. She glared right back at him, and tossed aside her prepared speech.

Pointing her finger at the mine owner she said:

The diamonds you are wearing in your shirt front were bought with the blood of fifteen men who were burned to death in a mine which you own, because you would not spend the money to provide two entrances. You made their wives widows; you made their children orphans; you are responsible to Almighty God for the long, weary lives of poverty and ignorance which they face; and if the people of this state of Oklahoma will elect me to the office which I am seeking I will change such conditions, not only in your mine, but in all others.

In the very election when territorial settlers voted for Oklahoma’s Constitution, they also cast they votes for the first elected officials for what they hoped would be a new state. In that election in 1907, Kate made political history. She polled six thousand more votes than any other Democrat on the ticket and at the age of 32 became the first woman in the United States to be elected to statewide office. An accomplishment amplified even more by the fact that women could not vote in that election.

The early years of the twentieth century—the “Progressive Era”—were a period of tremendous social awareness. There were demands for reform in practically every area of American life. Kate was in favor of most of the reforms, with one surprising exception. She had no interest in women’s suffrage. “The boys always do what I ask them,” she said, “so I don’t see any need to go to the polls myself.” Like a good politician, she was willing to compromise on some issues, to win on more important ones. But Oklahoma would soon discover that there were some issues on which Kate Barnard would never compromise.

Kate issued a devastating report of her finding. In the wake of the scandal it caused, Oklahoma was inspired to build its own model penitentiary (at McAlester) and Kansas convicts won some badly needed prison reforms.

Kate was reelected by a large majority in 1910. But her courage and her conscience forced her to fight some of the most powerful men in both her own Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The trouble started when a report came into the Department of Charities and Corrections that three “elf” children were living in a field just outside of town. They slept in the hollow of an old tree and got their food by begging at nearby farmhouses. Kate sent one of her assistants to find the trio and bring them back to her office.

The three “elves” turned out to be Indian children. They were a sorry sight. Their clothes were filthy rags, their arms and legs were scrawny and covered with scabs, their black hair was so tangled and matted that it resisted comb and brush and had to be cut away from their scalps.

The youngsters were sent to a children’s shelter while Kate set about finding out who they were. After six weeks of investigation, she turned up the fact that their parents had died a few years before and they had been placed under the protection of a guardian. The man had also been appointed guardian for some 51 other Indian minors. When Kate asked him where the other children were, he shrugged indifferently. “I don’t know,” he murmured, “I’ve lost all track of them.”

What made the situation even more appalling was another discovery by Kate’s investigators. The three Indian children owned valuable lands in the Glenn Pool oilfields. The guardian had been collecting their rents and keeping them for himself.

Kate was horrified to discover that defrauding Indians had become a popular and profitable pastime in Oklahoma. Originally, the federal government was supposed to hold the land in trust for each Indian for twenty-five years. But federal officials transferred the responsibility for Indian minors to Oklahoma courts after statehood. Many of these children were immensely wealthy. Coal had been discovered on the Choctaw and Chickasaw lands, oil and gas on the Creek and Cherokee territories. Since the children were completely ignorant about their holding, the opportunities for graft and corruption were enormous.

Oklahoma judges regularly appointed guardians who had no interest in the children they were assigned to protect but were passionately interested in stealing their inheritances. Kate uncovered dozens of schemes to cheat Indians. In one case, a sixteen-year-old Indian boy was kidnapped and forced to marry a local prostitute. The marriage legally established his status as an adult. The men who staged the kidnapping then made him sign over the deed to his land. With this information in hand, Kate decided to undertake a probe of the orphans in Oklahoma’s asylums. She discovered hundreds of Indian children who had been turned out to fend for themselves after their lands were taken from them by court-appointed guardians.

Infuriated by these injustices, Kate Barnard went before the state legislature and demanded that the Department of Charities and Corrections be given the right to intervene on behalf of any Indian whose estate was being mismanaged. She was about adults as well as children. Many adult Indians could not read or write and did not understand business procedures.

For the first time in her political life, Kate Barnard had a hard time mustering a majority. Some of the most respected men in the Oklahoma Legislature were either profiting from the Indian land frauds or had powerful friends who were getting rich from them. Almost every guardian had a half dozen or more children under his supposed supervision.

A few Oklahomans were delighted with Kate’s work. Most, however, were not very enthusiastic about it and as the probes continued and a number of influential men were implicated, Kate’s popularity began to decline. The state legislature moved quickly to quiet the investigation.

Additionally, the legislature was considering a reduction in the budget of Kate’s Department of Charities and Corrections. Kate recognized political blackmail when she saw it. If she continued her investigation she would lose her funding. Unwilling to compromise, Kate found herself with no money to pay her staff. For the first time, Kate also found she was unable to tell her side of the story in the newspapers. Reporters avoided her. The publishers had joined the ugly conspiracy. They too had friends involved in the land frauds.

Kate tried to keep her office open with $350 of her own money and a few hundred more borrowed from friends. Behind the scenes she fought desperately to get another vote on an emergency vote from the state legislature. But the men in charge of Oklahoma’s politics talked about how the state budget had doubled in four years and hypocritically insisted that the elimination of Kate’s department was “necessary.” Kate Barnard finally had to accept the bitter truth. The Department of Charities and Corrections had ceased to exist.

Using the income from some property that her father had left her at his death in 1909 and the money she collected at fund-raising speeches, Kate organized a “People’s Lobby.” For the next twenty years Kate continued to speak out for the Indians, but it was not an issue on which she could rebuild he shattered political career. She became more and more affected by a disfiguring skin disease and nervous exhaustion. She died in 1930 at the age of 55, a defeated, forgotten name in Oklahoma. Two histories of the state, both published by the University of Oklahoma, did not even mention her name. They also failed to mention anything about Oklahoma’s robbing Indians.

Kate Barnard died thinking of herself as a failure. But the cause for which she fought did not die. In 1926, a growing chorus of critics persuaded the government to fund a study by the Brookings Institution to see how the Indians were faring under the land allotment system. The findings, published in 1928 and confirmed through a long, thorough Congressional investigation, stunned the nation. Poverty, starvation, humiliation, had become a way of life for tens of thousands of Indians.

In 1887, they had owned 138 million acres of land. By 1934, their holdings had shrunk to 47 million. In Oklahoma, the land belonging to the largest tribes had dwindled from 19.5 million acres to 1.5 million. It would be nice to say that all the injustices that Kate Barnard had fought have been rectified. But this is an imperfect world. At least her gallant voice, ignored in her own time, can be heard by courageous men and women of another era. She is one more example of a woman of courage transcending the limitation of her time and place.

Sooner Socialism
By W. David Baird and Danney Goble³⁸
Rich and Poor
Social class was a significant feature affecting early Oklahomans’ lives. Oklahoman’s liked to claim that the defining quality of their brand new state was the equality of all, but no one could deny that many families occupied a status considerably different than most. Even Oklahoma had its elites—some of whom, like the oil giant E.W. Marland, would have been considered upper-class anywhere in America. Though of much more modest standing, at least some in every community were blessed with wealth and comfort that separated them from their fellow residents.

That is hardly surprising. What may be startling is how very poor so very many early Oklahomans were. This was particularly true across the former Indian Territory, where the grafting of land allotments had serious consequences for not only Indians but everyone else as well. One consequence was that a few were able to take control of huge parcels of land. Another was that many were unable to own land at all. Instead, they rented it, usually in an arrangement known as sharecropping. What made it especially hard for them is that the crop was almost always cotton (many landlords would not allow their tenants to grow anything else), and cotton prices often barely covered the cost of production.

In no county in eastern Oklahoma did anything like one-half of the farmers own their own land. In many, not even one-tenth did. By the time the sharecropper had paid the cost of ginning the cotton, had given the landlord his share, and had paid off his debts at the local store, he could be left with little, if any, cash income.

Oklahomans who note how conservative their state has become may be astonished to learn just how strong socialism once was—particularly when the look at it from the vantage point of the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. Such comparisons, however natural, are unfair. Oklahoma’s early socialists faced problems unknown to later generations and they advocated solutions completely unlike those that later failed so dismally in Communist nations. These were desperately poor people—people so poor and so desperate that they were ready to replace what they regarded as an evil economic, social, and political system with a socialist alternative.

Increasing numbers of Oklahoma’s farmers faced real want in the early years of statehood. This large class of the rural poor provided a fertile field for early socialism within Oklahoma. Socialists believed that the state’s Democratic officials not only could not solve their problems but also added to them. In particular, they believed that the state’s political elite had joined hands with its economic elite to force poverty upon the masses. In joining the Socialist Party (also known as the Working Class Union), they were in open revolt against that combined elite, the elite that they described as “the parasites in the electric light towns.”

Theirs was not a violent revolt. Rather, they appealed to voters to mark their ballots for Socialist Party candidates who pledged to promote fundamental changes: for publicly owned cooperatives, state credit for farmers, the forced breakup of great land estates, and the like.

Those appeals fell on fertile soil. In every election from statehood in 1907 to World War I in 1914, the Socialist vote at least doubled in Oklahoma. As early as 1910, Oklahoma had more Socialist Party members than did any state in the union, even more than New York, although the Empire State had seven times Oklahoma’s population. By the outbreak of the First World War, one out of every five Oklahomans was voting for Socialist candidates and electing them to the state legislature and to dozens of county and local offices. Particularly in the southern counties, the party was unusually strong. Drawing over one-third of the vote, the Socialists passed the Republicans to become the Democrats’ chief opposition in that large section of the state.
The First World War
This opposition did not survive the world war. One reason was that the war’s demand for farm products briefly pushed prices up to record levels. The temporary easing of the farmer’s plight took much wind from the Socialists’ sails. The larger explanation, however, was that the war gave state officials the opportunity to blast their vessel from the water. Because many Socialists opposed America’s participation in the war, and a few openly campaigned against it, their more powerful rivals were able to tar the entire party with the brush of “disloyalty,” even treason. This was especially the case after the Socialists became associated with several random acts of violence, as well as an episode known as the Green Corn Rebellion.

In the first summer of America’s involvement in World War I, a poorly organized band of farmers in the Canadian River valley took up arms, proclaiming the intent of marching on Washington to force peace on the government. The revolt took its odd name from the rebels’ supposed diet as they were marching along the way.

Few ever got beyond their home counties, and their pitiable forces were easily crushed by local sheriffs and the state militia (national guard). Still, the audacity of the deed was all that many Oklahomans needed for hysteria. Warmly supported by public opinion, state authorities proceeded to shut down Socialist newspapers and jail the party’s leaders—most of whom had no relationship at all to the pathetic rebellion. By the end of World War I, Oklahoma’s Socialist party was virtually dead.

The Green Corn Rebellion

Makes the News
Ada Weekly News August 2, 1917

To Resist Draft Law—Organization thought to exist in several counties in OK

That there is a wrong organization in Pontotoc, Seminole, Pottawatomie, and perhaps other counties, the purpose of which is to resist the draft law, is the opinion of Pontotoc County officials. Acting upon evidence collected the office of Sheriff Bob Duncan and county Attorney A.L. Bullock the federal authorities today took into custody Sam Bingham, Geo. Norman, Ernest Johnson, Jim Hammett Sr., and a Mr. Wilson, all of Francis or near that place. These will probably by lodged in the federal jail at Holdenville or Muskogee.

Some of the agitators, it is alleged believe the time has come to strike for a different form of government. They believe that all of those not contented with things as they are now will rise up in a common cause and overthrow the powers of the government.

It is possible that this organization has spread to other counties. Mr. Bullock thinks. Rumors of it have been reaching Ada fro several days. Quietly the officers have been watching developments. Officials in other counties are doing the same. Arrests have been made in Pottawatomie County. Arrests in Seminole are looked for any time. One member of the organization who has not yet been arrested is said to have remarked that a few days would see some startling developments. The officers know who he is and are watching him.
Ada Weekly News August 9, 1917

U.S. District Attorney in Deadly Earnest Against Leaders of Uprising—Excitement Subsides—Believed trouble is about over but no chances will be taken

Anarchy reared its head in the southern part of Seminole County Thursday afternoon and night and part of that section is under control of mob of anti-draft men of various ages.

The first outbreak came about 4 o’clock. Thursday afternoon when Sheriff Grail of Seminole County and Deputy Cross of Sasakwa were waylaid east of Sasakwa and fired on. They had but one gun but with this they returned the fire. Some thirty-five shots were exchanged and the ambushers disappeared.

The next move of the anti-drafters was to make a general roundup of the country, forcing every man they could find to accompany their party. It is reported that Grant Scroggins and the father and brother of W.T. Melton were among those taken. It is said that the raiders were at least 100 strong when last reported, but they declared they would have 3,000 men together in a short time.

The Frisco Bridge was the next object of attention, and they fired it in three places, doing damage that required until noon today to repair. It was reported that dynamite was also used, but men from Francis said if such was the case the damage was slight. The fires were started and to make more certain of their work they set fire to a handcar of building material and shoved it to the middle of the bridge. To conceal their movements they cut the telegraph wires both north and south of Francis and service was not restored until noon today.

Evidently the leaders of this movement have been preparing for some time, for this morning when the news began to spread, many men went to the various hardware stores only to find that every high power gun had been sold. However, there are quite a number of such guns in the community and a good-sized squad could be armed.

In Ada there has been no undue excitement, but on every hand there has been evidence a grim determination to back the officers in any and all emergencies.
Ada Weekly News August 10, 1917

Seven New Arrests Today

At noon today Sheriff Duncan got word that one of the leaders and six men were captured and taken to Wewoka.

Anti-draft rioters who for three days run amuck in southeaster OK, this afternoon faced the United States commissioner’s to answer the charge of treason. District Attorney McGinnis, in charge of the prosecution, announced that where evidence is sufficient he will ask for the death penalty. Prohibitive bail will be asked in order to hold the men until trial.

Authorities are confident they have two National organizers among the 250 prisoners. Evidence and records seized by authorities show the Working Class Union had 27,000 members in the State. The records also give evidence for the arrest of many leaders of the revolutionary movement.

The uprising in Seminole County is apparently about to an end, but posses are still searching the woods and picking up suspects and arms. It is estimated that no fewer than 300 men have been taken and now that the tide has set in so strongly against them, they are beginning to come in and surrender.
Brewer’s Story

C.C. Brewer, age 41, and his two sons, Dave aged 18 and Homer aged 16, held in the city jail for the Seminole County authorities, talked freely to a News-Herald representative last night. They admitted membership in the Working Class Union, but maintained they entered into their plans only under duress and had been trying to get out.

Asked what the idea of the W.C.U. was in their present activities, Brewer replied that it was part of a tremendous revolution, which was expected to spread rapidly and become nationwide. The extermination of the officers and all who refused to fall in with their plans was contemplated. The only end the leaders could see was the victorious over throw of the government. Resistance of the draft was only a part of their purpose, but was emphasized by the actual nearness of the actual drawing for army service.

The death toll of the anti-draft rioting reached three, when J.F. Moose of Okemah was shot and killed Sunday night by a posse guarding the roads leading to Holdenville. Moose was killed when he failed to heed the warning of the posse-men to halt, being riddled with buckshot rifle bullets. He was in an automobile and tried to escape.

Ed Blalock was killed and two posse-men injured when a band of thirty rioters were trapped in a schoolhouse southeast of here Sunday afternoon.

Jack Paige, former marshal, was shot in the leg and Henry Johnson shot in the head.

A special train took 56 arrested rioters from Holdenville to McAlester this morning. All jails of surrounding towns are filled. A total of 225 have been arrested in Seminole County since the outbreak started. Reports from Ada and Wewoka this morning state that everything is quiet. Posses are still scouring the country arresting all individuals in the groups or rioters. Many are giving themselves up to the authorities.

Alice Mary Robertson:

Anti-Feminist Congresswoman
By Louise B. James³⁹
Alice Mary Robertson is one of the most important women that Oklahoma has produced. The story of her life includes a list of many achievements culminating with her election to the United States House of Representatives in 1920. She was only the second woman elected to this body; she remains the only woman Oklahoma has ever elected to Congress. In spite of all her achievements, her public comments about the role of women in American life indicate her belief that a woman’s chief role was that of wife and mother. Her victory in the first election following the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment was a victory for those opposed to women’s suffrage, as Miss Alice did not wish the right of voting for herself or for other women. Her life story was a paradox for those interested in women’s rights. She was opposed to much of what the feminists of her day were seeking, yet, she achieved more in her own life than most men have achieved either in that time period or in the present.

Born into one of Oklahoma’s distinguished missionary families, she was the granddaughter of Rev. Samuel A. Worcester who devoted most of his life to work with the Cherokees. She was the daughter of two missionaries to the Creek Indians, William S. Robertson and Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson. Her mother set an example of what a woman might achieve as she raised a growing family. Her mother also taught classes of Indian students, translated books of the Bible into Creek, and became the first American woman to earn a Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) degree. Her father, William, commented on his wife’s ability, “Tis not every mother that can teach with two children as assistants, yet Ann Eliza scarcely loses an hour.” Miss Alice desired to achieve a name for herself. At thirteen, she wrote to her older sister, Ann Augusta, “I have studied algebra today, and taken my first drawing lesson. I am going to be somebody yet.”

For much of her life “being somebody” was connected with her family’s position and came mainly in the field of Indian education, an endeavor which she thought was proper for a woman. At the age of nineteen she was employed by the Indian Department in Washington, D.C., as a clerk. While she was working there, she taught herself shorthand. Ben Pitman, the originator of the style of shorthand she learned, was impressed with the efforts and sent here an autographed copy of his shorthand manual. Shorthand brought her much recognition later as she was the only person in Indian Territory with such a skill and was frequently called upon to use this ability in developments in Indian Territory, including the commission which worked for the cession of the Cherokee Outlet.

While she was working outside Indian Territory, her parent’s mission at Tullahassee burned leaving the students without a chance to continue their educations. She convinced officials of the newly created school at Carlisle, PA, to accept twenty-five of the students from Tullahassee, and even arranged free fare for these students from railroad officials.

Her career outside Indian Territory was cut short by the death of her father, and she returned to help at home in 1881. During this time, she started the boarding school which eventually become Henry Kendall College, which in turn became Tulsa University.

Her knowledge in the field of Indian education led to Miss Alice being invited to speak at an educational meeting at Lake Mononk, NY, in 1891. In her audience was a man destined to changed her life, for he would bring her into fields of endeavor far from education and mission work. As she spoke she become aware of one extremely interested member of the audience, and by the end of the speech her remarks were directed to him. Theodore Roosevelt came to her after the speech, introducing himself with the remark that their views on Indian education were much the same.

The friendship grew, and during the Spanish-American War she helped recruit Troops L and M of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. When Roosevelt became President, she found herself with a job far outside the education connected ones she had held in the past. He appointed his staunch Republican woman friend as the postmaster of Muskogee in 1905. Miss Alice did not stop to consider the fact that she would be the only postmistress of a first class post office. She saw work to be done, and she tried to do her best.

A postmistress created quite a stir at the convention of postmasters in the fall of 1906. She was placed on every committee. She was not intimidated by being the only woman. Miss Alice presented several papers containing her suggestions and addressed the convention supporting her views. She requested that she be allowed to become just “one of the boys,” with the only exception being that they not smoke cigarettes in her presence. She did not mind cigars being smoked, and as she attended all session, cigarette smoking was at a minimum.

At the same time that she was enjoying the limelight in the convention, she was making comments on women’s rights. “The exchange of a woman’s privileges for a man’s right is too much like bartering the birthright for a mess of pottage.” This statement was certain to anger suffragists who were trying to achieve political equality at this time! She made it clear that she was not a suffragist, but a “hard-working postmaster.” Roosevelt reappointed her to this position which she held until 1913.

Her next venture into national recognition was during World War I, and it was again in a field safely and traditionally feminine. She began meeting troop trains that came through Muskogee and gave out cigarettes, candies, post cards, gum, and coffee to the soldiers. She owned a cafeteria in Muskogee and fed soldiers and their families for free as they passed through Muskogee.

Following World War I, the avowed opponent of women’s suffrage found herself as a candidate for the United States House of Representatives. As she explained, “The men have thrust the vote on us and now I am going to see whether they mean it.” The campaign she conducted must have been one of the most unusual in political history. It truly had a woman’s touch. She usually ran advertisements in the Muskogee paper for her cafeteria. These advertisements listed the menus in enticing ways, “Lots of hot soup today; pole beans, boiled with bacon in the pot; corn bread, made from white meal, buttermilk, cherry pie!” After she filed for office, comments like, “our campaign seems to be going very well, even if we are not neglecting our customers,” appeared with the usual list of foods. She also observed, “I’m not anyone but home folks, and I want to go to Congress. First because a lot of men moved that I go and then a lot of women seconded them. Some say I won’t get there, but I’m well pleased with the outlook.”

She chose a very good year to be a Republican running for Congress in Oklahoma. Five of eight representatives that year were Republican, and the anti-feminist past sixty years of age found herself on of those members. Oklahoma also sent a Republican United States Senator to Washington that year.

Congressmen curious about their new female colleague found that in appearance she was “built on similar architectural lines as the late Champ Clark.” Her clothing was never the latest fashion but was described as “something black,” and more suited for Muskogee than Washington, D.C.

She had no intention of upsetting the male dominated Congress. She was to pride herself on never speaking when she could avoid a speech. She had always gotten with men than with women and had “always done a man’s work, carried a man’s burdens, and paid a man’s bills.” She was ready to work with Congress and be “just one of the boys” again.

Miss Alice did believe that a woman might have one special role in Congress. She believed that a woman should help make the government more honest and truthful, as indicated by her campaign slogan of, “I cannot be bought; I cannot be sold; I cannot be intimidated.”

Of special interest for the press was the meeting of Miss Alice and the only female member of the British Parliament, Lady Astor. She like the foreign visitor when they met, even though a feminist group sponsored Lady Astor’s visit. Miss Alice complimented her by saying “I have been impressed with an appreciation of the fact that the sanest women active in political work are wives and mothers accustomed to think for the future of their children. . . .” Perhaps she included herself in such a group, for while she remained single, she adopted, raised and educated one young girl. There were always children around that she helped. The daughter of a close friend even lived with her for a time while she was in Congress. She noted the children around her, “Some women collect china or jewels or lace. I have a fad for collecting boys and girls. . . .”

She was soon faced with the dilemma which confronts elected officials. Should she listen to her constituents and vote the way they instructed her; or should she listen to her own conscience and vote as she believed? She chose to be her own voice and quickly found herself in trouble with her voters. One of the unpopular votes was on a veterans’ bonus bill, which she voted against. This was an unusual vote for a woman who had given so much of her time and resources to help these very soldiers during the war. But part of her campaign promises had been, “I am a Christian; I am an American; I am a Republican,” and the Republican part of her believed that paying a bonus to able-bodied men was a bad precedent. Her vote received much attention, and she had the courage to return home and defend her actions in person before a veteran’s group. This was an unpleasant and difficult meeting. She asked for a show of hands of those men who had voted for her; among the angry veterans, only one man raised his hand. He must have had as much courage as Miss Alice did. She thanked him for his vote and realized that much of her political support was now lost.

The second unpopular vote was on the Sheppard-Tower Bill, also called the Maternity Bill, which included a provision for the government furnishing instruction to mothers on the care of young children. It was the legislation which the women’s rights groups had chosen to champion as the symbol of their new power in political affairs, and her negative vote probably did not lose any political support. She even urged women to write to their legislators and express their opposition to the bill. Prior to her vote and speech in Congress, she attacked the bill in public saying it would allow “the establishment of practically uncontrolled, yet Federally authorized centers of propaganda.” She commented on the pressure being bought on her by women’s groups, “They are trying to scare me into support of the bill, but I can’t be scared.”

He defeat at the election of 1922 was no surprise. She realized that politically she was in trouble early that year when she wrote her sister, “My political fences are in terrible shape everywhere. I made a speech which was so mishandled in the telegraphic re-prints in the newspapers that I am simply seething in boiling oil just now.” Oklahoma could not be expected to continue in the unusual pattern of voting Republican for too many elections, so Oklahoma’s only woman in Congress returned home after one term.

She was not bitter about her defeat remarking, “Happiness is contentment, and I always manage to content myself and find something that needs to be done.” She realized that the high point of her career had come rather late in life, as she remarked, “I’ve been a Cinderella at sixty-nine, but now the pumpkin is round the corner, waiting to wisk me back.”

She did get in one jab at enemies back home, especially other women. She had been told by some women in Oklahoma, “You see, we didn’t want you to go to Washington in the first place, and now we are going to keep you.” She responded, “How do you know I’ll come back?”

But everyone realized that Miss Alice of Muskogee would of course come home. For all that she had seen and done while in Washington, she was looking forward to hearing those Oklahoma mockingbirds. Evidently she did hope that the Republican President would reward a faithful party member with an appointment connected to Indian affairs, but she returned home just a private citizen.

What did Miss Alice’s career in Washington accomplish? She has an unusual response to such a question, telling a reporter, “If you asked a housekeeper that what do you think she would say? I’ve been keeping house for the nation just like a woman would in her own home—busy, busy, every day, in every way, without any outstanding thing to show for it.” Most freshman Congressmen can point to very few outstanding achievements, Miss Alice included.

She had clashed with the feminists mainly because she believed they were asking for rights she did not want for herself. Typical of her comments on the right to vote was, “I did not want suffrage. I didn’t ask for it, but they gave it to us, and as God gives me strength, I’ll carry the responsibility.” She also believed that feminists were asking for privileges simply because they were women. She said, “I have never asked any discount on account of my petticoats.” She also believed that very few women had the training to succeed in public life, even though she had managed to do so. She thought other women had “gone into politics the wrong way, beginning at the top instead of bottom. . . . When a woman shows she is fitted for office, she will receive the call to office just as a man does.”

Tulsa Burning

LaFortune pulls out one of the few remaining copies of a self-published, eyewitness account of the riot, written by a young black woman named Mary Jones Parrish . A YMCA typing instructor, Parrish had included in her remarkable volume three wide-angle photographs of the destruction, taped and folded within the book like a triptych. Now LaFortune spreads open the panorama for his guest. "It looks like Hiroshima, or worse," he says.

The photographs are breathtaking: 35 blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, reduced to cinder and rubble. On a single night, more than 10,000 armed and crazed whites looted and burned down the city's entire black section. In the pictures on LaFortune's desk, the smoke is still rising off the scorched earth, drifting between charred trees and the few jagged remains of brick walls.

For most of the past 75 years, the riot remained Tulsa's brooding secret. But on June 1, 1996, the 75th anniversary of the event, Tulsa held its first commemorative service and erected a memorial. And in October LaFortune performed his own role in the ritual healing.

During an emotional ceremony, he cleared a long deceased black man named J. B. Stradford of the charge of inciting the riot.

Stradford was one of Tulsa's most prosperous black entrepreneurs in the 1910's. He owned a 65-room hotel, a savings and loan, and other real estate in Greenwood. Having lost everything in the riot, Stradford escaped to Chicago, where he began life anew and became a successful lawyer. When he died in 1935, at the age of 75, the incitement charge still hung over him. With the riot's anniversary, the family wanted his name cleared. But first LaFortune and Assistant District Attorney Nancy Little had to uncover the details of the events of 1921.

"I would almost say I was staggered by what I learned," Little said.

"I had heard my parents talk about a riot by black people that came out of a rape." She was bewildered to find out that neither half of that equation had been true. In particular, Little was struck by a series of firsthand accounts, all by black victims of the riot, in the back of Mary Jones Parrish's book. "Those stories," said Little, "were among the most moving I have ever read." And the more she read, the more she thought, "This doesn't look like a riot. It looks like a war, an invasion of the area.

Little's dismay is shared by almost any Tulsan today who learns the truth about the riot. Tulsa, after all, had none of the bitter memories of the Civil War or Reconstruction. It was no sprawling northern metropolis plagued by poverty, unemployment and rotting tenements. Nor was it a Southern backwater where racial prejudice was endemic. Tulsa was full of pride and prosperity on both sides of the tracks. The city's black section was as remarkable as the boomtown of the white oil barons. Moreover, this riot happened during the Roaring Twenties: in modern times. The fact that a southwestern frontier town could experience such a paroxysm of hate, anger and violence seemed to speak to the very notions of equality and civility. And white Tulsa's denial of its own guilt remains a case study in cultural amnesia.

Tulsa in the 1920s was a boomtown with a short fuse. Originally part of the sprawling Indian Territory, Tulsa had for years been beyond the reach of state or federal law, and after the discovery of oil nearby at the turn of the century, the town became a notorious haven for criminals. An otherwise boisterous history, ordered up by the city in the 1970's, speculated about those early boom years: "There seemed to be an unwritten law between the town and the outlaws in which Tulsa furnished them with asylum in exchange for being spared from criminal acts." Even after Tulsa fell under the American legal system, it remained unusually rough. The volatile mix of desperadoes, gamblers, prostitutes, cowboys, wildcatters, roustabouts and Ku Kluxers was enough to weaken the knees of the bravest law-enforcement officials.

By 1910, Black Tulsans made up 10 percent of the city's population. Most of these residents were immigrants from the East and South, but many others were native to the area, having been former slaves of wealthy Creek Indians. The Blacks in Tulsa, totally segregated on the north side of the railroad tracks, were building up a prosperous community that boasted the second highest black literacy rate among Oklahoma counties, and a neighborhood of shops, hotels, gaming halls and restaurants that was gaining a reputation across the Southwest. The Greenwood section of Tulsa bristled with such energy, prosperity and promise, that Booker T. Washington himself—so the legend goes—dubbed Greenwood Avenue "the Black Wall Street." 

This Black prosperity caused resentment among poorer whites, and the city elders worried that it was bad for the city's image. In 1912, the Tulsa Democrat complained: "Tulsa appears to be in danger of losing its prestige as the whitest town in Oklahoma." The paper went on to ask: "Does Tulsa wish a double invasion of criminal Negro preachers, Negro Shysters, crap shooters, gamblers, bootleggers, prostitutes and smart alecs in general?"

At the time of the riot, the Ku Klux Klan had something of a stranglehold on Tulsa. Mitchell found that during the early 1920s the Klan "operated as a phantom regime," putting its imprimatur on political candidates. In the year of the riot alone, 59 Blacks were lynched in border and Southern states. Just six months before, in Oldenville, Oklahoma, a young Black man accused of assaulting a white woman was taken from jail, strung to a telephone pole, and riddled with bullets. The fact that a white man had been lynched in Tulsa the previous summer only proved that skin color was no protection. Accused of murdering a taxi driver, Roy Belton had been "mobbed" by a group of whites while the police directed traffic at the lynching site, ensuring everyone a good view. A Black newspaper wrote at the time: "The lynching of Roy Belton explodes the theory that a prisoner is safe on top of the Court House from mob violence."

Since the end of World War I, Black leaders had begun to encourage resistance to "Judge Lynch." In 1919, Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had declared: "When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." In Tulsa, the success of the Black community had only made this resolve more powerful.

The incident that set off the Tulsa riot was the same incident that set off so many other race riots before it: a report of an assault by a Black man on a white woman. In the case of Tulsa, a woman of little credibility and a story apparently trumped the report up, a combination of an allegation by a newspaper with even less. But those small details would not be fully understood before Black Tulsa burned to the ground.

Walter White, an NAACP official who arrived in Tulsa during the height of the riot, would offer a detailed account of the "assault" in The Nation later that month. According to White, a young Black messenger named Dick Rowland called for an elevator in a downtown Tulsa building. The operator, a young white woman named Sarah Page, on finding she had been summoned by a Black man, started the car on its descent when Rowland was only halfway in. To save himself from injury, Rowland threw himself into the car, stepping on the girl's foot in doing so. Page screamed and, when a crowd gathered outside the elevator, claimed she had been attacked. The police arrested Rowland the following day but with little enthusiasm, perhaps because they knew the reputation of his accuser. Page, a new arrival in Tulsa, had left her husband in Kansas City, and Sheriff Willard McCullough had served divorce papers on her just two months before. He was reported to have said later that if half the charges alleged in the divorce petition were true, "she is a notorious character."

Nevertheless, her charge of assault gave Tulsa's most disreputable newspaper enough to work with. Richard Lloyd Jones—a cousin of the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright—had purchased the Tulsa Democrat two years before. Jones had changed the paper's name—to the Tulsa Tribune—but not its behavior. He not only continued the newspaper's racist ways but raised them to a higher power, referring to the Black section of Tulsa as either "Little Africa" or "N-----town."

The Tribune's coverage of the alleged attack on Page clearly inflamed feelings in Tulsa. The adjutant general of Oklahoma would later blame the riot on "an impudent Negro, a hysterical girl, and a yellow journal." No original copies of the offending articles exist today, either in bound volumes or on microfilm, having been destroyed in the years following the riot. But a University of Tulsa student managed to find a copy for his 1946 thesis, and published it in its entirety.

On its front page, the Tribune had charged that Rowland had attacked Page, "scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes." The managing editor of the paper would, days later, admit that the scratches and torn clothes were fictions. The article stated that Rowland had been identified and arrested, had admitted grabbing Page's arm, and would be tried that afternoon. The final sentence was a guaranteed tearjerker: It stated that Page, whose age it gave as an improbable 17, "is an orphan who works as an elevator operator to pay her way through business college."

The Tribune also ran an editorial that day. No copies are known to survive, but people interviewed after the riot recalled an article that spoke of a lynching, and may have even encouraged one. Scott Ellsworth, who wrote the definitive book on the riot, Death in a Promised Land (1982), believes the headline read "To Lynch Negro Tonight." Whatever the Tribune said, the fuse was now lit. Shortly after the paper hit the newsstands, talk of a lynching was making its way around town. Within hours, hundreds of whites were milling in front of the courthouse—a common prelude to "Judge Lynch."

According to the unpublished memoirs of J.B. Stradford, the Tribune's stories "aroused the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan," and the KKK let it be known that they would "mob" Rowland that night. Stradford went on to say that Sheriff McCullough telephoned the office of the Tulsa Star, a Black newspaper, to warn "he expected an attack would be made on the jail that night." The sheriff promised that he would do all he could to protect Rowland, but that "if he found he could not cope with the situation, for us to get together and he would call us to help protect him."

In the end, the Black leaders assembled in the Star's office voted to go to the courthouse without waiting for the sheriff's summons. (Nor did they all heed Stradford's call to remain sober.) Fully armed, some 25 Blacks drove to the courthouse. Sheriff McCullough and Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver, Tulsa's first Black police officer met them there. The two law officers persuaded the emissaries to return to Greenwood, which they did peacefully. But the white crowd did not disperse. It continued to swell to ominous proportions, reaching 1,500 to 2,000. The Blacks returned, this time numbering between 50 and 75. Once again, McCullough and Cleaver tried to send the entourage home, but before they could succeed, an older white man made the mistake of confronting a young Black veteran of World War I. According to author Scott Ellsworth, the white man said, "N-----, what are you going with that pistol?" The answer was as polite as it was direct: "I'm going to use it if I need to."

Within moments, a struggle for the gun ensued, a shot rang out and guns were blazing. The Blacks retreated toward Greenwood while the whites began to prepare for their revenge. In the next few hours, a dozen stores in downtown Tulsa that sold firearms—sporting-good stores, Pawnshops, and even jewelry stores—were broken into and looted. The National Guard Armory was spared only because a small band of guardsmen, warned in advance, held off the multitudes. The whites, now numbering 10,000, headed for Greenwood, as a smaller rear guard of Blacks tried to hold them off. Mary Jones Parrish, who had read about recent riots in Chicago and Washington, D.C., heard the firing in the distance and later wrote: "It was hours before the horror of it all dawned upon me. . . . It did not seem possible that prosperous Tulsa, the city which was so peaceful and quiet that morning, could be in the thrall of a great disaster."

The horror was also dawning on city officials. For hours Police Chief John Gustafson clung to the belief that local authorities could control the situation. In what was an act of either naiveté or depravity, he deputized as many as 500 white volunteers with "special commissions."

The NAACP's Walter White, being very light complexioned, volunteered for duty shortly after his arrival in town, and was given one of these commissions. "Now you can go out and shoot any N----- you see," he was told, "and the law'll be behind you." White would spend a tense night riding about the city in the company of five members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Before long, even Gustafson realized events were out of his control. He signed a telegram, solicited by the governor, requesting the aid of the National Guard. The telegram was a model of concise communications: "Race riot developed here. Several killed. Unable to handle situation. Request that National Guard forces be sent by special train. Situation serious."

The fighting, pillaging and burning continued all night and into the morning. The riot was now a war; being fought building by building, block by block. The white's rage was blinding: At one point, the advancing mob noticed a lone, unarmed pedestrian across the street. Mistaking him for Black, the rioters opened fire, hitting him some 25 times. "Death was instantaneous," reported the Tulsa World the following morning. "He was hit so many times his body was mangled almost past identification." Now and again the mob would string a Black corpse to the rear bumper of an automobile and drag the body around town. Whenever a fire engine appeared on the scene, the white mob refused to let the fire crew deploy its hoses, forcing them back to the station. Police and their "deputies," those who were not actively engaged in the looting and burning, rounded up Black noncombatants, the elderly, women and children, and trucked them to holding facilities. At least one of these prisoners, Dr. A.C. Jackson, whom the Mayo brothers had once called the "most able Negro surgeon in America," was killed while being held in police "protection."

Mary Jones Parrish, who was still holed up with her daughter at the edge of the fighting, later wrote: "Looking south out of the window of what then was the Woods Building, we saw car loads of men with rifles unloading up near the granary. . . . Then the truth dawned upon us that our men were fighting in vain to hold their dear Greenwood."

The National Guard finally pulled into town by train from Oklahoma City at 9:15 a.m. with Adjutant General Charles Barrett in command. "In all my experience," Barrett wrote years later, "I have never witnessed such scenes as prevailed in this city when I arrived at the height of the rioting. Twenty-five thousand whites, armed to the teeth, were ranging the city in utter and ruthless defiance of every concept of law and righteousness. Motor Cars, bristling with guns swept through the city, their occupants firing at will." Nevertheless, the guards' first official act was to prepare and eat breakfast. One man who had the temerity to question this indulgence was immediately arrested. The guardsmen themselves, once they finished their breakfast, proceeded to round up the remaining Black residents at bayonet point, often drawing blood and frequently showing no sympathy for the homeless Blacks who were supposedly under their protection.

When it was all over, the Red Cross would report treating almost 1,000 people. Classrooms at the Booker T. Washington School were converted into an emergency facility. Parrish wrote: "I can never erase the sights of my first visit to the hospital. There were men wounded in every conceivable way, like soldiers after a big battle. Some with amputated limbs, burned faces, others minus an eye or with heads bandaged. There were women who were nervous wrecks, and some confinement cases. Was I in a hospital in France? No, in Tulsa.

It is impossible to judge the severity of the Tulsa Riot by its death toll. The official count was 36, but the earliest newspaper accounts ranged between 75 and 175, and Scott Ellsworth gives 100 as his best guess. (Many Blacks and some whites believe the actual number of deaths was much higher, with truckloads of corpses dumped into mass graves or into the nearby Arkansas River.) There were other riots around that time that had official counts almost as high, or even higher—the East St. Louis riot of 1917 (at least 125 dead), the Chicago riot of 1919 (at 38 dead); the Elaine, Arkansas riot of 1919 (at least 30 dead). But what had been lost in Tulsa was far more than lives. It was a community and a dream.

As bad as the riot was, what followed was in many ways worse. To the hot-blooded crimes of murder, pillaging and arson were added the cold-blooded crimes of false imprisonment, unusual cruelty and incredible hypocrisy. Richard Lloyd Jones would once again set the tone in his editorial in the Tulsa Tribune: "Acres of ashes lie smoldering in what but yesterday was 'N-----town'." He went on to use the riot as a pretext for attacking his political opponents. Over the next several days the headlines told the story of how white Tulsa would choose to view the riot for decades to come:

—PROPAGANDA OF NEGROES IS BLAMED.

—BLACK AGITATORS BLAMED FOR RIOT.

—PLOT BY NEGRO SOCIETY?

—BLACKS HAD LEADERS.

—BLOOD SHED IN RACE WAR WILL CLEANSE TULSA.

—NEGRO SECTION ABOLISHED BY CITY'S ORDER.

The attorney general of the state, during an address to the Tulsa City club two weeks after the tragedy, declared: "The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man that he was 30 years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor."

Over the following days and weeks white Tulsa put forth two ideas: Blacks had caused all the trouble, but the white community had opened its purses and hearts and rebuilt the burned neighborhood. The president of the chamber of commerce furnished press associations across the country with a broadside that stated: "The sympathy of the citizenship of Tulsa in a great wave has gone out to the unfortunate law-abiding Negroes who became victims of the action and bad advice of some of the lawless leaders, and as quickly as possible rehabilitation will take place and reparation be made."

And as the rioters emptied their cans of oil, they didn't bother with the outhouses, many of which were at some distance from the street. Now Tulsa wanted the north side of town to become a new industrial and transportation center. As for the Blacks, the mayor told his city commission: "Let the Negro settlement be placed further to the north and east." The courts overruled that ordinance four months later, but by then Blacks had lost precious time in rebuilding.

As to rehabilitation and restitution, there never would be any. Behind closed doors, Tulsa's white leaders plotted to do precisely the opposite of their proclamations. The Executive Welfare Committee in charge of "relief" efforts voted to solicit no money for aid, nor accept any donation, "financial or otherwise," to "reconstruct the Negro District." What money did come in to the Welfare Committee was used to reimburse the Red Cross for its Herculean efforts immediately following the riot. Scott Ellsworth pored over the official records while researching his book. "One myth that persists is that the white community created a generous relief effort and rebuilt Black Tulsa," he recently told a reporter for the Tulsa World. "The city fathers tried to keep Black Tulsans from rebuilding. They tried to swindle them out of their land. They refused donations from charitable organizations around the country, telling people they were going to rebuild the Black community." The winter of 1921-22 would find close to 1,000 Black Tulsans with nothing but tents to protect them from the cold and snow.

Hundreds of Blacks left Tulsa immediately after the riot, never to return. One of these was A.J. Smitherman, the editor of the Tulsa Star, whose business had been destroyed and whose name had been added to the grand-jury indictment. Gone too, was Stradford. The day after the riot, he and his wife had been held under "police protection" along with some 6,000 Black residents. But with the help of some white acquaintances, Stradford managed to leave town and eventually made his way to by train to Independence, Kansas, to stay with his brother. The day after his arrival, the Kansas police knocked on his brother's door and arrested Stradford, on the grounds of having incited the riot. The evidence: testimony that the first armed carloads of Blacks had left from in front of Stradford's hotel on Greenwood Avenue. Stradford was quoted as saying after his arrest: "They wanted me and now they have me."

There followed a law-enforcement soap opera. Tulsa wanted Stradford extradited. The attorney general of Oklahoma, along with the Tulsa County attorney, traveled to Topeka to plead with the governor of Kansas, bringing letters "from prominent men in Tulsa" assuring the governor that Stradford "would be given a fair trial and would be adequately protected from mob violence." The governor was convinced and ordered Stradford rearrested. But Stradford was no fool. Already out on bail, he fled with his son to Chicago.

As for Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver, he became the toast of Tulsa. Although the town's newspapers showed little remorse that the entire Black section had been burned to the ground, they were sympathetic about Cleaver's losses, which were considerable. Cleaver had amassed $ 20,000 worth of real estate on a policeman's pay. If this were not enough to raise questions about Cleaver's conduct, an article about him in the Tribune strongly suggested that he was playing a double game: "In all of Tulsa today there was just one Negro who walked the street openly and unafraid, molested by no one and greeted with a cheery smile by all who knew him."

What had Cleaver done to deserve such good will? Whatever he had done before, he now sided with the whites in blaming his fellow Blacks for the riot. Two days after the riot, Cleaver was quoted as saying: "I am going to do everything I can to bring the Negroes responsible for the outrage to the bars of justice. They caused me to lose everything I have been accumulating and I intend to get them." Get them he did. It was largely Cleaver's testimony, in court and out, that helped convince white Tulsa that it was blameless.

Dick Rowland was released from jail two weeks after the riot. Sarah Page dropped her charges three months later, and left town. Police Chief John Gustafson was found guilty on two counts: dereliction of duty during the riot and "conspiracy to free automobile thieves and collect rewards." Sheriff McCullough admitted to the press later that he had fallen asleep. "I didn't know there had been a riot until I read the papers the next morning at 8 o'clock," he said. Reminded that he too had signed the telegram requesting the aid of the National Guard in the middle of the night, the sheriff said he had not bothered to read it. Richard Lloyd Jones suffered a fitting fate for his role in triggering the riot. Eight years later he commissioned his cousin to build a house in Tulsa. It would be perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright's least successful house, a towering sprawling affair that resembled a penitentiary and leaked like a fishing trawler.

As for the Black community of Tulsa, it soon rebuilt Greenwood without the promised help. In the '30s and '40s, the area experienced something of a revival as one of the country's leading jazz centers. But in the decades that followed, Greenwood decayed. Dissected by highways, emptied by suburban drift and enervated by integration, the neighborhood finally succumbed to the bulldozer. Today, all that remains of "the Black Wall Street" is a single gentrified block of Greenwood Avenue, surrounded by new urban-renewal projects: a new university complex, a duck pond and a new cultural center that houses a jazz museum.

Dreams of a memorial to the Tulsa tragedy had long been popular in the city's Black community, where the riot had never been forgotten. Don Ross, a Black State representative, had been trying to put together some sort of commemoration since the 50th anniversary in 1971. And James Goodwin, a Black lawyer whose family owns the Oklahoma Eagle, had gone so far as to draw up elaborate plans for a memorial and museum.

What was missing was white participation and enthusiasm. Without white support, fund-raising would be far more difficult and the point entirely lost.

Enter Ken Levit. A young law graduate and former staffer for Sen. David Boren, Levit had the fragmentary knowledge of the riot usual among white Tulsans. "I knew that some racial incident of historic proportion took place," he says. "I didn't really understand any of the details—where, when, why, and how." While studying for the bar in the summer of 1994 he came upon Ellsworth's Death in a Promised Land. Using his associations and connections with Tulsa’s legal community, Levit, along with James Goodwin and Don Ross began formulating the plans for the 75th anniversary commemorative and raising money for a memorial.

The anniversary ceremony took place on June 1, 1996. It began with singing, prayers and speeches at Greenwood's Mt. Zion Baptist Church, itself a powerful symbol of the riot, having been torched only two months after its completion, and then lovingly rebuilt over the next 31 years. A crowd of 1,200 overflowed the church. On hand were Benjamin Hooks, former executive director of the NAACP, former senator David Boren, now the president of the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa Mayor Susan Savage and Scott Ellsworth. At one point Rep. Don Ross rose to say that over the last 75 years, no public official had ever apologized for the riot, so therefore he, an elected official, would do so. The irony that a black man was taking on the white man's burden of expiation was lost on no one. The guests then walked a few hundred yards to the dedication of a granite slab called the Black Wall Street Memorial.

The day's events left many a Tulsan, black and white, near tears. "That service was something of significance and real power," Levit recalled later. "For me, it was probably one of the most intense moments I have ever experienced. Don Ross was electrifying."

The judge then fired off letters, explaining J.B. Stradford's central role in Black Tulsa before the riot. Along with a photographic portrait, he sent this description of the patriarch of the Stradford clan: "He was magnificent, and had the courage and physical strength of a Mandingo warrior." Toole finished by mentioning the memoirs, which are still in the family's possession. "We are of course writing our own story of this era and his life.

Toole's letter set in motion a series of conversations that would lead to another moving ceremony. On October 18, Toole and 20 other members of the extended Stradford clan, who traveled from Texas, Illinois, Ohio, and New York, standing a stone's throw from where the Stradford Hotel once stood, listened as Bill LaFortune formally dropped the charges, and Oklahoma governor Frank Keating granted an honorary executive pardon.

At the request of the family, J.B. Stradford's name was added posthumously to a list of those allowed to practice law in Tulsa.

"It's regrettable that we have come here to recognize an embarrassment, a historical event that never should have happened," said Keating. "Our tragedy as Oklahomans is that the Stradfords are not living here." And he wasn't overstating the case: No Stradford had ever set foot in Tulsa since J.B.'s hasty departure, but the family had flourished. Stradford's son became a prominent Chicago lawyer and a founding member of the National Bar Association, arguing and winning Hansberry v. Lee, a crucial civil-rights case, before the U.S. Supreme Court. His granddaughter Jewel LaFontant-Mankarious, born one year after J.B.'s escape from Tulsa, would go on to become a deputy solicitor general and U.S. ambassador-at-large. Her son, John Rogers, Jr., is founder and president of Ariel Capital Investment in Chicago, and was named by Time magazine in 1994 as one of the country's most promising leaders under the age of 40. Another granddaughter, Letitia Toole, would become a stage and film actress and a member of the American Negro Theater, acting with Ossie Davis and Sidney Portier, and arrayed in front of Keating during the ceremony were four generations of Stradford's extended family, including a cardiologist, a tennis professional, a sculptor, a ballet dancer, and a movie director.

For his part, Judge Toole was delighted. "It was a wonderful ceremony," said the judge. "The governor spoke and made an apology to the Stradford family; he said something happened that should not have happened, and we know that, but I have never seen such a forceful apology." As for Don Ross, he seemed of two minds. On the one hand, he said, "The African American community of Tulsa can now say we were the victims and not the criminals in this racial upheaval." On the other, Ross still believes reparations are in order. He is thinking of introducing a bill that would pay out a total of $6 million to the families that lost everything in the riot. Nancy Little, too, doubts that Tulsa's season of remembrance and contrition can yet come to a close. "There is a time to leave the past behind," she mused. "I think that time is not when something has not been dealt with. Most people still do not know about it."

Perhaps the newsletter sent out by the Greenwood Cultural Center following the Stradford reception said it best. Under a photograph of the new memorial was a bit of verse that went:

"Things ain't what they oughta be, Things ain't what they gonna be, But thank God things ain't like they was."

“The Kiowa Five”: Tsa-to-ke, Hokeah, Mopope, Professor Jacobson, Asah, and Auchiah (L to R)

“Squaw Dance” by Stephen Mopope

paper (lined army ledger books), pencils, and paints, Captain Pratt suggest that they create art to sell to the white tourists who often stopped by to see the “wild Indians.” More than 600 drawings and paintings resulted. Known as ledger art, these were not like the tribal displays of the past; instead, they were the private expressions, often painfully autobiographical, of individual Indians. Many even signed their paintings with their private mark. When they returned to Oklahoma, their people called them by a word previously unknown in most Indian languages, “artists.”

Few white people recognized the significance of the work created by these Indians and those inspired by them. Determined to root out all traces of Indian identity, the superintendent of Anadarko’s Indian School forbade it when he found some young Kiowa children devotedly sketching and painting. He protested that “they should have been trying to become white men rather than wasting a lot of time with drawing.” One of the few who though otherwise was Susie Ryan Peters.

“Greeting of thee Moon God” by Jack Hokeah

Uninterested in teaching young girls to clean house, she was convinced that her charges—both girls and boys—included several natural artists. In 1918 she arranged for an art instructor from Chickasha to come to Anadarko and teach them, paying the artist’s salary herself. Although these informal lessons lasted only three or four months, Mrs. Peters persuaded Saint Patrick’s Mission School in Anadarko to accept the most promising of the students. At the school, Sister Olivia and Father Al enthusiastically added to the students’ preparation.

The budding Kiowa artists were neither average students nor stereotypical “savages.” Several were the sons and grandsons of famous war chiefs and holy men, and most came from important Indian families. All were close to the leaders of their people, for whom ancient traditions remained vivid memories. Many continued themselves to participate in rituals that dated from long before the whites’ arrival.

In 1923, Mrs. Peters and Father Al asked the University of Oklahoma to admit some of the Kiowa artists, but none had the necessary scholastic background or the money for tuition. Although they never enrolled as students, Professor Oscar B. Jacobson, head of the university’s school of art, invited them to live in Norman, where they could paint in the university’s art studios under his supervision. In 1927 five young Indians arrived to great excitement. Collectively they were to achieve fame as the “Kiowa Five”: Monroe Tsa-to-ke (1904-1937), Stephen Mopope (1898-1974), Spencer Asah (1905-1954), Jack Hokeah (1902-1969), and Lois Bou-ge-tah Smokey (1907-1981), who was later replaced by James Auchiah (1906-1974).

They were almost instant celebrities. Awed by their quickly developing gifts, Professor Jacobson mounted a university exhibit of their work within weeks of their arrival. In November 1927 they gained national recognition when the American Federation of Arts exhibited their paintings at its national convention in Denver. Soon the world learned of the Kiowa Five through their exhibition at the First International At Exposition in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1929 a prestigious French publisher issued a beautiful folio of some of their more-important works. Travel in the 1920s and 30s was a unique opportunity for them to follow the age-old Kiowa tradition, to “journey to the four corners of the Earth.”

“Warriors” by Monroe Tsa-to-ke

may have even influenced the U.S. government’s policy toward the Indians. The artwork of the Kiowa Five became well known for its representational, narrative style with ceremonial and social scenes of Kiowa life as their subject matter. Their work drew attention to the traditional culture and history of the Kiowas and other tribes. Auchiah once commented: “Our forefathers’ deeds touch us, shape us, like strokes of a painting. In endless procession their deeds mark us. The Elders speak knowingly of forever.” The enthusiasm for rediscovered Indian traditions, sparked in part by the Kiowas’ brilliant work, found one expression in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. One of the New Deal’s reforms, this was the law by which Washington finally abandoned its determination to assimilate Indians into white society through the calculated destruction of their separate cultures.

In Oklahoma the Kiowa Five continued their work through the 1930s. In particular, several found employment when the New Deal hired unemployed artists under the Works Progress Administration. Later they went their own ways, some continuing as painters while others took up more ordinary employment to support themselves and their families. Still, even today, a few of Oklahoma’s older public buildings display the murals and other projects that they created. Their legacy, however, is much, much more than that.

The Blue Devils came together in 1923 and made their headquarters in Oklahoma City’s Ritz Ballroom. Mostly they traveled to play at clubs, including white clubs across Oklahoma and surrounding states. The group’s greatest popularity, however, was on the old-time Chittlin’ Circuit, a string of black-owned clubs that booked black bands for appreciative black audiences. The location of many of those black clubs in Kansas City, MO made that city the nation’s jazz capital during the Roaring Twenties.

Kansas City promoters regularly involved the Blue Devils in their famous Battles of the Bands. These were open competitions in which rival bands successively tried to outdo each other’s hottest licks. Not infrequently, the Oklahoma Citians bested every big-time band in the region in those competitions.

With the Great Depression of the 1930s, clubs, both black and white, withered; and denied audiences, the Oklahoma City Blue Devils disbanded. Many of their members made their way to Kansas City, where they became the nucleus for a new band directed by one of the Blue Devils’ old piano players. That band, the Count Basie Orchestra, continued for decades as America’s premier jazz band—a continuing reminder of black achievements behind Oklahoma’s walls of segregation.

Jerome Tiger’s grandfather, Lewis Coleman, was the church’s pastor. Like the Rev. Coleman and his wife, Hettie, Jerome’s parents, Lucinda Coleman Tiger and John Tiger, were bilingual. English was used with the whites, but all were more comfortable with the Creek that they spoke at home and in church. Because other Indian families moved in and out of the other houses on the grounds, young Jerome lived not only amid an extended family but in something approaching a traditional Creek communal village. Daily he was surrounded by the living traditions of his fellow Indians.

“The Guardian Spirit” by Jerome Tiger

But these were modern times, and Lucinda and John Tiger left Eufaula for Muskogee. Lucinda took a “white” job, pressing clothes at Teel’s Laundry. John did too, beginning to drive fifty miles to Tulsa and his job at the Douglas Aircraft plant. For the first time Jerome and his brothers attended predominately white schools—Edison Elementary, Alice Robertson Junior High, and Muskogee Central High schools.

School was not particularly hard for Jerome Tiger, but neither was it much fun. He spent most of his spare time with Indians his age and other lower income boys whom other students regarded as hoods. His chief interests were an odd combination of violence and sensitivity—boxing and art. Bored with school, he quit after his junior year, served a two-year hitch with the U.S. navy, and returned to Muskogee. He hope to enroll in Bacone College.

The little college had begun as a Baptist missionary school for Indians. Although many (even in Oklahoma) had never heard of it, it had been a national treasure for years because of its art department begun by Acee Blue Eagle. Blue Eagle, also a Creek, had studied art at the University of Oklahoma, beginning there just after the Kiowa Five left. While Blue Eagle headed Bacone’s art departement from 1935 to 1938, he had established national reputations for both himself and the college. Subsequently, Woody Crumbo, of Creek and Potawatomi ancestry, took Blue Eagle’s place and, like him, further developed the Indian style and enhanced the college’s fame in art circles. He too had studies under both Professor Jacobson and Mrs. Peters like the Kiowa Five. When Jerome Tiger returned to Muskogee, Dick West, a Cheyenne, headed the legendary Bacone art department. Unfortunately for Jerome, he could not be admitted to the college, since he lacked a high school diploma. His older brother, Johnny, however, was a student there, and through him, Jerome learned the conventions and styles of Indian art.

No one had to give Jerome Tiger his talent. From his boyhood onward, he had spent hours drawing scenes inspired by events around him and from his imagination as it had been shaped by his elders’ stories and tales. Naturally right-handed, he could also draw amazingly well with his left hand. In fact, he once did four drawings simultaneously—one with each hand and one with each foot!

Returning to his grandparents’ home in Eufaula, Jerome Tiger married, had the first of two children, and began to work seriously at his art. Soon his paintings came to the attention of Nettie Wheeler, owner of the Thunderbird Shop. Located north of Muskogee on Highway 69, the little shop sold tourist trinkets and doodads. Stashed among the prevailing disorder were priceless original works of art, for Nettie Wheeler was an expert on and patron of Indian artists. Recognizing Jerome Tiger’s genius, she began to promote his paintings and entered two of them in competitions at Sante Fe and Tulsa, where both won prizes. She also encouraged Jerome to take advantage of a new program of vocational training offered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Jerome, his wife, and his daughter moved to Cleveland, OH, where he studied at the famous Cooper School of Art.

Cold and crowded, Cleveland was utterly unlike any place where Jerome Tiger had ever lived. Other than the Major League Baseball team, there were few other Indians in Cleveland, and most of them were Navajos, with whom Tiger regularly fought. He did like the Cooper School, however, even accepting for the first time the discipline required in formal art training. He might have stayed at the school if he had not happened to wander by a professor’s office one day. Standing unseen in the hallway, he overheard one teacher tell another that, although the young Oklahoman certainly had talent, “by the time we get through with him, he’ll be just another Indian that bit the dust.”

Jerome Tiger had other plans for his life. He left Cleveland and the Cooper School behind, returned to Muskogee, and polished and perfected his craft. In little time he developed a style so personal that his works were instantly recognizable. Although based on the conventions and themes pioneered by the Kiowa Five and furthered by others, his works were unlike anything ever seen in Indian art before. Clean and uncluttered, their fine lines and exquisite colors seemed to flow together to suggest movement and emotions as much as they did objects and people. Amazed to learn that he was largely self-taught, critics pronounced him a “painter’s painter.” His works, whether based on traditional Creek ways or illustrating the humor and the poignancy of contemporary Indian life, completely fulfilled the mandate that his grandfather had given him. “Put on paper what the Creek has in his heart,” old Coleman Lewis had told him. Jerome Tiger did that better than anyone else ever had.

Tiger created an amazing number of paintings. By the hundreds they poured from his home in Muskogee. Working primarily in a corner of his bedroom, he painted whenever and as long as the inspiration moved him, sometimes working all night and into the next. Some he gave away to friends and family. Others he sold, often for a little as thirty or forty dollars. For many purchasers, his work provided their introduction to Indian art, or, for that matter, original art of any kind. Outside his immediate surroundings, Jerome’s paintings regularly won national prizes and took his fame across America. They did not, however, take him. He mailed his paintings to competitions around the country, but Jerome Tiger never traveled outside of Oklahoma again.

The fame that came to him did not change Jerome. He kept up his boxing, one year winning the Oklahoma Golden Gloves championship as a middleweight. He continued to participate in Indian dances and consult with honored Creek holy men. Surrounded by his old friends (some of whom had no idea of his national stature), he played pool, drank beer, and played around with firearms. He was doing the last in the early morning hours of August 13, 1967. After a stomp dance in Eufaula, he piled into his brother’s car with some other friends. Pulling into an all-night restaurant and service station, the group was ready to break up when a deafening explosion shook the car. Jerome Tiger’s .22 pistol had discharged accidentally, sending a bullet into his brain.

When he was buried three days later, the funeral brought television crews, nationally famous artists and critics, and scores of simple mourners to the West Eufaula Baptist Church. That is where it had all begun no much earlier. Jerome Tiger was twenty-six years old.

The Harvest Gypsies
By John Steinbeck⁴²
Article One
At this season of the year, when California's great crops are coming into harvest, the heavy grapes, the prunes, the apples and lettuce and the rapidly maturing cotton, our highways swarm with the migrant workers, that shifting group of nomadic, poverty-stricken harvesters driven by hunger and the threat of hunger from crop to crop, from harvest to harvest, up and down the state and into Oregon to some extent, and into Washington a little. But it is California which has and needs the majority of these new gypsies. It is a short study of these wanderers that these articles will undertake. There are at least 150,000 homeless migrants wandering up and down the state, and that is an army large enough to make it important to every person in the state.

To the casual traveler on the great highways the movements of the migrants are mysterious if they are seen at all, for suddenly the roads will be filled with open rattletrap cars loaded with children and with dirty bedding, with fire-blackened cooking utensils. The boxcars and gondolas on the railroad lines will be filled with men. And then, just as suddenly, they will have disappeared from the main routes. On side roads and near rivers where there is little travel the squalid, filthy squatters' camp will have been set up, and the orchards will be filled with pickers and cutters and driers.

The unique nature of California agriculture requires that these migrants exist, and requires that they move about. A resident population of laborers cannot harvest peaches and grapes, hops and cotton. For example, a large peach orchard which requires the work of 20 men the year round will need as many as 2000 for the brief time of picking and packing. And if the migration of the 2000 should not occur, if it should be delayed even a week, the crop will rot and be lost.

Thus, in California we find a curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful. The migrants are needed, and they are hated. Arriving in a district they find the dislike always meted out by the resident to the foreigner, the outlander. This hatred of the stranger occurs in the whole range of human history, from the most primitive village form to our own highly organized industrial farming. The migrants are hated for the following reasons, that they are ignorant and dirty people, that they are carriers of disease, that they increase the necessity for police and the tax bill for schooling in a community, and that if they are allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out the season's crops. They are never received into a community nor into the life of a community. Wanderers in fact, they are never allowed to feel at home in the communities that demand their services.

Let us see what kind of people they are, where they come from, and the routes of their wanderings. In the past they have been of several races, encouraged to come and often imported as cheap labor; Chinese in the early period, then Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans. These were foreigners, and as such they were ostracized and segregated and herded about.

If they attempted to organize they were deported or arrested, and having no advocates they were never able to get a hearing for their problems. But in recent years the foreign migrants have begun to organize, and at this danger signal they have been deported in great numbers, for there was a new reservoir from which a great quantity of cheap labor could be obtained.

The drought in the middle west has driven the agricultural populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska and parts of Kansas and Texas westward. Their lands are destroyed and they can never go back to them.

Thousands of them are crossing the borders in ancient rattling automobiles, destitute and hungry and homeless, ready to accept any pay so that they may eat and feed their children. And this is a new thing in migrant labor, for the foreign workers were usually imported without their children and everything that remains of their old life with them.

They arrive in California usually having used up every resource to get here, even to the selling of the poor blankets and utensils and tools on the way to buy gasoline. They arrive bewildered and beaten and usually in a state of semi-starvation, with only one necessity to face immediately, and that is to find work at any wage in order that the family may eat.

And there is only one field in California that can receive them. Ineligible for relief, they must become migratory field workers.

Because the old kind of laborers, Mexicans and Filipinos, are being deported and repatriated very rapidly, while on the other hand the river of dust bowl refugees increases all the time, it is this new kind of migrant that we shall largely consider.

The earlier foreign migrants have invariably been drawn from a peon class. This is not the case with the new migrants.

They are small farmers who have lost their farms, or farm hands who have lived with the family in the old American way. They are men who have worked hard on their own farms and have felt the pride of possessing and living in close touch with the land.

They are resourceful and intelligent Americans who have gone through the hell of the drought, have seen their lands wither and die and the top soil blow away; and this, to a man who has owned his land, is a curious and terrible pain.

And then they have made the crossing and have seen often the death of their children on the way. Their cars have been broken down and been repaired with the ingenuity of the land man.

Often they patched the worn-out tires every few miles. They have weathered the thing, and they can weather much more for their blood is strong.

They are descendants of men who crossed into the middle west, who won their lands by fighting, who cultivated the prairies and stayed with them until they went back to desert.

And because of their tradition and their training, they are not migrants by nature. They are gypsies by force of circumstances.

In their heads, as they move wearily from harvest to harvest, there is one urge and one overwhelming need, to acquire a little land again, and to settle on it and stop their wandering. One has only to go into the squatters' camps where the families live on the ground and have no homes, no beds and no equipment; and one has only to look at the strong purposeful faces, often filled with pain and more often, when they see the corporation-held idle lands, filled with anger, to know that this new race is here to stay and that heed must be taken of it.

It should be understood that with this new race the old methods of repression, of starvation wages, of jailing, beating and intimidation are not going to work; these are American people. Consequently we must meet them with understanding and attempt to work out the problem to their benefit as well as ours.

It is difficult to believe what one large speculative farmer has said, that the success of California agriculture requires that we create and maintain a peon class. For if this is true, then California must depart from the semblance of democratic government that remains here.

The names of the new migrants indicate that they are of English, German and Scandanavian descent. There are Munns, Holbrooks, Hansens, Schmidts.

And they are strangely anachronistic in one way: Having been brought up in the prairies where industrialization never penetrated, they have jumped with no transition from the old agrarian, self-containing farm where nearly everything used was raised or manufactured, to a system of agriculture so industrialized that the man who plants a crop does not often see, let alone harvest, the fruit of his planting, where the migrant has no contact with the growth cycle.

And there is another difference between their old life and the new. They have come from the little farm districts where democracy was not only possible but also inevitable, where popular government, whether practiced in the Grange, in church organization or in local government, was the responsibility of every man. And they have come into the country where, because of the movement necessary to make a living, they are not allowed any vote whatever, but are rather considered a properly unpriviledged class.

Let us see the fields that require the impact of their labor and the districts to which they must travel. As one little boy in a squatters camp said, "When they need us they call us migrants, and when we've picked their crop, we're bums and we got to get out."

There are the vegetable crops of the Imperial Valley, the lettuce, cauliflower, tomatoes, and cabbage to be picked and packed, to be hoed and irrigated. There are several crops a year to be harvested, but there is not time distribution sufficient to give the migrants permanent work.

The orange orchards deliver two crops a year, but the picking season is short. Farther north, in Kern County and up the San Joaquin Valley, the migrants are needed for grapes, cotton, pears, melons, beans and peaches.

In the outer valley, near Salinas, Watsonville, and Santa Clara there are lettuce, cauliflowers, artichokes, apples, prunes, and apricots. North of San Francisco the produce is of grapes, deciduous fruits and hops. The Sacramento Valley needs masses of migrants for its asparagus, its walnuts, peaches, prunes, etc. These great valleys with their intensive farming make their seasonal demands on migrant labor.

A short time, then, before the actual picking begins, there is the scurrying on the highways, the families in open cars hurrying to the ready crops and hurrying to be first at work. For it has been the habit of the growers associations of the state to provide by importation, twice as much labor as was necessary, so that wages might remain low.

Hence the hurry, for if the migrant is a little late the places may all be filled and he will have taken his trip for nothing. And there are many things that may happen even if he is in time. The crop may be late, or there may occur one of those situations like that at Nipomo last year when twelve hundred workers arrived to pick the pea crop only to find it spoiled by rain.

All resources having been used to get to the field, the migrants could not move on; they stayed and starved until government aid tardily was found for them.

And so they move, frantically, with starvation close behind them. And in this series of articles we shall try to see how they live and what kind of people they are, what their living standard is, what is done for them and to them, and what their problems and needs are. For while California has been successful in its use of migrant labor, it is gradually building a human structure which will certainly change the State, and may, if handled with the inhumanity and stupidity that have characterized the past, destroy the present system of agricultural economics.

Here is a house built by a family who has tried to maintain neatness. The house is about 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper. The roof is peaked; the walls are tacked to a wooden frame. The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river the wife of the family scrubs clothes without soap and tries to rinse out the mud in muddy water. The spirit of this family is not quite broken, for the children, three of them, still have clothes, and the family possesses three old quilts and a soggy, lumpy mattress. But the money so needed for food cannot be used for soap nor for clothes.

With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush; in a few months the clothes will fray off the children's bodies while the lack of nourishing food will subject the whole family to pneumonia when the first cold comes.

Five years ago this family had fifty acres of land and a thousand dollars in the bank. The wife belonged to a sewing circle and the man was a member of the grange. They raised chickens, pigs, pigeons and vegetables and fruit for their own use; and their land produced the tall corn of the middle west. Now they have nothing.

If the husband hits every harvest without delay and works the maximum time, he may make four hundred dollars this year. But if anything happens, if his old car breaks down, if he is late and misses a harvest or two, he will have to feed his whole family on as little as one hundred and fifty.

But there is still pride in this family. Wherever they stop they try to put the children in school. It may be that the children will be in a school for as much as a month before they are moved to another locality.

Here, in the faces of the husband and his wife, you begin to see an expression you will notice on every face; not worry, but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds in against the borders of the camp. This man has tried to make a toilet by digging a hole in the ground near his paper house and surrounding it with an old piece of burlap. But he will only do things like that this year.

He is a newcomer and his spirit and decency and his sense of his own dignity have not been quite wiped out. Next year he will be like his next-door neighbor.

This is a family of six; a man, his wife and four children. They live in a tent the color of the ground. Rot has set in on the canvas so that the flaps and the sides hang in tatters and are held together with bits of rusty baling wire. There is one bed in the family and that is a big tick lying on the ground inside the tent.

They have one quilt and a piece of canvas for bedding. The sleeping arrangement is clever. Mother and father lie down together and two children lie between them. Then, heading the other way; the other two children lie, the littler ones. If the mother and father sleep with their legs spread wide, there is room for the legs of the children.

There is more filth here. The tent is full of flies clinging to the apple box that is the dinner table, buzzing about the foul clothes of the children, particularly the baby; who has not been bathed nor cleaned for several days.

This family has been on the road longer than the builder of the paper house. There is no toilet here, but there is a clump of willows nearby where human feces lie exposed to the flies—the same flies that are in the tent.

Two weeks ago there was another child, a four-year-old boy. For a few weeks they had noticed that he was kind of lackadaisical, that his eyes had been feverish.

They had given him the best place in the bed, between father and mother. But one night he went into convulsions and died, and the next morning the coroner's wagon took him away. It was one step down.

They know pretty well that it was a diet of fresh fruit, beans and little else that caused his death. He had no milk for months. With this death there came a change of mind in his family. The father and mother now feel that paralyzed dullness with which the mind protects itself against too much sorrow and too much pain.

And this father will not be able to make a maximum of four hundred dollars a year any more because he is no longer alert; he isn't quick at piece-work, and he is not able to fight clear of the dullness that has settled on him. His spirit is losing caste rapidly.

The dullness shows in the faces of this family, and in addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn. Sometimes they still start the older children off to school, but the ragged little things will not go; they hide in ditches or wander off by themselves until it is time to go back to the tent, because they are scorned in the school.

The better-dressed children shout and jeer, the teachers are quite often impatient with these additions to their duties, and the parents of the "nice" children do not want to have disease carriers in the schools.

The father of this family once had a little grocery store and his family lived in back of it so that even the children could wait on the counter. When the drought set in there was no trade for the store any more.

This is the middle class of the squatters' camp. In a few months this family will slip down to the lower class.

Dignity is all gone, and spirit has turned to sullen anger before it dies.

The next door neighbor family of man, wife and three children of from three to nine years of age, have built a house by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds, tin, old paper and strips of carpet against them.

A few branches are placed over the top to keep out the noonday sun. It would not turn water at all. There is no bed.

Somewhere the family has found a big piece of old carpet. It is on the ground. To go to bed the members of the family lie on the ground and fold the carpet up over them.

The three-year-old child has a gunnysack tied about his middle for clothing. He has the swollen belly caused by malnutrition.

He sits on the ground in the sun in front of the house, and the little black fruit flies buzz in circles and land on his closed eyes and crawl up his nose until he weakly brushes them away.

They try to get at the mucous in the eye-corners. This child seems to have the reactions of a baby much younger. The first year he had a little milk, but he has had none since.

He will die in a very short time. The older children may survive. Four nights ago the mother had a baby in the tent, on the dirty carpet. It was born dead, which was just as well because she could not have fed it at the breast; her own diet will not produce milk.

After it was born and she had seen that it was dead, the mother rolled over and lay still for two days. She is up today, tottering around. The last baby, born less than a year ago, lived a week. This woman's eyes have the glazed, far-away look of a sleepwalker's eyes.

She does not wash clothes any more. The drive that makes for cleanliness has been drained out of her and she hasn't the energy. The husband was a sharecropper once, but he couldn't make it go. Now he has lost even the desire to talk.

He will not look directly at you for that requires will, and will needs strength. He is a bad field worker for the same reason. It takes him a long time to make up his mind, so he is always late in moving and late in arriving in the fields. His top wage, when he can find work now; which isn't often, is a dollar a day.

The children do not even go to the willow clump any more. They squat where they are and kick a little dirt. The father is vaguely aware that there is a culture of hookworm in the mud along the riverbank. He knows the children will get it on their bare feet.

But he hasn't the will nor the energy to resist. Too many things have happened to him. This is the lower class of the camp.

This is what the man in the tent will be in six months; what the man in the paper house with its peaked roof will be in a year, after his house has washed down and his children have sickened or died, after the loss of dignity and spirit have cut him down to a kind of sub-humanity.

Helpful strangers are not well received in this camp. The local sheriff makes a raid now and then for a wanted man, and if there is labor trouble the vigilantes may burn the poor houses. Social workers, survey workers have taken case histories.

They are filed and open for inspection. These families have been questioned over and over about their origins, number of children living and dead.

The information is taken down and filed. That is that. It has been done so often and so little has come of it.

And there is another way for them to get attention. Let an epidemic break out, say typhoid or scarlet fever, and the country doctor will come to the camp and hurry the infected cases to the pest house. But malnutrition is not infectious, nor is dysentery, which is almost the rule among the children.

The county hospital has no room for measles, mumps, and whooping cough; and yet these are often deadly to hunger-weakened children. And although we hear much about the free clinics for the poor, these people do not know how to get the aid and they do not get it. Also, since most of their dealings with authority are painful to them, they prefer not to take the chance.

This is the squatters' camp. Some are a little better, some much worse. I have described three typical families. In some of the camps there are as many as three hundred families like these. Some are so far from water that it must be bought at five cents a bucket.

And if these men steal, if there is developing among them a suspicion and hatred of well-dressed, satisfied people, the reason is not to be sought in their origin nor in any tendency to weakness in their character.
Article Four
The federal Government, realizing that the miserable condition of the California migrant agricultural worker constitutes an immediate and vital problem, has set up two camps for the moving workers and contemplates eight more in the immediate future. The development of the camps at Arvin and at Marysville makes a social and economic study of vast interest.

The present camps are set up on leased ground. Future camps are to be constructed on land purchased by the Government. The Government provides places for tents. Permanent structures are simple, including washrooms, toilets and showers, an administration building and a place where the people can entertain themselves. The equipment at the Arvin camp, exclusive of rent of the land, costs approximately $18,000.

At this camp, water, toilet paper and some medical supplies are provided. A resident manager is on the ground. Campers are received on the following simple conditions: (1) That the men are bona fide farm people and intend to work, (2) that they will help to maintain the cleanliness of the camp and (3) that in lieu of rent they will devote two hours a week towards the maintenance and improvement of the camp.

The result has been more than could be expected. From the first, the intent of the management has been to restore the dignity and decency that had been kicked out of the migrants by their intolerable mode of life.

In this series the word "dignity" has been used several times. It has been used not as some attitude of self-importance, but simply as a register of a man's responsibility to the community.

A man herded about, surrounded by armed guards, starved and forced to live in filth loses his dignity; that is, he loses his valid position in regard to society, and consequently his whole ethics toward society. Nothing is a better example of this than the prison, where the men are reduced to no dignity and where crimes and infractions of the rule are constant.

We regard this destruction of dignity, then, as one of the most regrettable results of the migrant's life, since it does reduce his responsibility and does make him a sullen outcast who will strike at our Government in any way that occurs to him.

The example at Arvin adds weight to such a conviction. The people in the camp are encouraged to govern themselves, and they have responded with simple and workable democracy.

The camp is divided into four units. Each unit, by direct election, is represented in a central governing committee, an entertainment committee, a maintenance committee and a Good Neighbors committee. Each of these members is elected by the vote of his unit, and is recallable by the same vote.

The manager, of course, has the right of veto, but he practically never finds it necessary to act contrary to the recommendations of the committee.

The result of this responsible self-government has been remarkable. The inhabitants of the camp came there beaten, sullen and destitute. But as their social sense was revived they have settled down. The camp takes care of its own destitute, feeding and sheltering those who have nothing with their own poor stores. The central committee makes the law's that govern the conduct of the inhabitants.

In the year that the Arvin camp has been in operation there has not been any need for outside police. Punishments are the restrictions of certain privileges such as admission to the community dances, or for continued anti-social conduct, a recommendation to the manager that the culprit be ejected from the camp.

A works committee assigns the labor to be done in the camp, improvements, garbage disposal, maintenance and repairs. The entertainment committee arranges for the weekly dances, the music for which is furnished by an orchestra made up of the inhabitants.

So well do they play that one orchestra has been lost to the radio already. This committee also takes care of the many self-made games and courts that have been built.

The Good Neighbors, a woman's organization, takes part in quilting and sewing projects, sees that destitution does not exist, governs and watches the nursery; where children can be left while the mothers are working in the fields and in the packing sheds. And all of this is done with the outside aid of one manager and one part-time nurse. As experiments in natural and democratic self-government, these camps are unique in the United States.

In visiting these camps one is impressed with several things in particular. The sullen and frightened expression that is the rule among the migrants has disappeared from the faces of the Federal camp inhabitants. Instead there is a steadiness of gaze and a self-confidence that can only come of restored dignity.

The difference seems to lie in the new position of the migrant in the community. Before he came to the camp he had been policed, hated and moved about. It had been made clear that he was not wanted.

In the Federal camps every effort of the management is expended to give him his place in society. There are no persons on relief in these camps.

In the Arvin camp the central committee recommended the expulsion of a family which applied for relief. Employment is more common than in any similar group for, having something of their own, these men are better workers. The farmers in the vicinity seem to prefer the camp men to others.

The inhabitants of the Federal camps are no picked group. They are typical of the new migrants. They come from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas and the other drought states. Eighty-five per cent of them are former farm owners, farm renters or farm laborers. The remaining 15 percent includes painters, mechanics, electricians and even professional men.

When a new family enters one of these camps it is usually dirty, tired and broken. A group from the Good Neighbors meets it, tells it the rules, helps it to get settled, instructs it in the use of the sanitary facilities; and if there are insufficient blankets or shelters, furnishes them from its own stores.

The children are bathed and cleanly dressed and the needs of the future canvassed. If the children have not enough clothes the community sewing circle will get busy immediately. In case any of the family are sick the camp manager or the part-time nurse is called and treatment is carried out.

These Good Neighbors are not trained social workers, but they have what is perhaps more important, an understanding which grows from a likeness of experience. Nothing has happened to the newcomer that has not happened to the committee.

A typical manager's report is as follows:

New arrivals. Low in foodstuffs. Most of the personal belongings were tied up in sacks and were in a filthy condition. The Good Neighbors at once took the family in hand, and by 10 o'clock they were fed, washed, camped, settled and asleep.

These two camps each accommodate about 200 families. They were started as experiments, and the experiments have proven successful. Between the rows of tents the families have started little gardens for the raising of vegetables, and the plots, which must be cared for after a 10 or 12-hours' day of work, produce beets, cabbages, corn, carrots, onions and turnips. The passion to produce is very great. One man, who has not yet been assigned his little garden plot, is hopefully watering a jimson weed simply to have something of his own growing.

The Federal Government, through the Resettlement Administration, plans to extend these camps and to include with them small maintenance farms. These are intended to solve several problems.

They will allow the women and children to stay in one place, permitting the children to go to school and the women to maintain the farms during the work times of the men. They will reduce the degenerating effect of the migrants' life; they will re-instill the sense of government and possession that have been lost by the migrants.

Located near to the areas which demand seasonal labor, these communities will permit these subsistence farmers to work in the harvests, while at the same time they stop the wanderings over the whole state. The success of these Federal camps in making potential criminals into citizens makes the usual practice of expending money on tear gas seem a little silly.

The greater part of the new migrants from the dust bowl will become permanent California citizens. They have shown in these camps an ability to produce and to cooperate. They are passionately determined to make their living on the land. One of them said, "If it's work you got to do, mister, we'll do it. Our folks never did take charity and this family ain't takin' it now."

The plan of the Resettlement Administration to extend these Federal camps is being fought by certain interests in California. The arguments against the camps are as follows:

That they will increase the need for locally paid police. But the two camps already carried on for over a year have proved to need no locally paid police whatever, while the squatters' camps are a constant charge on the sheriff's offices.

The second argument is that the cost of schools to the district will be increased. School allotments are from the state and governed by the number of pupils. And even if it did cost more, the communities need the work of these families and must assume some responsibility for them. The alternative is a generation of illiterates.

The third is that they will lower the land values because of the type of people inhabiting the camps. Those camps already established have in no way affected the value of the land and the people are of good American stock who have proved that they can maintain an American standard of living. The cleanliness and lack of disease in the two experimental camps are proof of this.

The fourth argument, as made by the editor of The Yuba City Herald, a self-admitted sadist who wrote a series of incendiary and subversive editorials concerning the Marysville camp, is that these are the breeding places for strikes.

Under pressure of evidence the Yuba City patriot withdrew his contention that the camp was full of radicals. This will be the argument used by the speculative growers' associations. These associations have said in so many words that they require a peon class to succeed. Any action to better the condition of the migrants will be considered radical to them.

The migrant is always partially unemployed. The nature of his occupation makes his work seasonal. At the same time the nature of his work makes him ineligible for relief. The basis for receiving most of the relief is residence.

But it is impossible for the migrant to accomplish the residence. He must move about the country. He could not stop long enough to establish residence or he would starve to death. He finds, then, on application, that he cannot be put on the relief rolls. And being ignorant, he gives up at that point.

For the same reason he finds that lie cannot receive any of the local benefits reserved for residents of a county. The county hospital was built not for the transient, but for residents of the county.

It will be interesting to trace the history of one family in relation to medicine, work relief and direct relief. The family consisted of five persons, a man of 50, his wife of 45, two boys, 15 and 12, and a girl of six. They came from Oklahoma, where the father operated a little ranch of 50 acres of prairie.

When the ranch dried up and blew away the family put its moveable possessions in an old Dodge truck and came to California. They arrived in time for the orange picking in Southern California and put in a good average season.

The older boy and the father together made $60. At that time the automobile broke out some teeth of the differential and the repairs, together with three second-hand tires, took $22. The family moved into Kern County to chop grapes and camped in the squatters' camp on the edge of Bakersfield.

At this time the father sprained his ankle and the little girl developed measles. Doctors' bills amounted to $10 of the remaining store, and food and transportation took most of the rest.

The 15-year-old boy was now the only earner for the family. The l2-year-old boy picked up a brass gear in a yard and took it to sell.

He was arrested and taken before the juvenile court, but was released to his father's custody. The father walked in to Bakersfield from the squatters' camp on a sprained ankle because the gasoline was gone from the automobile and he didn't dare invest any of the remaining money in more gasoline.

This walk caused complications in the sprain which laid him up again. The little girl had recovered from measles by this time, but her eyes had not been protected and she had lost part of her eyesight.

The father now applied for relief and found that he was ineligible because he had not established the necessary residence. All resources were gone. A little food was given to the family by neighbors in the squatters' camp.

A neighbor who had a goat brought in a cup of milk every day for the little girl.

At this time the 15-year-old boy came home from the fields with a pain in his side. He was feverish and in great pain.

The mother put hot cloths on his stomach while a neighbor took the crippled father to the county hospital to apply for aid. The hospital was full, all its time taken by bona fide local residents. The trouble described as a pain in the stomach by the father was not taken seriously.

The father was given a big dose of salts to take home to the boy. That night the pain grew so great that the boy became unconscious. The father telephoned the hospital and found that there was no one on duty who could attend to his case. The boy died of a burst appendix the next day.

There was no money. The county buried him free. The father sold the Dodge for $30 and bought a $2 wreath for the funeral. With the remaining money he laid in a store of cheap, filling food—beans, oatmeal, and lard. He tried to go back to work in the fields. Some of the neighbors gave him rides to work and charged him a small amount for transportation.

He was on the weak ankle too soon and could not make over 75¢ a day at piecework, chopping. Again he applied for relief and was refused because he was not a resident and because he was employed. The little girl, because of insufficient food and weakness from measles, relapsed into influenza.

The father did not try the county hospital again. He went to a private doctor who refused to come to the squatters' camp unless he was paid in advance. The father took two days' pay and gave it to the doctor who came to the family shelter, took the girl's temperature, gave the mother seven pills, told the mother to keep the child warm and went away. The father lost his job because he was too slow.

He applied again for help and was given one week's supply of groceries.

This can go on indefinitely. The case histories like it can be found in the thousands. It may be argued that there were ways for this man to get aid, but how did he know where to get it? There was no way for him to find out.

California communities have used the old, old methods of dealing with such problems. The first method is to disbelieve it and vigorously to deny that there is a problem. The second is to deny local responsibility since the people are not permanent residents. And the third and silliest of all is to run the trouble over the county borders into another county. The floater method of swapping what the counties consider undesirables from hand to hand is like a game of medicine ball.

A fine example of this insular stupidity concerns the hookworm situation in Stanislaus County. The mud along water courses where there are squatters living is infected. Several businessmen of Modesto and Ceres offered as a solution that the squatters be cleared out. There was no thought of isolating the victims and stopping the hookworm.

The affected people were, according to these men, to be run out of the county to spread the disease in other fields. It is this refusal of the counties to consider anything but the immediate economy and profit of the locality that is the cause of a great deal of the unsolvable quality of the migrants' problem. The counties seem terrified that they may be required to give some aid to the labor they require for their harvests.

According to several Government and state surveys and studies of large numbers of migrants, the maximum a worker can make is $400 a year, while the average is around $300, and the large minimum is $150 a year. This amount must feed, clothe and transport whole families.

Sometimes whole families are able to work in the fields, thus making an additional wage. In other observed cases a whole family, weakened by sickness and malnutrition, has worked in the fields, making less than the wage of one healthy man. It does not take long at the migrants' work to reduce the health of any family. Food is scarce always, and luxuries of any kind are unknown.

Observed diets run something like this when the family is making money:

—Family of eight—Boiled cabbage, baked sweet potatoes, creamed carrots, beans, fried dough, jelly, tea.

—Family of seven—Beans, baking-powder biscuits, jam, coffee.

—Family of six—Canned salmon, cornbread, raw onions.

—Family of five—Biscuits, fried potatoes, dandelion greens, pears.

These are dinners. It is to be noticed that even in these flush times there is no milk, no butter. The major part of the diet is starch. In slack times the diet becomes all starch, this being the cheapest way to fill up. Dinners during lay-offs are as follows:

—Family of seven—Beans, fried dough.

—Family of six—Fried cornmeal.

—Family of five—Oatmeal mush.

—Family of eight (there were six children)—Dandelion greens and boiled potatoes.

It will be seen that even in flush times the possibility of remaining healthy is very slight. The complete absence of milk for the children is responsible for many of the diseases of malnutrition. Even pellagra is far from unknown.

The preparation of food is the most primitive. Cooking equipment usually consists of a hole dug in the ground or a kerosene can with a smoke vent and open front. If the adults have been working 10 hours in the fields or in the packing sheds they do not want to cook. They will buy canned goods as long as they have money, and when they are low in funds they will subsist on half-cooked starches.

The problem of childbirth among the migrants is among the most terrible. There is no prenatal care of the mothers whatever, and no possibility of such care. They must work in the fields until they are physically unable or, if they do not work, the care of the other children and of the camp will not allow the prospective mothers any rest.

In actual birth the presence of a doctor is a rare exception. Sometimes in the squatters camps a neighbor woman will help at the birth. There will be neither sanitary precautions nor hygienic arrangements. The child will be born on newspapers in the dirty bed. In case of a bad presentation requiring surgery or forceps, the mother is practically condemned to death. Once born, the eyes of the baby are not treated, the endless medical attention lavished on middle-class babies is completely absent.

The mother, usually suffering from malnutrition, is not able to produce breast milk. Sometimes the baby is nourished on canned milk until it can eat fried dough and cornmeal. This being the case, the infant mortality is very great.

The following is an example: Wife of family with three children. She is 38; her face is lined and thin and there is a hard glaze on her eyes. The three children who survive were born prior to 1929, when the family rented a farm in Utah. In 1930 this woman bore a child which lived four months and died of "colic."

“Migrant Mother”—Dorothea Lange, 1937 Library of Congress archives

In 1931 her child was born dead because "a han' truck fulla boxes run inta me two days before the baby come." In 1932 there was a miscarriage. "I couldn't carry the baby 'cause I was sick." She is ashamed of this. In 1933 her baby lived a week. "Jus' died. I don't know what of." In 1934 she had no pregnancy. She is also a little ashamed of this. In 1935 her baby lived a long time, nine months.

"Seemed for a long time like he was gonna live. Big strong fella it seemed like." She is pregnant again now. "If we could get milk for um I guess it'd be better." This is an extreme case, but by no means an unusual one.