By Randy Hopkins
The front page of the Tulsa Daily World from Saturday, November 10, 1917, (The Gateway to Oklahoma History, www.gateway.okhistory.org)
On November 10, 1917, a birth announcement for the “Modern Ku Klux Klan” appeared in a front-page headline of the Tulsa Daily World. The Klan’s birth pains were colorfully described by the newspaper’s managing editor, who had just witnessed the “Tulsa Outrage”—the kidnapping and torture of seventeen union organizers. The day would cast a long shadow, darker for the likelihood that the midwives of the birth included some of the then most powerful Oklahomans.
The imprimatur of atrocity began with Governor Robert Lee Williams. Few men’s talents have better matched their opportunities. Born and raised in Alabama, Williams migrated to Oklahoma in 1896. Beginning as a railroad lawyer, his interests soon ran to banks, mining, insurance, cottonseed oil, and land, which he operated as a post-Civil War plantation owner.[1] Brilliant and driven, Williams’s attention to detail was such that the Daily Oklahoman’s managing editor defied anyone to find one instance “wherein a single department head ever slipped anything through and over ‘Our Bob.’”[2] His skills came with a blistering tongue, bad temper, and an aggressive manner. He was intolerant of those who disagreed with him and little short of abusive with his family. These negative descriptions are given by his admiring biographers.[3]
A dominating presence at Oklahoma’s Constitutional Convention, Williams became the state’s first supreme court chief justice. From these positions, he campaigned to curtail black suffrage and promote the interests of his second love, the state’s Democratic Party.[4] When he finally captured the governorship, however, he was pained to be a “minority” winner in both primary and general elections. In the latter, the Socialist Party that Williams despised took 20 percent of the vote.[5] By the end of Williams’s term, the Oklahoma Socialist Party would cease to exist.[6]
Williams might have gone down as a rare parsimonious politician— his first two years were dubbed the “cruel economy”—had not the United States entered World War I in April 1917. The state legislature was out of session and could not meet unless Williams called them. Refus ing this because he wanted to “run the show” himself, the “violently patriotic” Williams became Oklahoma’s war governor and, effectively, its dictator.[7] The mechanism Williams molded for his dictatorship was the State Council of Defense, augmented with county councils. Renowned for the meticulous care he took in making appointments, Williams selected all the members.[8] The Oklahoma State Council of Defense’s official history later bragged that its rulings and “the dictates of the county councils of defense have been the supreme law of the land.” [9]
Williams’s supreme law was not law at all. The councils were extra-legal—they had no legal basis.[10] The state council’s history conceded it was “endowed with no mandatory or judicial powers under any statute of the commonwealth.[11] "A cover letter accompanying oaths of office told county appointees that “we wish to call your attention to the fact that your position has no legal status.”[12] The official history of the Tulsa County Council of Defense concurred:
Oklahoma was one of the States in which Councils of Defense, State, county, and district had neither government nor legal status in fact. The Legislature had adjourned before the declaration of war. With few exceptions, therefore, edicts were issued by these organizations without warrant of law.[13]
Robert L. Williams (6307, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS).
Extra-legality meant that criminal acts committed along the way, and there were many, were just that—crimes.[14] Many of the legal activities, also numerous, were underwritten by intimidation and violence, especially in the field of fundraising.[15]
Williams and his councils instead relied on public opinion to determine how far they could go.[16] Many Oklahomans, however, were deaf to the war trumpets. Recruiting was lagging everywhere; “lukewarm ism” was rampant.[17] Inflaming public opinion thus became the first task. Williams, therefore, targeted leading newspaper editors, along with bankers and attorneys, for his county councils.[18] The daily newspapers, the mass media of the day, would be part of Williams’s team and would report according to the team’s agenda.[19]
The county councils themselves were encouraged to “feel free to take up whatever emergencies may arise in the county.”[20] In practice, this meant that the councils focused attention on their local enemies.[21] Criminal methods soon followed. Williams’s biographers confess that at times he “almost condoned such acts of violence.”[22] In truth, he went much further. In response to a near lynching in Collinsville, one that implicated his Rogers County Council, Williams told the Daily Oklahoman:
"We should not be too quick to condemn the efforts of loyalists, who in some instances have had to resort to strong-arm methods. It is unfortunate that some men have had to be made to feel the will of the community. Where such action is necessary it should be undertaken by the county council of defense...the county councils should be allowed to act as courts of patriotism." [23] Only after the war ended did the state council order the county councils to confine themselves to “action which would be sustained by law.”[24]
The Tulsa County Council of Defense would be the state’s most aggressive and powerful county council, and Williams devoted close attention to it.[25] Tulsa’s representative on the Oklahoma State Council was S. R. “Buck” Lewis. Born and raised in Texas, Lewis migrated in1887. A prominent lawyer and self-described capitalist, Lewis was a lifelong Democratic Party operative, helping found the party in the Indian Territory. At the start of his term, Williams named Lewis to his staff as “lieutenant colonel.”[26] Lewis was also close to influential Tulsan and fellow Democratic Party stalwart W. Tate Brady.27 Brady too was a political ally of the governor.[28]
The original Tulsa Council of Defense members announced July 11, 1917, were:
1. J. Burr Gibbons. Born in Indiana, raised there and in Missouri, and migrating in 1907, Gibbons was the father of advertising in Tulsa, a profession that grew with the war.[29] Chair of the Tulsa Council, Gibbons would be relentlessly aggressive and castigate other county councils for devoting too little attention to “disloyalty, industrial disturbances, and sedition.” The persecution of such activities, he promised the councils, would enlist public support and “costs you nothing.”[30]
2. Robert McFarlin. An oilman and banker, McFarlin was born and raised in Texas, migrating in 1885. In 1916 he and his partners sold their oil company to a Standard Oil subsidiary for $39 million.[31] In 1917 he was president of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and vice-chair of the Committee of 100, a law and order league composed of prominent men.[32] McFarlin was a money man for the Tulsa Council’s activities, “advancing” the council $20,000, its Home Guard $9,000 to $17,000, and more funds for other “emergency measures.”[33] The Tulsa Council was far and away the best-funded of all the councils, even the states.[34]
3. Glenn Condon. Born in Iowa in 1891, Condon arrived in Oklahoma City at a young age. Extraordinarily well-liked, the one-time newsboy became the youngest member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 1916 and was named managing editor of the Tulsa Daily World in March 1917.[35] While he was a Republican, Williams appears to have been fond of him.[36] By war’s end, however, both his political and newspaper careers in Oklahoma would be at an end.
Governor Robert L. Williams, standing in the first row without a uniform, and his staff
including S. R. “Buck” Lewis, standing to Governor Williams’ left as indicated by the
arrow,1915 (6469, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS)
4. H. C. “Harry” Tyrrell. Born and raised in Iowa, Tyrrell was an oilman and president of the Tulsa Young Men’s Christian Association, then a politically influential organization. He became vice-chair of the Tulsa Council. He had been head of a law and order league that folded into McFarlin’s Committee of 100. Since late 1916 Tyrrell dominated Tulsa law enforcement through a younger associate named H. H. Townsend. Under Tyrrell’s influence, Townsend not only became assistant chief of police, to whom the real chief was subservient, but he also became the Tulsa County sheriff’s “right-hand deputy.”[37] In late March 1917, Townsend became the security chief of Carter Oil Company, the largest Standard Oil subsidiary in Oklahoma.[38]
5. Lilah Lindsey. Born and raised in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Indian Territory, Lindsey was head of the Tulsa Women’s Christian Temperance Union and president of the state’s Homemakers Society. She became the council’s secretary-treasurer and was assigned to handle “women’s issues.”[39] At its first meeting on August 4, 1917, the Tulsa Council determined to select a “secret committeeman” in every populated center in the county. They were identified as “men of prominence and unquestioned loyalty,” but their duties were not explained. The identity of Tulsa’s secret committeeman would never be revealed. Condon was named director of publicity.[40] Immediately, the Tulsa Daily World began publishing a series of increasingly bloody-minded editorials against the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W. or Wobblies), a radical, but sometimes successful, union that was the bane of the owners of Oklahoma’s oil companies.[41] These recurrent incitements were distributed to the World’'s daily circulation of twenty thousand readers.[42]
Pictured left to right: Charles E. Parker, chief pilot; Andrew Payne; Glenn Condon; and M. R. Harrison of the Claremore Chamber of Commerce at Curtiss Field, Long Island, New York. (20669, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS)
Things appeared to be coming to a head in late September when Williams appointed a captain of the Tulsa Home Guard (L. W. Rook) at Condon’s “urgent personal request.”[44] Instead, the council’s preparations remained coiled for the next month, likely in deference to a then ongoing and massive Second Liberty Loan campaign.[45] The campaign ended successfully on Saturday, October 27. Following a last Sunday of normality, the coil suddenly sprang.
At 4 a.m. on Monday, October 29th, an explosion shattered the house of Mr. and Mrs. J. Edgar Pew at 1443 South Cheyenne Avenue.[46] Pew was vice president and general manager of Carter Oil Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Carter was the largest operator in the nearby Mid-Continent Oil Field, with a million acres of oil leases and twenty million barrels of oil in storage.[47] Pew, a production expert, was Standard Oil’s highest-ranking official in Tulsa.[48] Scarcely had the sun risen over the blast site than Monday’s Tulsa Daily World hit the streets. It had gone to press several hours before the bombing.[49] Readers were told of a 2 p.m. meeting where the Tulsa Council would authorize a 150-man Home Guard to replace the state’s National Guard that had been federalized and shipped to war. Volunteers were invited to a meeting that night at the city-owned Convention Hall (later called Brady Theater, now the Tulsa Theater). The Tulsa Council’s official history credits the Pew explosion for giving “birth” to the Home Guard, which it called its “right arm of power.”[50]
Recruitment was aided by a front-page headline in the afternoon Tulsa Democrat warning that “Dynamiting of Pew Home May Only Be Start.” This was based on representations by Tulsa Police Chief E. L. “Ed” Lucas and Carter Oil’s security head H. H. Townsend that a “reign of terror” was about to descend. Pew, they said, had been selected because he was a “big pillar” of the oil industry. The allegedly German-controlled I.W.W. was reported to be behind it all.[51] The Pew bombing dominated October 30’s World, with photos of the fractured house captioned “First Destructive Stroke in I.W.W. Plan of Destruction in Tulsa.” The paper told its audience a terror campaign involving “[w]holesale destruction of property without regard to human life” was unfolding. It warned of a “deliberately planned conspiracy... to murder the heads of many big oil producers of Tulsa and to slay and destroy with all the fiendishness of the most deprived minds.” November 1st was even announced as the terror campaign’s intended kick-off date, had not the Pew bombing occurred “prematurely.” The World cited private detectives employed by the large oil companies, said to be “unimpeachable sources” who had “spied on I.W.W. meetings and dogged the steps of the workers for months.” The paper quoted, or rather invented a quotation, from an October I.W.W. newspaper that “plainly interpreted means that a plan to murder some of the most prominent oil men in Oklahoma have [sic] been hatched.” In response, unionists who were said to be willing to die for the cause had “flocked to the city in great numbers in the last two weeks.” The World claimed it too had been “marked for destruction,” citing the receipt of threatening ing letters for four weeks (all emphases added).[52]
E. L. Lucas (20288.92.81.2.2, Chickasaw Council House Museum Collection, OHS)
The centerpiece of the World’s front page was a notice—“To Loyal Tulsans”—titled “250 Men Wanted at Once to Compete [sic] Tulsa Home Guards.” It opened with a mystery—that “for reasons that can not publicly be stated [sic] it is essential that the Tulsa Home Guard be raised to its full strength immediately” (emphasis added). A new organizational meeting was scheduled that night at Tulsa’s Chamber of Commerce.[55]
The culprit(s) at the Pew house remains a mystery. If the I.W.W. did it, they chose a near-perfect moment for their enemies. The Pew home was being remodeled the prior week and thus was accessible to any number of outsiders. Pew said he was aware of no personal enemies, but the same could not be said for Standard Oil, which was casually hated by other oilmen.[56] Near contemporaneous rumors said it was an inside job committed for the purpose of inflaming the public mind or, intriguingly, that “the police operatives of the Carter Oil Co. committed the crime for the express purpose of continuing their employment under enlarged power.”[57] Townsend remained employed at Carter into 1919, longer than Pew.[58] Only one thing seems certain: if the Tulsa authorities believed that the I.W.W. men who later came into their control were responsible, they would have never turned them loose. Regardless of “who done it,” what unfolded was like one of the local drama productions covered by the World’s lavish theater section.[59] Fortunately, because the federal Bureau of Investigation, Justice Department and other records have been preserved, it is possible to contrast what was going on off-stage while a public performance was taking place.
The I.W.W. had indeed been heavily infiltrated, such that it was increasingly difficult to tell where the union left off and the spies began.[60] According to Deputy US Marshal John Moran, three detective agencies had men inside the Tulsa branch. One was a Pinkerton man hired by Carter Oil, one from the agency of Foster Burns, and a third from the agency of John Gustafson, who would be Tulsa’s police chief during the 1921 Race Massacre. The three spies were reporting to Moran, although without knowledge that the others were passing their tales to him.[61]
Far from proving criminality, the infiltration demonstrated the opposite. In a town awash with detectives, spies, and public relations men, the Pinkerton/Carter Oilman “Jack McCurry” was all three, having become publicity agent for the Tulsa I.W.W.chapter. If there was a spy well placed to confirm a vast plot, McCurry was it. Described as “unusually intelligent and straightforward” and “extremely well posted to report local plans and conditions” by Bureau of Investigation agent T. F. Weiss, McCurry reported that the Tulsa union men were “doing nothing or planning nothing directed against the Government.” There was “no talk of violence.” They were trying to get men employed in the oil fields in order to organize, efforts effectively blunted by oil company informers and the prompt firing of unionists. Moran, draw ing from the reports of all three spies, confirmed that he had learned of no particular plan to “interfere in any way with industries essential to the war effort.” Federal agent Weiss wistfully concluded that “these appear to be the real facts of the situation.”[62]
Meanwhile, on stage, the October 30 Home Guard organization meeting went off swimmingly, although it featured two sizable misrepresentations. Captain Rook, Williams’s appointee, told the assembled volunteers that home guards were authorized by act of Congress and that they were of the same status as the National Guard in time of peace. Both of these statements were false.[63] More truthful assertions included Condon’s promise that McFarlin would make sure the Home Guard had proper backing. The city-owned Convention Hall was promised as an armory.[64] Some of the most prominent men in Tulsa were in attendance and Home Guard enlistees included Burr Gibbons, Tate Brady, and Eugene Lorton, owner of the Tulsa Daily World. Buck Lewis later served as the council’s administrator of the Home Guard, managing the group as a lieutenant colonel on Governor Williams’s staff.[65] The Tulsa Daily World’s headquarters would itself function as a recruiting office.[66]
October 31st brought more published incitements to kill. The World’s “Oklahoma Notes” column, which sometimes appeared under Condon’s name, claimed that the only relief from the I.W.W. is “a wholesale application of concentration camps. Or, what is hemp worth now, the long foot?” An editorial favorably quoted one citizen’s proposal to treat Wobblies like horse thieves and lynch them. The editorial promised that the “price of folly” for the German-begotten I.W.W. will be “prison or death.”[67]
It appears the Tulsa Council finalized plans at its November 3rd meeting. Before this, both Moran and federal Justice Department agent John Whalen requested that the council leave the I.W.W. alone pending the federal investigation. Moran got unhonored assurances.[68] For all its avowed loyalty, the Tulsa Council instead sabotaged the investigation. As with Williams, self-interest was the shore upon which the tide of loyalty to the government ebbed.[69]
At approximately 9 p.m. on Monday, November 5th, Tulsa police raided the I.W.W. headquarters located in the New Fox Hotel at Brady and Main Streets. There was no warrant, no resistance, and no discovery of incriminating evidence.[70] Eleven mostly card-playing men were arrested as vagrants. Tulsa Mayor John Simmons was waiting at the jail when the prisoners made their midnight arrival. Federal agent Weiss reinvestigated and found that “there seems to be no evidence on which to convict any of the men on.”[71] The World itself made a hash of vagrancy, noting that at least two men had jobs. Later, the paper exulted that one of them lost his Pressmen’s union card, thereby risking becoming an actual vagrant.[72]
Eugene Lorton (20491.18, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS)
Outside the court, however, November 6th was far from quiet. From Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma State Council warned “traitors” that there are only two types of people—Americans or enemies—and that “a blank wall and firing squad may soon be the remedy for pro-Germanism in Oklahoma.” The state council also urged “enemies among us” only be kept behind bars “until that punishment all traitors deserve can be meted out to them.” The Tulsa Daily World adorned the declaration with the headline, “Day of Wrath Coming.”[74] That afternoon, Williams’s and Lewis’s associate Tate Brady confronted E. L. Fox, owner of the building housing the I.W.W. chapter. For an apparently spontaneous confrontation, the World’s report was strikingly first-person:
"Brady . . . has been trying for some time to have the I. W. W. ejected from the Fox building on Brady Street. He met Fox at Brady and Main [Tuesday]...hot words ensued. Brady struck Fox with his fist. The latter rolled into the gutter. A large crowd collected. Brady walked on down the street. Afterward, he declared that Fox belittled the Home Guard and lauded the I. W. W."[75]
Wednesday, November 7th, brought a new actor to the stage, Tulsa City Attorney John Meserve, who secured a second trial continuance. Meserve had originally been appointed to office at the urging of McFar lin’s Committee of 100.[76] Behind the scenes, he had sent an inflammatory warning to US Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory about I.W.W. terrorism, though his claims were deemed without merit after the Justice Department investigated.[77] Meserve would join the Tulsa Council
by December 1917, serving as its “prosecuting attorney.”[78] Meanwhile, the World broadcast more murder talk. Its “Down the Agitators” editorial was the first of a series advising oil workers to trust their bosses. Said the World’s editorialist:
"There has not been in the twenty years of oil history in Oklahoma and Kansas a single disagreement between employee [sic] and the employers which have not been settled or which could not be settled by an individual conference in three minutes. The one remedy for the vicious agitator is to ride him on a rail. If he seriously objects to that he might be used for the decoration of a telephone pole that is slightly out of place in the original design."[79]
On the same day, Marshal Moran gave federal agent Weiss eye-opening news, namely:
The businessmen had a program agreed upon by them and the Police Dept. by which the men are to be given a hearing tomorrow evening, remanded to jail, and later some businessmen are to escort the men to the City limits and make them leave, with a warning not to return.[80]Moran tried to get them not to do it, but he would again be ignored.[81]
The trial finally opened on Thursday, November 8th, but to disappointing reviews. With Glenn Condon in constant attendance, the World complained of Richardson’s long-winded arguments on the niceties of vagrancy and confessed that “nothing of a sensational nature developed.”[82] The prosecutors ignored the actual charges, instead of seeking to learn the defendants’ attitudes toward the government and whether they supported the Liberty Loan drives. The prosecution rested its case on the fact that they were Wobblies.[83] The World claimed that all the witnesses spoke in “broken English,” joining an ongoing chorus that painted the unionists as aliens and outsiders. Moran, in contrast, reported that most of the defendants were “local men.”[84] Friday, November 9th, was far more sensational, starting with the arrival of the Bolshevik Revolution in Tulsa via the World’s bold, black headline. The paper’s now-infamous “Get Out the Hemp” editorial incited hysteria and murder in the starkest terms yet:
"Any man who attempts to stop the [oil] supply for one-hundredth part of a second is a traitor and ought to be shot!... If the I.W.W. or its twin brother, the Oil Workers union, gets busy in your neighborhood, kindly take occasion to decrease the supply of hemp. Knowledge of how to tie a knot that will stick might come in handy in a few days...kill’em just as you would kill any other kind of snake. Don’t scotch 'em; kill’em. And kill’em dead. It is no time to waste money on trials and continuances and things like that."[85]
Tulsa Daily World, November 7, 1917 (The Gateway to Oklahoma History, www.gateway. okhistory.org)
The trial brought matching fireworks. Apparently reacting to Richardson’s cautious, lawyerly approach, a decidedly different defense counsel appeared—Frank Ryan. Ryan was a former secretary of the Tulsa branch of the Oil Workers Industrial Union, an IWW affiliate,
who recently married a young stenographer living at the Fox Hotel. Ryan had not been present at Monday’s raid and had already given supporting testimony on Thursday. He could have simply stayed away and avoided what befell him.[86]
Instead, he went for the jugular, casting prosecutor Meserve on the witness stand, there to accuse him of telling a Tulsa lawyer named Ed Crossland that the case was fixed. Meserve denied this, but conceded that Crossland had in a “jocular vein” told him, “John, you ought to be able to have it all fixed up,” to which Meserve replied “Sure.” While not mentioned in the paper, Crossland was a recent Tulsa County Attorney and may have had insights concerning Tulsa’s justice system. Ryan next grilled another prosecutor, former police judge E. O. Cavitt. Even the World seemed to comment on Cavitt’s evasiveness. Ryan demanded admission that posters had already been printed warning I.W.W. cardholders to leave town. Cavitt denied this. Such posters appeared around midnight and one was pinned to Richardson’s office.[87]
Ryan’s efforts notwithstanding, convictions ensued. Evidence is divided on whether the resultant $100 fines were for vagrancy or failure to own a Liberty Bond, which violated no law. Perhaps Evans himself was not sure, only that they had to be guilty.[88] For good measure, Evans ordered the arrest of other union members/witnesses in the audience, including Ryan. Condon concluded his write-up by observing that the “first tears of the trial were shed when [Ryan’s] young wife clung to his neck weeping as he was led into the jail.”[89]
He did not stay there long. Shortly before midnight, the men were loaded into three touring cars driven by three policemen and guarded by six others.[90] The reason given by the authorities for removing the men is also disputed. The World claimed that the men were to be taken to the I.W.W. headquarters and released on promises to leave town. This was also the version given by the Tulsa Council’s official history, which has Evans giving the deportation order.[91] Chief Lucas, however, explained that the fear of a gathering mob led to a scheme to take the men to the county jail, which was allegedly more secure. That the men were taken in the opposite direction from the county jail was explained as a subterfuge.[92] Curiously, the eyewitness report of the secretary of the Tulsa I.W.W. branch said that no reason at all was given.[93] The authorities had to give the public some reason for their actions, though they did not get their stories straight.
The caravan proceeded from the alley behind the police station, allegedly to avoid observation if they went up Main Street. This may have minimized witnesses, but it did the I.W.W. men no good. Just past the Frisco railroad tracks, a band of heavily armed men wearing black capes, cowls, and masks rose from behind a pile of bricks and commandeered the procession.[94] Two victims testified that the procession stopped before the gang emerged.[95] The policemen were ordered to turn over their weapons and the guards on the running boards were told to “beat it.”
After those six officers fled, there is no evidence that they did anything to respond to the situation. Meanwhile, the I.W.W. men were bound with rope, after which they and the three police drivers were kidnapped, with a gun at the head of every Wobbly. The caravan drove north to the Convention Hall, the Tulsa Home Guard’s city-owned armory, where other black-costumed men awaited.[96] The entourage proceeded west on Easton Street to a “lonely ravine” near Irving Place. Condon and his wife drove out by auto as unmasked “spectators. " [97]
The uniformed gang, who announced themselves as the “Knights of Liberty,” had chosen a spot where their autos could be lined up to illuminate the ceremony. A line of Knights was already there, stand ing at “present arms.” Other Knights manned the approaches, turning back cars that tried to reach the area with threats to shoot. The Wobblies were ordered to strip from the waist up. Their shoes went as well. When the men wore union suits, a knife-flashing Knight cut away the upper portion, along with all the men’s bonds. One by one they were tied to an Oak and whipped “until blood ran.”[98] The Knights’ ringleader then stepped forward “with a white-wash brush and pot of boiling tar,” coating them from head to tail, while intoning “in the name of the outraged women and children of Belgium.” The invocation of alleged German atrocities in Belgium itself reflected a fixation of Governor Williams and the state council, who viewed such allegations of sadism as “the greatest stroke to arouse patriotism.”[99] Humiliating feathers came next. While their worldly possessions were covered in gasoline and burned, the Wobblies were lined up facing west with the Knights gathered behind them. The ringleader ordered them to “get,” never to return. The real torture came next.
Since the Tulsa Outrage, as the event was soon dubbed, concluded after midnight, Condon must have rushed back to the World. His report, published Saturday morning, November 10th, under the foreshadowing headline “Modern Ku Klux Klan Comes Into Being,” was exultant. He penned, “The frightened and half-naked men ran with their bare feet thru [sic] the brush with the speed of kangaroos,” while “hundreds of rifle and revolver shots were fired into the air [as] they sped into the inky darkness of the night.” Sunday’s World revealed that the union men had “torn thru [sic] barbed-wire fences and all sorts of obstacles in their mad rush,” that the Knights’ gunshots caused them “to break all track records,” and that “pieces of clothing and flesh, and a profusion of feathers, were found entangled” in the wire. Given what the World described as the Knights’ “machine-like preparations,” it is likely that the obstacle course was chosen with the barbed wire in mind.[100]
The coverage of the Saturday afternoon Tulsa Democrat, usually more level-headed than the World, was of a similar vein.[101] The union men suffered “the penalty for lack of patriotism” and “scurried like frightened rabbits from cover to cover, the white skin of their naked bodies gleaming in flash from the fire that had been built to light the proceedings.” They were now “half-naked, penniless, without food, their breast and backs smeared with hardened tar and feathers—outcasts from society.” Since Condon was the only civilian journalist present, the Democrat’s article may have been provided by one of the Knights. The paper may have valued an eyewitness view, lest its competitor scores a scoop, especially if it was offered by a former Tulsa Democrat reporter and editor such as J. Burr Gibbons.[102]
Meanwhile, about the time Saturday’s Tulsa Daily World was rolling off the press, the Wobblies continued their barefoot flight through the cold, dark, Oklahoma countryside. Incredibly, the Knights appear to have prepared the path of the “outcasts” with more than barbed wire, as some of the farmers they approached turned the “bleeding, shivering, starving men” away with waving weapons while announcing, “In the name of the outraged women and children of Belgium, we refuse food or comfort.”[103] Frank Ryan and another victim finally located a friendly farmhouse where the tortured men used five gallons of coal oil or kerosene to clean their wounds.[104]
Who were the Knights of Liberty? Nine police officers were held at gunpoint, their weapons taken, and three were kidnapped. Yet, the World boasted that government agents “were making no apparent effort to discover the identity of the fifty black-robed and hooded men.”[105] They never tried.[106] Mere yokels could not have accomplished or caused such a cover-up.
Identification evidence that does exist includes a sworn statement from one of the victims, I.W.W. secretary E. M. Boyd.[107] The I.W.W. also employed L. A. Brown, a Kansas City detective and former investigator for the US Industrial Relations Commission and Federal Trade Commission.[108] Brown interviewed an uncertain number of victims and many Tulsans, including Moran.[109] To his credit, he appears relatively conservative in his use of evidence.[110] The resulting accusations are not conclusive, but it is possible to assess their plausibility.
The strongest evidence centers on Tulsa’s Police Chief Ed Lucas. According to Brown, Lucas was one of two men emphatically fingered as Knights.[111] Boyd added eyewitness testimony that gowns and masks were brought for Lucas and other detectives and that he personally witnessed Lucas and detective George Blaine, a later three-time Tulsa police chief, putting on “the rigs.”[112] Boyd avowed that Lucas was “easily recognizable by six of us at least” and regulated the number of lashes each victim received.[113] The men likely had an opportunity to observe Lucas during the trial and his job as regulator suggests he may have spoken or acted.
Brown also named H. H. Townsend, Lucas’s dominating assistant chief, and Tulsa policeman Carl Lewis, Buck Lewis’s brother.[114] For the role of the Knights leveling guns near the railroad tracks, those two could have been sent from central casting. From 1916 to early 1917, Townsend, Lewis, and three other officers constituted the Tulsa police’s “wrecking squad” for their methods of enforcing prohibition, and its “purity squad” when dealing with sex and vice. In January 1917, Townsend, Lewis, and the others had risen from behind another pile of bricks to ambush and kill a twenty-year-old taxi driver. Murder charges ensued, though all but Townsend, hired by Carter Oil at a substantial raise, remained with the department pending trial.[115] City Attorney John Meserve was alleged by Brown to be the Knight who applied “the rope that had been soaked in brine to the backs of the victims.”[116] If so, one of his victims included the man who had just flung him onto the witness stand and accused him of conspiring against justice. It would help explain why Frank Ryan was singled out for special treatment. A witness report says he was “beaten unmercifully.”[117] As Condon described it:
"[Ryan] was the first to feel the sting of the whip and the burn of the tar, according to the officers who were present. They must have wanted to give him an especially strong dose for he was whipped again after the tar had been applied, thus forcing the hot liquid into the flesh."[118]
Meserve’s subsequent activities reveal a lawyer throwing off the rule of law, conducting hundreds of star chamber prosecutions, in which he appears to have functioned as prosecutor and judge. Eighty-four of these involved “disloyalty” and resulted in “many” persons imprisoned in an “insane asylum.”[119] The “manhunts” were frequent and under cover of the strictest secrecy.[120]
US Marshal Moran told Brown that “you would be surprised at the prominent men in town who were in this mob” and he was well-positioned to know them.[121] The second of the enthusiastically identified culprits, Tate Brady certainly qualified as prominent.[122] Brady was the accused “ringleader”—the Knight who applied the boiling tar while intoning “in the name of the women and children of Belgium.” This Knight did a lot of talking that night and Brady had recently demonstrated his loud, violent ways right in front of the I.W.W. headquarters.[123]
If Brady or Carl Lewis were involved, it increases the odds that Brown correctly named Buck Lewis as a Knight.[124] If Williams’ lieutenant colonel was present it elevates the likelihood that other Tulsa councilors, such as Gibbons and Tyrrell, were there, though they are unnamed in the available reports. The presence of any of the inter-linked network of police, city officials, Tulsa councilors, and elite businessmen discussed here at least implicates the others.[125] Regarding the name “Knights of Liberty,” Nigel Sellars has suggested that it was borrowed from an affiliate of the Copper heads, northern Democratic Party groups opposed to the Civil War.[126] If so, it points to the involvement of southern Civil War sympathizers. Few could better fulfill that description than Tate Brady and Buck Lewis unless it was Governor Williams himself. Brady may have designed a mansion after Robert E. Lee’s Arlington, but Williams went further. At the age of ten, the lad born “Robert Williams” declared that he would henceforth be known as “Robert Lee” in honor of his greatest hero, and so he was. Williams was said to have “loved daring raids and hazardous exploits” of the Confederacy.[127]
No one accused Eugene Lorton of being there, but his paper always took great pride in the Knights.[128] This continued long after Condon resigned from the paper.[129] Even when Lorton turned his back on the atrocious tactics his paper had promoted, the Daily World defended the Knights:
"There is quite a difference between the drunken mob recruited from saloons that killed the Illinois offender and the quiet and orderly method of Oklahoma’s “Knights of Liberty.” Tho [sic] both were without legal authority, the Oklahoma way was at least humane and spilled no blood. And it was accomplished coolly and deliberately by men of brains and discretion [emphasis added]."[130]
Lorton, however, was not all that discreet on the subject. On December 14, 1917, his paper bragged that the tar and feather party had been “administered” by the Home Guard, of which Lorton was a member along with Tate Brady and Burr Gibbons.[131]
Robert McFarlin was also of unqualified prominence, though the surviving accusations do not name him. But if the Tulsa Council’s Home Guard was involved, as Lorton’s paper boasted, then McFarlin’s money helped pay for the Tulsa Outrage, or at least its weaponry.[132]
McFarlin remained a vigorous councilor to the end and nothing in his subsequent behavior suggests the slightest objection to what had happened.[133] One defense to his presence at the lonely ravine, however, is that he was otherwise occupied that day. For the World’s “modern Ku Klux Klan” shared Saturday with another birthday—the grand opening of McFarlin’s Exchange National Bank. The building at Third Street and Boston Avenue was known to later generations as part of the National Bank of Tulsa and, later still, as the Bank of Oklahoma.[134] At the moment, it was the “pride of Tulsa,” the finest building in the Southwest and the state’s tallest building. Within a month, the Exchange Bank would be Oklahoma’s largest bank. A glittering palace, the air-conditioned building’s centerpiece was a seventeen-ton vault door, at least one ton for each tortured Wobbly, so balanced that a child could operate it.[135]
It was, however, more than just a bank building. Carter Oil occupied the top three floors, as well as the sixth. J. Edgar Pew’s office was in the penthouse. Prairie Oil, the Standard subsidiary that bought McFarlin’s oil company, had the eighth floor, and Standard Oil of Indiana the fourth.[136] There was no more fitting symbol of Upton Sinclair’s claim that “in Oklahoma, everything is Standard Oil” than the Exchange Bank’s monument to wealth and power.[137]
Regardless of who wore the cowls and masks, the Knights’ status as a tentacle arm of Williams’s councils was confirmed by their second and final performance on October 11, 1918. The latest of the endless Liberty Loan drives was staggering to the finish line, well short of hugely inflated targets.[138] Loath to see Oklahoma fail, a three-act play was performed. First, the Oklahoma State Council of Defense telegraphed an alert attributing the bond shortfall to “wild rumors of allied success,” which bore the mark of “insidious German propaganda” designed to injure the sale of Liberty Bonds. The Tulsa Council then issued a “Note of Warning” reminding citizens that “no one is above suspicion” and that anyone not buying the bond limit is “making himself a traitor.”[139] Act three occurred at 7:30 p.m., when the Knights, wearing their original uniforms, paraded in the streets of Tulsa as a “Liberty Loan slackerism warning.” The World’s prose, in bold black print, was equal to the occasion:
"Dressed in black and thoroughly masked, the “Knights of Liberty,” as they termed themselves, gave an ominous warning to men whose patriotism is subject to criticism. Efforts to trace the party to its origin failed. They came out of the darkness, loaded into automobiles when through, and melted back into the night as they came. Warnings during the past day or two that slackerism in Tulsa would not be tolerated may have a hidden meaning."[140]
Both official histories brag that the Liberty Loan campaign promptly went over the top.[141]
While the Tulsa Council otherwise abandoned masked forays, its methods led inexorably to killing when one of its private investigators, S. L. Miller, shot and killed a Tulsa waiter for allegedly disloyal statements. A hearing was held before Justice of the Peace Lee Daniels. While Daniels might have rested his decision on Miller’s allegation that the waiter appeared to reach for a weapon, he instead announced what the World called “a new unwritten law that makes it justifiable for a man to slay one who speaks against the country.”[142] Even though the waiter could not give his version, Daniels ruled that “his crime is the most damnably reprehensible that a man could commit...I can’t help but say that he deserved his fate.” Daniels received an ovation from the packed audience, including members of the Tulsa Council.[143]
Three weeks later, Miller organizing a Knights-style beating of an alleged adulterer. This accomplished what a killing had not—the council promptly accepted Miller’s resignation. It also issued a condemnation of mob spirit and “secret enforcement of the law,” though it did not mention that Miller was its operative and it did not apply the condemnation to its own operations.[144] Lorton’s paper added a front-page editorial denouncing “hasty Ku Klux Klan parties,” though most of its words were expended explaining why the Knights were “necessary” and their assault on the I.W.W. was of “wholesome effect.”[145]
The qualified disclaimers were already too late. Other groups with different targets were eyeing the Knights’ “system” and would continue to do so.[146] That some of Tulsa’s “big-brained busy men” and the city authorities appeared to promote and legitimize atrocity made the virus that much more potent.[147] In the Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Scott Ellsworth wrote that the Tulsa Outrage was “an important step along the road to the race riot...an important precedent for more such activities in the future.”[148] So, too, the Knights of Liberty were a pre-echo of the later white-clad Oklahoma KKK, a different franchise from the Knights perhaps, but with overlapping membership and a similar propensity for showy and sadistic violence.[149] Even the name “Ku Klux Klan” had been blessed in newspaper headlines.
What would unfold had, ironically, been predicted by Lorton’s newspaper just two days after the Tulsa Outrage—that “class appeals and advocacy of violence beget hatred and violence undreamed of.”[150] For Tulsa, the violence undreamed of was just beginning.
Randy Hopkins is a retired trial lawyer residing in Portland, Oregon. Born and raised in Oklahoma, he is a graduate of Oklahoma State University and the University of Texas School of Law.
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Endnotes:
1. E. E. Dale and James D. Morrison, Pioneer Judge: The Life of Robert Lee Williams (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1958), 60–67, 83–101, 383. The authors, who were professional historians, knew Williams for four decades and were allowed unprecedented access to his records. While their work reflects many of the same biases as their subject—for example, the Constitutional Convention “courageously resisted” proponents of women’s suffrage (p. 171)—it is invaluable for the facts of Williams’s life and deep insight into his personality. See also Garin Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 91–107.
2. Walter M. Harrison, “‘Never say die’—Judge Bob,” Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK), January 19, 1919.
3. Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 2, 89–90, 227–28, 256–57, 382–83, 395–97.
4. Ibid., 149, 162–71, 192–96, 250–53. For Williams’s rise in the Democratic Party, see ibid., 102–19. The Democratic Party’s election chicanery helped cement its control and Williams was likely the brains behind these tactics. Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 112–16, 131–41, 177–78; James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895– 1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 317–23, 353–54; Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red, 85–86, 89n53; James Scales and Danney Goble, Oklahoma Politics: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 83–87; “How State’s Crooked Election Machinery Was Used to Defeat a Fair and Honest Law,” Tulsa (OK) Daily World, October 7, 1917, 33–34.
5. Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 208, 224–27, Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 289– 93, 374–75.
6. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 346–47, 372–81; Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red, 113–25; Howard L. Meredith, “A History of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1969), 196–97.
7. For “run show himself” and “violently patriotic,” see Martin H. Lutter, “Oklahoma and the World War, 1914–1917: A Study in Public Opinion” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1961), 535–36 (quoting an interview with and a personal letter of E. E. Dale). For refusal to call a special session, see Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 257, 266, 275. For the label “war governor,” see William T. Lampe, ed., Sooners in the War (Oklahoma City: State Council of National Defense, 1919),
8. For Williams’s meticulous care in making appointments, see Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 230–36, 257, 263. The State Council’s chair was his business partner, J. M. Aydelotte. Williams’s oldest and closest friend, William Utterback, was a member. Williams also relied on his close relationship with the University of Oklahoma, appointing its president, Stratton Brooks, as council secretary. A university journalism professor and council publicity man, Chester Westfall, became the executive secretary to both the governor and the state council. Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 270–71; Lampe, Sooners in the War, 7–15; “Hist! Williams May Be Itching to Wear Senator Gore’s Toga,” Tulsa Daily World, September 11, 1917, 1; “Westfall New Secretary,” Tulsa Daily World, September 22, 1917, 3.
9. Lampe, Sooners in the War, 14.
10. The federal Council of National Defense (CND) “requested” that the states create councils, but it had no legal authority to demand it or to confer power on them. Lampe, Sooners in the War, 4 (lists CND statutory powers); Second Annual Report of the Council of National Defense (Washington, DC: Council of National Defense, 1918), 10 (state and local Councils were “voluntary”); Report on Organization and Activities of State Councils of Defense (Washington, DC: Council of National Defense, 1917), 1–7. The legality of state councils depended on state authorization, of which there was none in Oklahoma. James A. Robinson, Anti-Sedition Legislation and Loyalty Investigations in Oklahoma (Norman: Bureau of Government Research, University of Oklahoma, 1956), 1. The CND urged states to secure statutory standing for their councils, albeit with “moderate power and moderate methods.” William J. Breen, Uncle Sam at Home (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 18. The CND provided a model statute. Second Annual Report of the CND, 12.
11. Lampe, Sooners in the War, 14 (the council “often neglected to look up the legal status of questions and it has always ignored precedent.”); also, Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 270–71. On November 2, 1918, just days before World War I ended, the state council finally decided to appoint a committee to investigate and present the “right kind of bill” to the Oklahoma Legislature. Minutes of State Council, November 2, 1918, in Lampe, Sooners in the War, minutes 47. Page numbering begins again in Lampe, Soon ers in the War, in the section with the Minutes of the State Council of Defense. This will be indicated with the word “minutes” before the page numbers.
12. Undated letter and oath, 20696, folder 1, box 1, M2001.037, Oklahoma State Council of Defense Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society Research Center, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, OK (hereafter cited as State Council Collection, OHS).
13. William T. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War (Tulsa, OK: Tulsa County Historical Society, 1919), 59.
14. For crimes of the Oklahoma councils, see Bissett, Agrarian Socialism, 157–65; Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 345–82; Breen, Uncle Sam at Home, 106–07; O. A. Hilton, “The Oklahoma Council of Defense and the First World War,” The Chronicles of Okla homa 20, no. 1 (March 1942): 18–42; Robinson, Anti-Sedition Legislation, 2–7; James H. Fowler, “Extralegal Suppression of Civil Liberties in Oklahoma During the First World War and Its Causes” (master’s thesis, Oklahoma State University, 1974), 59–84; James H. Fowler, “Tar and Feather Patriotism: The Suppression of Dissent in Oklahoma Dur ing World War I,” The Chronicles of Oklahoma 56, no. 4 (Winter 1978–79), 379–430; Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 69–77, 91–95, 151–54, 157–59, 221–25; Lampe, Sooners in the War, 6–15, 25–65, 86–87; Minutes of the State Council of Defense, May 16, 1917, to January 4, 1919, included in Lampe, Sooners in the War, minutes 4–6, 9–10, 16, 20, 22, 26–27, 29–30, 32, 38, 40–41, 43, 51–52.
15. In addition to authorities in footnote 14, Carter Blue Clark, “A History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1976), 23–25, 44; “No Mercy is Shown for Bond Slackers,” Tulsa Daily World, April 12, 1918, 8. Oklahoma contributed more than $150 million to the war effort. Roy Hoffman, “Oklahoma’s Contribution to the War Effort—A Full Pack,” Daily Oklahoman, April 6, 1937, 10. This does not include the value of Oklahoma’s oil that was sent to war never to return.
16. Undated letter from Oklahoma State Council of Defense, 20696, folder 1, box 1, M2001.037, State Council Collection, OHS; Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 59. Also, Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979), 116 (absence of legal authority not a great handicap to officials who understood “the potentialities inherent in war psychosis”).
17. Lampe, Sooners in the War, 8; Bissett, Agrarian Socialism, 149–50 (less than half expected draft registrants registered and 72 percent of those claimed exemption); Lutter, “Oklahoma and the World War,” 534–35 (“preponderant majority” viewed the war with “profound reluctance and disquietude”); “‘More Men’ is Cry of Recruiting Officers,” Tulsa Daily World, June 7, 1917, 2; “Recruiting Still Lagging,” Tulsa Daily World, June 28, 1917, 1. In 1916 Congressman William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray’s advocacy of “preparedness” cost him his US House of Representatives seat. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 350–51; Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red, 111–12.
18. For public opinion management, see Lampe, Sooners in the War, 6, 8–10; Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 60; Hilton, “The Oklahoma Council of Defense,” 21. For targeting leading editors, lawyers, and bankers, see Hilton, “The Oklahoma Council of Defense,” 21–22 (citing Aydelotte); letter from State Council, July 3, 1917, 20681, folder 1, box 1, State Council Collection, OHS.
19. “Printer’s Ink is Wise Investment,” Tulsa Daily World, November 7, 1917, 2 (per head of Tulsa’s Advertising Club’s Vigilance Committee, “If a person reads at all, h reads the daily newspaper. It is part of the everyday life of the American people. . . . The daily newspaper can best give the constant repetition that wears away forgetfulness and forces attention.”).
20. Undated letter from Oklahoma State Council of Defense to county executive committee appointees, 20698, folder 1, box 1, State Council Collection, OHS.
21. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 374–75.
22. Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 272.
23. “Governor Warns Against Mob Rule,” Daily Oklahoman, April 21, 1918, 1A. For attempted Collinsville, Oklahoma, lynching, see ”Police Save Alien Hanged at Collins \ville,” Daily Oklahoman, April 20, 1918, 1; “Mob Heeds Plea for Trial and Relents,” Tulsa Daily World, April 20, 1918, 1. The state council itself openly praised another state’s vigilance committee who “wait on persons making unpatriotic remarks”; “We Must Win the War,” Tulsa Daily World, September 19, 1917, 4. Williams’s executive secretary Westfall reported that “perhaps a few [men] shot, would mean the absolute stamping out of pro-Germanism in Oklahoma”; Minutes of State Council, December 29, 1917, in Lampe, Sooners in the War, minutes 6.
24. Minutes of State Council, November 30, 1918, in Lampe, Sooners in the War, minutes 48. The motion was made by state council member Stratton Brooks, president of the University of Oklahoma, and seconded by S. R. Lewis, the Oklahoma State Council of Defense’s Tulsa representative.
25. Hilton, “The Oklahoma Council of Defense,” 35, 42; Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 60: “State Council of Defense Wants Three Tulsans to Direct Work from Capital,” Tulsa Daily World, January 6, 1918, 10. For Williams’s close control, see R. L. Williams to S. R. Lewis, April 24, 1918, 89702, folder 5, box 28, M1982.115, Robert L. Williams Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society Research Center, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, OK (hereafter cited as R. L. Williams Collection, OHS). For the ]eventual composition of the Tulsa Council, see Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 60–62.
26. For Lewis’s biography, see Rex Harlow, ed., Makers of Government in Oklahoma (Oklahoma City: Harlow Publishing Company, 1930), 788; Luther B. Hill, A History of the State of Oklahoma, Vol. II (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1909), 426. Lewis’s mother was an “outaluck,” a Cherokee descendant who was not an enrolled tribal member. Like his friend Brady, Lewis was influential within the Cherokee Nation. Lewis was secretary to the then last chief, W. C. Rogers. For his appointment to the state council, see “S. R. Lewis Named on Defense Board,” Tulsa Daily World, May 13, 1917, 1. Lewis, with coal mining interests, was also on the Raw Materials, Minerals, and Metals Committee of the state council and headed its Finance Committee. Undated letter from Oklahoma State Council of Defense, 20698, folder 1, box 1, State Council Collection, OHS.
27. Born and raised in Missouri, Brady arrived in 1890. For Brady’s biography, see J. T. White, ed., National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. XX (New York: James T. White and Co., 1929), 134–35; Hill, A History of the State of Oklahoma, Vol. II, 486–87. Besides their links through the Cherokee Nation and the Democratic Party, Brady was state commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, while Lewis, whose father had been a Texas cavalryman, was commander of the Sons in Indian Territory. “Tate Brady Commander,” Oklahoma Leader (Guthrie, OK), July 14, 1910, 8. They were also social friends. “Oklahoma Vets Invade the City of Memphis,” Claremore (OK) Progress, June 22, 1922, 4; “O. M. A. Band Boys Return Home,” Claremore Progress, June 29, 1922, 1.
28 R. L. Williams to Tate Brady, October 23, 1913, 34478, folder 3, box 4, R. L. Williams Collection, OHS (requesting Brady’s help in getting Kate Barnard’s support for Williams’s gubernatorial campaign). Brady succeeded Williams as Democratic Party national committeeman.
29. For Gibbons’s biography, see Gaston Litton, History of Oklahoma at the Golden Anniversary of Statehood, Vol. IV (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1957), 627–28; Men of Affairs and Representative Institutions of Oklahoma (Tulsa, OK: World Publish ing Co., 1916), 232. Gibbons had been a journalist and press agent for US Senator Robert L. Owen and was at the time manager of an insecticide company. Gibbons would operate an influential Tulsa advertising firm well into the 1950s. For World War I and the growth of the advertising profession in Tulsa, see “Never Again to be an ‘AD Clubless’ City,” Tulsa Daily World, August 15, 1917, 1.
30. J. Burr Gibbons to Oklahoma State Council of National Defense, January 23, 1918, 87304, folder 2, box 27, R. L. Williams Collection, OHS.
31. Carl N. Tyson, James H. Thomas, and Odie B. Faulk, The McMan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 106–11. The sale was the largest such transaction in the oil business until the 1950s and closed shortly before the federal income tax took effect.
32. For McFarlin’s biography, see Tyson, Thomas, and Faulk, The McMan, 5–18. Regarding McFarlin’s wartime work, see ibid., 112–16. For election to the chamber of commerce, see “M’Farlin to Lead Parent Civic Club,” Tulsa Daily World, February 11, 1917, 4. For Committee of 100, see “Fight is Opened to ‘Clean’ Tulsa,” Tulsa Daily World, February 11, 1917, 1, 7; “100 Committee Holds Election,” Tulsa Daily World, February 23, 1917, 4.
33. Lampe, Sooners in the War, 87; Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 64. He also owned the lot at Fourth Street and Main on which the building that housed the Tulsa Council was built. “Navy League to Put Up a Home,” Tulsa Daily World, May 23, 1917, 11; Colonel Clarence Douglas, History of Tulsa, Vol. 1 (Tulsa, OK: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1921), 382. McFarlin’s money was used to purchase uniforms, rifles, ammunition, and other equipment, including two machine guns. “Automobiles to Aid Home Guard,” Tulsa Daily World, November 6, 1917, 7. The Tulsa guard was so overstocked with factory-fresh weapons that Gibbons sought to sell them to other counties. J. Burr Gibbons to Oklahoma State Council of Defense, January 24, 1918, folder 19, box 3, 8-C-4-
2 State Council of Defense—Home Guard “Tulsa County,” Governor Williams Collection, Oklahoma State Archives, Oklahoma Department of Libraries, Oklahoma City, OK.
34. Since the Oklahoma Legislature was not in session, public dollars could not be appropriated for the councils, which survived on contributions. The Tulsa Council was also aided by a privately subscribed “war fund” of at least $30,000. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 199–200. This allowed McFarlin to be repaid for his patriotic gestures. “Wisdom and Tact in Council of Defense,” Tulsa Daily World, August 27, 1918, 9. For McFarlin’s “advancements,” see Lampe, Sooners in the War, 87 ($9,000 to the Home Guard); Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 64 ($20,000 to the Home Guard), 74 ($17,000 to the Home Guard); Tyson, Thomas, and Faulk, The McMan, 113 ($20,000 to the Tulsa Council). It is possible these amounts overlapped.
35. For Condon biography, see Men of Affairs and Representative Institutions of Oklahoma, 232. While he was named managing editor in March, his name first appeared in the Tulsa Daily World’s masthead in July, four days before he was announced as a member of the Tulsa Council. “Your Indulgence for a Moment Please, While We Toot Our Own Horn,” Tulsa Daily World, March 25, 1917, 1 (Condon had “complete charge” of editorial department); Tulsa Daily World, July 7, 1917, 4 (name to masthead). Condon was also head of the state council’s “Four Minute Men.” Lampe, Sooners in the War, 79; “Compliments Four Minute Men on Oklahoma Result,” Tulsa Daily World, October 28, 1917, 3.
36. Immediately after Condon resigned from the Tulsa Daily World in late November 1917, Williams appointed him and two others to travel to the European war zone. R. L. Williams to Glenn Condon, December 10, 1917, folder 7, box 27, R. L. Williams Collection, OHS; “Oklahomans Will Go to War Front,” Tulsa Daily World, November 26, 1917, 2; “Condon Departs for Europe Tomorrow,” Tulsa Daily World, December 2, 1917, 1. Upon Condon’s return, Williams appointed him delegate to a Philadelphia convention seeking to prevent a “premature” peace. “Condon is Named as Oklahoma Delegate,” Tulsa Daily World, May 3, 1918, 3.
37. Townsend had been boys secretary at the YMCA prior to joining the police. For “dominating” chief, see “Create New Role on Police Force,” Tulsa Daily World, Septem ber 21, 1916, 2; “How Many Bosses Have Tulsa Cops?,” Tulsa Daily World, September 28, 1916, 8 (Townsend as “real head” of police); “Two Detectives Get Official Ax,” Tulsa Daily World, November 1, 1916, 1; “Jail Officers, Is Plea of Mother,” Tulsa Daily World, January 25, 1917, 1, 5 (Lucas called a “figurehead,” reporters know to talk to Townsend); “Townsend Quits Police Position,” Tulsa Daily World, March 31, 1917, 1. For County sheriff’s “right-hand deputy,” see “Deputies Resent Sheriff’s Action,” Tulsa Daily World, October 3, 1916. 1; “Jim Woolley Dead is Latest Rumor,” Tulsa Daily World, October 6, 1916, 1; “Press Agent for Woolley is Busy,” Tulsa Daily World, October 28, 1916, 1.
38. “Townsend Quits Police Position,” Tulsa Daily World, March 31, 1917, 1 (Townsend hired to protect Carter from “foreign invasion”).
39. “Tulsans Are Recommended for Council of Defense,” Tulsa Daily World, July 11, 1917, 1; Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 61, 63, 67–69. For Lindsey’s biography, see Linda D. Wilson, “Lindsey, Lilah Denton,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=LI008; Harlow, Mak
ers of Government in Oklahoma, 789.
40. “Defense Board Holds Meeting,” Tulsa Daily World, August 5, 1917, 13. By advertising its secret component, the council created a force multiplier, as the public could not be sure who would be watching them. See Murray B. Levin, Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1917), 148–51, 174–75.
41. For the I.W.W. in Oklahoma, see Nigel Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905–1930 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). For the I.W.W. nationally, see William Preston, Aliens, and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties; Jay Feldman, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 39–65.
42. The editorials were published on the editorial page adjacent to Lorton’s and Con don’s names on the masthead. “Unblushing Treason,” Tulsa Daily World, August 6, 1917, 4 (advocating “execution” for Wobblies who are deported but return); “A National Menace,” Tulsa Daily World, August 7, 1917, 4 (“drastic measures should be undertaken to eliminate the I.W.W. element as an enemy of the nation”); “Industrious Disturbers,” Tulsa Daily World, August 10, 1917, 4 (advocating a “few death sentences” for “our secret enemies”); “Give Them The Limit,” Tulsa Daily World, August 18, 1917, 4; Tulsa Daily World, September 10, 1917, 4 (World would “support a movement to shoot a few of the plotters.”); Tulsa Daily World, September 26, 1917, 4 (“They should send a good-sized firing squad over to Portland, Ore. Four thousand shipbuilders have struck for higher wages.”); “Labor and Sedition,” Tulsa Daily World, October 1, 1917, 4. For a view of the I.W.W. as low class or even subhuman, see Tulsa Daily World, August 13, 1917, 4 (tortured and lynched I.W.W. Frank Little not “a man that amounted to anything” and I.W.W. “a filthy lot.”); “They Have Them, Too,” Tulsa Daily World, August 23, 1917, 4 (I.W.W. as “fungus outgrowth”).
43. “Military Honor for Draft Army,” Tulsa Daily World, August 26, 1917, 3. A nascent home guard, already organized by L. W. Rook and consisting primarily of Spanish-American War veterans, was absorbed into the council’s guard. “The Home Guards,” Tulsa Daily World, May 7, 1917, 4; “Heroes of ’98 in Home Guard,” Tulsa Daily World, August 13, 1917, 1; “Tulsa Home Guards Will Meet Tonight,” Tulsa Daily World, August 16, 1917, 3; “Officers Elected by Home Guards: To Drill at Once,” Tulsa Daily World, August 21, 1917, 4; “Defense Council to Meet This Afternoon,” Tulsa Daily World, August 25, 1917, 12. Supervision of the home guards was originally assigned to the state’s adjutant general, who presided over Oklahoma’s National Guard before its federalization in April 1917. On November 1, 1917, direct responsibility for the home guards was shifted to the governor. Governor Williams’s chief clerk to L. W. Rook, November 1, 1917, folder 19, box 3, 8-C-4-2 State Council of Defense—Home Guard, Governor Williams Collection, Oklahoma State Archives, Oklahoma Department of Libraries, Oklahoma City, OK.
44. “Rook is Appointed Homeguard Captain,” Tulsa Daily World, September 29, 1917, 4 (“A press of business in the governor’s office had held up the issuance of the commission so long that the county council sent Condon to the capital to speed the thing along.”).
45. “Governor Names Officers,” Tulsa Daily World, October 22, 1917, 3 (Collinsville Home Guard reserving action due to loan drive).
46. The explosion was alternatively attributed to nitroglycerin or dynamite. For the extent of damage, see “Dynamiting of Pew Home May Only Be Start,” Tulsa (OK) Democrat, October 29, 1917, 1; “I. W. W. Plot Breaks Prematurely in Blowing Up of Pew Residence,” Tulsa Daily World, October 30, 1917, 1. Pew later testified that he smelled glycerin fumes, collected pieces of fuse, and put them in a box that was given to Townsend. Redmond Cole trial notes, October 23, 1919, M290, folder 2, box 49, Redmond S. Cole Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (hereafter cited as October 23, 1919, trial notes, Cole Collection, WHC). The box and fuses did not survive for later litigation on the matter. Redmond S. Cole trial notes, May 24, 1920, M290, box 52, Cole Collection, WHC (hereafter cited as May 24, 1920, trial notes, Cole Collection, WHC); also, list of state and defense exhibits from said 1919 and 1920 trial notes, Cole Collection, WHC.
47. “History of Frame-Up in Interest of the Oil Companies,” New Solidarity (Chicago, IL), May 3, 1919, 3. For Pew biography, see “The Story of a Useful Life,” American Petroleum Institute Quarterly, April 1947, 3–16. Pew was also a member of the Executive Committee of McFarlin’s Committee of 100. “Committee of One Hundred Denies Charges [illegible] Has Not Co-Operated in Clean-Up,” Tulsa Daily World, April 2, 1918, 2.
48. Report from John Meserve to US attorney general, January 16, 1918, “Oklahoma State Council, January” folder, box 730, Record Group 62: Records of the Council for National Defense, Entry Pl 2, 339: General Correspondence, 1917–1919, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as Meserve to US attorney general, January 16, 1918).
49. The Tulsa Daily World’s press time was around 2 a.m. See “Newspaper History Made By the World,” Tulsa Daily World, November 12, 1918, 1.
50. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 66, 73.
51. “Dynamiting of Pew Home May Only Be Start,” Tulsa Democrat, October 29, 1917, 1.
52. “I. W. W. Plot Breaks Prematurely in Blowing Up of Pew Residence,” Tulsa Daily World, October 30, 1917, 1. The World cited a “highly inflammatory” article written by a Gallagher in the I.W.W. newspaper Solidarity. Gallagher was quoted as writing, “We want to get the head of all these big concerns.” This was fiction. The only recent Gallagher articles in Solidarity were August 11 and October 6, and neither promoted violence nor contained the quoted language. Instead, Gallagher encouraged members to go to work in the oil fields, to organize, and “then when we are thoroly [sic] organized make John D. [Rockefeller] come across with more of the good things of life.” “News from the Oil Fields,” Solidarity (Chicago, IL), August 11, 1917, 4; “News from Oil Worker,” Solidarity, October 6, 1917, 2.
53. Townsend knew about Carter Oil’s infiltration of the I.W.W. Report of John A. Whalen dated October 30, 1917, in Randolph Boehm, ed., United States Military Intelligence Reports: Surveillance of Radicals in the United States, 1917–1941 (Frederick, MD.: University Publications of America, 1984), reel 6, frame 276 (hereafter cited as USMIR reel 6). Pew himself told a federal Bureau of Investigation agent about the infiltration by Carter and other oil companies. Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 7, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frame 270. For information about Carter’s security force, see May 24, 1920, trial notes, Cole Collection, WHC.
54 “Nitro Blows Up Home of Oil Man,” Tulsa Daily World, October 30, 1917, 1; “Dynamiting of Pew Home May Only Be Start,” Tulsa Democrat, October 29, 1917, 1. For “later dropped” as a suspect, see “Two Held As Slackers,” Tulsa Daily World, November 9, 1917, 6. Carter Oil’s long and unsuccessful effort to convict the I.W.W. of the crime is outside the scope of this article. For particulars, see Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 122–33; Oklahoma Leader, May 10, 1919, 2; Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1937), 13–17; “Standard Oil Frame-Up in Tulsa,” New Solidarity, March 8, 1919, 5; “Charles Krieger Trial Exposes Prosecution As Conspira tor To Frame On Victim,” New Solidarity, November 1, 1919, 1, 3; “Final Day of Krieger Trial,” New Solidarity, November 29, 1919, 4 (all Lyons’s articles).
55. “250 Men Wanted at Once to Compete [sic] Tulsa Home Guards,” Tulsa Daily World, October 30, 1917, 1.
56. “Approval of Carter Oil Lease Bad Precedent,” Tulsa Daily World, July 18, 1917, 1; Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 15–16. For competition between Standard and other Oklahoma oilmen, see John Thompson, Closing the Frontier: Radical Response in Oklahoma, 1889–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 63–67, 116, 119–21. Prairie Oil’s 1916 purchase of McFarlin’s oil company appears to be in partial response to anti-Standard Oil moves by other oilmen.
57. “The Charles Krieger Case,” Oklahoma Leader (Oklahoma City, OK), May 10, 1919, 2.
58. “Tulsa City Directory, 1919” (Tulsa, OK: Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co., 1919), 509. Pew would leave Carter by June 1, 1918, if not sooner. For June 1, 1918, see October 23, 1919, trial notes, Cole Collection, WHC. Pew’s necrology from the American Petroleum Institute, of which he had been founder and president, indicates he left Carter in 1917. “The Story of a Useful Life,” American Petroleum Institute Quarterly, April 1947, 6–7.
59. See, e.g., “Great Play, Says Chief E. L. Lucas,” Tulsa Daily World, September 3, 1917, 3.
60.This situation was not limited to Tulsa or the oil industry. Anaconda Copper ordered its paid inside agents to organize strikes as a ruse to indict/eliminate radicals, a fact confirmed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation reports. Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 2nd ed., 113, 327n97. A bureau agent later bragged about “a whole setup for forming an I.W.W. local—forms, membership cards, literature.” Thus, the bureau could catch the “criminals” they created. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties, 231n112.
61. Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 7, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frame 270–71. Burns was a disgraced former Tulsa police chief, expelled from office in 1915. Shelly Lemons, “Down on First Street: Prostitution in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1900–1925,” (Ph.D. diss., Oklahoma State University, 2004), 100–06.
62. Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 9, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frames 267–69. Mc Curry did report that the men had no respect for “the Government,” viewing it as “directed all together by Wall Street and the Capitalists, and has no ends in view for the good of the common people.” This itself constituted a near capital crime to Williams and
his creations.
63. “Two Hundred in Home Guard Now,” Tulsa Daily World, October 31, 1917, 1. The Home Guard was created, legally or not, by the governor. The National Defense Act of June 3, 1916, did not authorize them. See www.legisworks.org/congress/64/publaw-85. pdf. In 1917 Congress authorized the secretary of war to loan weapons to “home guards who may be organized under the direction of governors,” www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes at-large/65th-congress/session-1/c65s1ch28.pdf (emphasis added). Williams himself confirmed the state-level creation of the guard. Williams letter to (federal) chief of ordnance dated August 9, 1917, folder 1, box 36, R. L. Williams Collection, OHS. Nor did the Home Guard remotely have the status of the National Guard, which the NDA did authorize. The act imposed a long list of standardized training, discipline, and qualification requirements on the National Guard so that it might serve quickly to expand federal armed forces. National Defense Act, Sections 61–116. Lacking age, physical condition, training, and other requirements, the Home Guard was useless for that purpose. Even Williams described it as “semi-military.” R. L. Williams to Wm. Beaty, August 8, 1917, folder 6, box 25, R. L. Williams Collection, OHS. The Home Guard members could not be federalized. “Tulsa Home Guards Will Drill Three Times a Week,” Tulsa Daily World, August 25, 1917, 6. They could resign at will. When new Oklahoma National Guard units were authorized, it was necessary to “perfect” them from scratch, rather than relabeling the Home Guard. “Tulsa Will Help To Make New Regiment,” Tulsa Daily World, March 29, 1918, 1; “Reorganization of Home Guard Will Be Delayed,” Tulsa Daily World, April 14, 1918, 2. Just as Williams created them, so he disbanded them. General Order from Williams, January 8, 1919, in Lampe, Sooners in the War, 80. He could not have done that if they held the status of the National Guard. See Sections 68 and 72 of the 1916 National Defense Act.
64. “Two Hundred in Home Guard Now,” Tulsa Daily World, October 31, 1917, 1, 6. The Simmons Administration approved the use of the Convention Hall. “Two Companies Home Guards Now on Duty,” Tulsa Daily World, November 3, 1917, 2.
65. “Rooney Named Captain of Tulsa Guard,” Tulsa Daily World, January 19, 1918, 11. Lewis was also charged with making sure the Guard was supplied with needed arms and equipment. “Council of Defense Will Supply Guards,” Tulsa Daily World, January 3, 1918, 14.
66. “Automobiles to Aid Home Guard,” Tulsa Daily World, November 6, 1917, 7.
67. “Patience Has An End,” Tulsa Daily World, October 31, 1917, 4.
68. Report of John A. Whalen dated October 30, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frame 276; Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 7, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frames 270–73.
69. In addition to ignoring federal admonitions to secure legislation for his councils, Williams slow-played War Department urgings to form a second state National Guard unit. Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 262, 269. The existence of a full contingent of the National Guard would lessen the need for Williams’s privately controlled home guards. The CND also encouraged states to establish a Council of Defense for African Americans. By war’s end, Oklahoma was the only state failing to have one. Linda D. Wilson, “Oklahoma Council of Defense,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www. okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=OK038.
70. Earl Bruce White, “The I.W.W. and the Mid-Continent Oil Field,” in James C. Foster, ed., American Labor in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 73. Curiously, Police Chief Lucas told Weiss that no documents were seized, though a large volume of material was turned over to Moran, who said that “there was not one word of disloyalty in it and [the Tulsa authorities] had nothing on them and couldn’t get it.” Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 7, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frame 270; White, “I.W.W. and Mid-Continent,” 74; L. A. Brown to Roger Baldwin, December 29, 1917, 97, vol. 36, 1917–1918, Oklahoma, American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 1, The Roger Baldwin Years, MC001.01, Public Policy Papers, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ (hereafter cited as Baldwin Papers).
71. Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 3, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frames 274–75.
72. “Hill Expelled By Pressmen,” Tulsa Daily World, November 13, 1917, 3.
73. For speculation, see “I. W. W. in Tulsa Raided by Police,” Tulsa Daily World, No
November 6, 1917, 1; for Richardson, see “Continue I. W. W. Cases,” Tulsa Daily World, November 8, 1917, 5.
74. “Defense Council Warns Traitors,” Tulsa Daily World, November 7, 1917, 8.
75.“North Siders in Fight on Street,” Tulsa Daily World, November 7, 1917, 12. Also on Tuesday, the Tulsa police team of Carl Lewis and George Blaine arrested another “vag” at I.W.W. headquarters. “I. W. W Offices Are Raided by Detectives,” Tulsa Daily World, November 7, 1917, 8. Nigel Sellars has concluded that this man, named Morris or Morrison, was the John Gustafson spy in line to become secretary of the I.W.W. chapter. Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 106, 232n38. If so, the arrest was likely a “sheep dipping” to ingratiate the spy to the unionists. Morris/Morrison was culled out before the Tulsa Outrage. Home Guard commander Rook was present at the possibly contrived arrest and used it to promote his guard. “I. W. W. is Arrested Prowling Close to Main Part of City,” Tulsa (OK) Weekly Democrat, November 15, 1917, 4.
76. John Meserve to US Senator J. W. Harreld, December 10, 1921, folder 4, box 7, John Bartlett Meserve Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society Research Center, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, OK. For Meserve biography, see Douglas, The History of Tulsa, Vol. 3, 281–82; Harlow, Makers of Government in Oklahoma, 796; Joseph B. Thoburn and Muriel H. Wright, Oklahoma: A History of the State and its Peoples (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, Inc., 1929), 128–30; Grant Foreman, “John Bartlett Meserve,” The Chronicles of Oklahoma 21, no. 2 (June 1943): 121–22.
77. Meserve telegraphed the US attorney general hours after the Pew explosion, ascribing the “work of dynamiters” to the I.W.W. Melvyn Dubofsky, ed., United States Department of Justice Investigative Files, Part I: The Industrial Workers of the World (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1989), reel 5, frame 64. When Justice Department agent John Whalen queried him in response, Meserve confessed that “he had no specific information on these subjects except that it seemed to be the opinion of the public that these acts were inspired by the I.W.W.” Meserve also referred to a “threatening letter” sent to the Tulsa Daily World, but Whalen found it contained “no threats.” Whalen investigated Meserve’s suggestion that the I.W.W. was behind the disastrous Mayo Hotel fire of October 23, 1917, but concluded the causes may have been natural. Report of John A. Whalen dated November 3, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frames 274–75. The fire, which killed two firemen, broke out in cleaning supplies at a paint store. At the time, none of the Tulsa authorities, including Meserve, treated it as anything other than rank carelessness. “Half Million Dollar Fire Razes Ohio Building; Damages Mayo’s,” Tulsa Daily World, October 24, 1917, 1, 18; “Ruins of Fire Give Back Dead,” Tulsa Daily World, October 25, 1917, 1, 16; “Will Arrest Dealers for Gasoline Danger,” Tulsa Daily World, October 26, 1917, 6, 13; “Theaters Improperly Equipped for Flames,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 4; “Will Investigate Hazards in Business Part of City,” Tulsa Daily World, December 22, 1917, 3.
78. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 71–72, 93; “John Meserve Advisor for Council of Defence [sic],” Tulsa Daily World, December 4, 1917, 10 (special legal advisor); “Tulsa Defense Council Re-Elects Its Officers,” Tulsa Daily World, January 22, 1918, 14 (a member of Tulsa Council).
79. “Down the Agitators,” Tulsa Daily World, November 7, 1917, 4. While Condon ran the editorial department, it is not safe to assume he or Lorton wrote all the editorials. “Cy,” Logsdon wrote an odd editorial page column titled “Dope,” originally adorned with a drawing of a smoking opium pipe. The reference to “decoration of a telephone pole . . . original design” is consistent with Logsdon’s proto-hipster writing style. See, e.g.: “Cy” Logsdon, “Dope,” Tulsa Daily World, August 12, 1917, 24. For members of the paper’s editorial department, see “Your Indulgence for a Moment Please, While We Toot Our Own Horn,” Tulsa Daily World, March 25, 1917, 1. Gibbons, a former journalist, may have submitted writings.
80. Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 7, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frame 272.
81. The “Knights of Liberty” Mob and the I.W.W. Prisoners at Tulsa, Oklahoma (New York: National Civil Liberties Bureau, 1918), 14 (hereafter cited as NCLB Pamphlet). Moran paid a price for not playing ball. In April 1918 the Democrats captured the city government and Moran was initially declared police chief, an appointment quickly undone by factional politics. “John Moran Resigns Federal Job to be Chief of Police,” Tulsa Daily World, April 10, 1918, 1; “M’Nulty Will Be Mayor of Tulsa,” Tulsa Daily World, May 1, 1918, 1; “M’Nulty Is Made Mayor of Tulsa,” Tulsa Daily World, May 4, 1918, 1, 9.
82. “I. W. W. Tried in Night Court,” Tulsa Daily World, November 9, 1917, 3. The defense agreed to designate a defendant and let his verdict serve for the rest. None of the testifying police officers could offer adverse evidence save for the defendant’s I.W.W. membership. NCLB Pamphlet, 11–12.
83.Richardson repeatedly said if there was any evidence of disloyalty he would withdraw, to which the police court officials responded with an ominous silence. According to one witness, Meserve said that “Tulsa was a big town, a wonderful town, but not big enough for all the good people and any I.W.W.s to live in at the same time.” Statement dated December 21, 1917, 100–03, Baldwin Papers. 83 NCLB Pamphlet, 11–12; “I. W. W. Tried in Night Court,” Tulsa Daily World, November 9, 1917, 3.
84. Report of T. F. Weiss dated November 7, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frame 272. This is supported by December 21, 1917, witness statement, Baldwin Papers, 100–03. The author of the statement is not identified. It was written from the viewpoint of a bystander who observed the trial and happened to follow the mob. Condon’s article, however, suggests that trailing autos were prevented from following. It is possible that the statement was actually written by a victim wishing to conceal his identity. At least one victim returned to his residence and family in Tulsa, only to be repeatedly harassed by the police and Police Judge Evans. NCLB Pamphlet, 14.
85. “Get Out the Hemp,” Tulsa Daily World, November 9, 1917, 4.
86. Ryan is sometimes labeled secretary of the I.W.W. chapter, but the secretary of the associated Oil Workers Industrial Union appears more accurate. “Local I. W. W. Offices Raided,” Tulsa Daily World, September 6, 1917, 1; Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 24, 69, 100. He was also a Socialist and participant in the party’s “free speech” movements in Tulsa and Muskogee. “Red Shirt Orator Brink in Muskogee,” Tulsa Daily World, Oc tober 9, 1914, 4. He does not appear to have been licensed to practice law. “I. W. W.’s are Convicted,” Tulsa Daily World, December 13, 1916, 3. But Judge Evans allowed him to represent the defendants and should have treated him as such.
87. “I. W. W. Members Flogged, Tarred and Feathered,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 1; L. A. Brown to Roger Baldwin, December 29, 1917, 97, Baldwin Papers. 88 E. M. Boyd, I.W.W. branch secretary and one of the tortured men, wrote that “as near as anyone could judge from the closing remarks of Judge Evans [the lead defendant] was found guilty and fined $100 for not having a Liberty Bond.” NCLB Pamphlet, 6; Baldwin Papers, 112. For a conviction on vagrancy, see December 21, 1917, witness statement, 102, Baldwin Papers; NCLB Pamphlet, 12–13.
89. “I. W. W. Members are Held Guilty,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 2. Mrs. Ryan, a stenographer, kept notes of the trial. “Oklahoma Mob Leaders Discovered by the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker (Seattle, WA), February 9, 1918, 1. Brown attempted to locate them, with unknown success.
90. White, “I.W.W. and Mid-Continent,” 73. Another historical dispute is whether sixteen or seventeen Wobblies were taken “for a ride.” The majority of sources, contemporary and later, report seventeen. See, e.g., “I. W. W. Members Flogged, Tarred and Feathered,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 1; NCLB Pamphlet, 13. I.W.W. branch secretary Boyd, however, counted sixteen and Sellars agrees. NCLB Pamphlet, 8; Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 108, 232n41. Confusion over the removal of arrested “spies” and the number of courtroom arrests make a final determination problematic. 91 Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 221–22.
92. “‘Go-And Stay,’ Commanded Black-Robed Ringleader of ‘Knights of Liberty’ as He Pointed to Hills,” Tulsa Democrat, November 10, 1917, 1, 8.
93. Report of E. M. Boyd, NCLB Pamphlet, 8–9.
94. The description of the Tulsa Outrage is a synthesis of Condon’s eyewitness report in “I. W. W. Members Flogged, Tarred and Feathered,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 1; an apparent eyewitness report in “‘Go-And Stay,’ Commanded Black-Robed Ringleader of ‘Knights of Liberty’ as He Pointed to Hills,” Tulsa Democrat, November 10, 1917, 1, 8; Tulsa Council’s official history in Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 221–22; the statements of E. M. Boyd and December 21, 1917, witnesses located in Baldwin Papers, 100–15, and sworn testimony of Joe French in Harrison George, The I.W.W. Trial (Chicago, IL: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1918), 197–99.
95. NCLB Pamphlet, 6–7 (Boyd’s version); George, The I.W.W. Trial, 197–98 (Joe French testimony).
96. December 21, 1917, witness report refers to ten or a dozen cars joining the entourage. Condon’s version says six. The Tulsa Democrat version lists three. 97 NCLB Pamphlet, 10. The business of having news reporters accompany outrages was a later tactic of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan. Charles C. Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 48. A theatrical style atrocity served a limited purpose unless the public knew about it and drew the proper meaning.
98. Descriptions of the “whip” range from a “cat-o’-nine-tails” (Condon), a double piece of new rope, five-eighths or three-fourths hemp (Boyd), a heavy piece of rope (December 21 statement), and a half-inch piece of pipe (French). Brown described it as “hemp soaked in brine.”
99. Williams and the state council went to great, but unsuccessful, lengths to prove that the alleged German atrocities were something more than Allied propaganda. Hilton, “The Oklahoma Council of Defense,” 29–30. In frustration, the state council had the effrontery to demand that the US State Department publish atrocity evidence. Aydelotte to the state council, August 6, 1917, folder 2, box 1, State Council Collection, OHS. When that failed, Williams’s executive secretary wrote President Wilson’s executive secretary asking to be sent “half a dozen of these mutilated [Belgian] children . . . to help draw crowds, etc. We feel certain it would be the greatest stroke to arouse patriotism possible.” Westfall to J. P. Tumulty, November 12, 1917, document 85000, folder 5, box 26, R. L. Williams Collection, OHS. This too was fruitless.
100. Joe French testified that the wire was about fifteen feet from where the men were lined up, but it was dark and not visible. French and the others “cut ourselves all to pieces.” George, The I.W.W. Trial, 198. For “quickly dubbed” the Tulsa Outrage, see Sel lars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 109. “I. W. W. Members Flogged, Tarred and Feathered,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 1; “I. W. W. Danger in Tulsa Not Ended,” Tulsa Daily World, November 11, 1917, 1.
101. “‘Go-And Stay,’ Commanded Black-Robed Ringleader of ‘Knights of Liberty’ as He Pointed to Hills,” Tulsa Democrat, November 10, 1917, 1, 8. Perhaps Condon and Gibbons engaged in a friendly journalists’ competition to see who could write the most colorful depiction of terror.
102. For Gibbons’s prior employment by the Tulsa Democrat, see “Why I Remember,” Tulsa (OK) Tribune, October 8, 1939, 8. It is possible that Gibbons also provided the Democrat’s editorial of Sunday, November 11, 1917, “Oil and the Industrial Workers,” painting the Oklahoma I.W.W. as proven dynamiters of Pew, speakers of broken English, and suggesting they may end by “decorating trees in the oil fields and in the vicinity of the city.”
103. “Who is to Blame for Tulsa,” Industrial Worker, November 24, 1917.
104. Report of E. M. Boyd, NCLB Pamphlet, 8; Baldwin Papers, 114.
105. “I. W. W. Danger in Tulsa Not Ended,” Tulsa Daily World, November 11, 1917, 1 (in contrast the Tulsa police were “continuing their search for I.W.W.’s and will arrest them as fast as they are discovered.”). A lookout was kept for the victims’ wanderings and when they were discovered, the local authorities were encouraged to assist the deportation process. Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 109. Other Wobblies also were targeted. “I. W. W. Danger in Tulsa Not Ended,” Tulsa Daily World, November 11, 1917, 1 (“In Drumright, Bartlesville and elsewhere, I.W.W.’s were arrested or run out of town. The “Knights of Liberty” have apparently started a movement that will lead to the breaking up of the organization.”).
106. Brown report, January 30, 1918, NCLB Pamphlet, 15; Douglas, History of Tulsa, Vol. 1, 469–73 (“because of the results obtained and the breaking up of an infamous nest of sedition and disloyalty no serious attempt was made to apprehend the members of . . . Tulsa’s Knights of Liberty.”). City attorney Meserve explained that he was powerless to act since what had happened “was not covered by any city ordinance,” though that had not prevented his prosecutorial focus on union cards, disloyalty, or “good” people versus bad. “‘Go-And Stay,’ Commanded Black-Robed Ringleader of ‘Knights of Liberty’ as He Pointed to Hills,” Tulsa Democrat, November 10, 1917, 8.
107., For Boyd's statement, see Baldwin Papers, 104–15. It is augmented by a further Boyd statement in the NCLB Pamphlet, 8–9.
108. For Brown’s background, see folder 15, box 3, series L0031-78, National Civil Liberties Bureau SUBPOENAED FILES, New York State Archives, 134–35, 99 (hereafter cited as NYSA). The Industrial Relations Committee was created by the US Congress in 1912 to study labor law and conditions.
109. Unfortunately, not all of Brown’s reports have been located. What does exist is as follows:
– December 29, 1917, letter to Roger Baldwin of the NCLB, Baldwin Papers, 93–97. – January 22, 1918, letter quoted in part in “Oklahoma Mob Leaders Discovered by the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker, February 9, 1918, 1.– January 30, 1918, report quoted in part in NCLB Pamphlet, 11–15. – L. A. Brown to Roger Baldwin, March 29, 1918, at NYSA, 134–35. A report said to be attached, is unavailable.
– An “undated” report quoted in part in White, “I.W.W. and Mid-Continent,” 75. The full report is also unavailable.
110. Brown’s March 29, 1918, letter acknowledged that, of the thirty names he unearthed, most allegations were of the “I believe” or “I am satisfied” variety. Brown also conceded that some witnesses were not willing to repeat their claims in court and his own doubts as to whether he could prove his allegations beyond a reasonable doubt, at least “in a court in Oklahoma at this time.” NYSA, 134–35. He instead opined on the basis of the preponderance of the evidence. White, “I.W.W. and Mid-Continent,” 75. Brown also noted that “justice to the people of Oklahoma demands that this report attempt to correct another newspaper falsehood; that is, that this mob violence met with general approval. Your investigator talked with more than 200 citizens both women and men, none of whom approved the mob outrage.” NCLB Pamphlet, 15.
111. L. A. Brown to Roger Baldwin, March 29, 1918, the letter at NYSA, 134. This letter also claimed that Lucas had been fired along with most of the police force. Historian Ronald L. Trekell, however, claims that Lucas remained chief until May 30, 1918, after his health failed at the first of May. Ronald L. Trekell, History of the Tulsa Police Department, 1882–1990 (Tulsa, OK: R. L. Trekell, 1990), 43. Neither claim appears completely accurate. Tulsa’s April 2, 1918, election resulted in the defeat of Simmons’s Republican Administration. The second of Lucas’s one-year terms ended when the Democrats took over on May 3, 1918. “Tulsa Capitulates to Wets; Open-Town Victory at Polls,” Tulsa Daily World, April 3, 1918, 1; “M’Nulty Is Made Mayor of Tulsa,” Tulsa Daily World, May 4, 1918, 1. At the time, a change in political administrations resulted in a “decapitation” of the police department, as existing officers were replaced with more politically trustworthy and controllable ones.
112. E. M. Boyd, “Tulsa, November 9th,” Liberator, April 1918, 15–17. Blaine’s name is replaced by a blank line in the version of Boyd’s statement quoted in the NCLB Pamphlet. After the Tulsa Race Massacre, Blaine was implicated in breaking into the McGee hardware store and dealing out guns to the mob. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 54, 129n21. He nonetheless became Tulsa Police chief from July 1921 to April 1922, April 1929 to May 1930, and November 1941 to May 1943. “TPD History ‘The Chiefs,’” Tulsa Police Department, www.tulsapolice.org/content/history/chiefs.aspx.
113. Brown also places policeman “Patten” in the mob. White, “I.W.W. and Mid-Continent,” 75. There was no “Patten” in the Tulsa police roster, only “James W. Patton, 1913– 1922.” Trekell, History of the Tulsa Police Department, 386. James Patton had either just been named chief of detectives (plainclothesmen) or would be immediately after the Tulsa Outrage. “Patton at Head of Detective Bureau,” Tulsa Weekly Democrat, Novem ber 15, 1917, 5. If Patton was there, it was likely bad news for the Wobblies, as he has left an odious reputation. Lemons, “Down on First Street,” 161–65 (Tulsa Police matron testified in 1921 that Patton beat a black female prisoner with a rubber hose and told a white Canadian woman who allegedly served as a police sex slave that she was “not as good as a nigger; all these sons-o-bitching foreigners ought to be killed. You are nothing but a whore.”). The matron was dismissed, while Patton was still boss of the detectives during the Tulsa Race Massacre. Brown named officer “Carmicle.” There was a “Henry Carmichael” serving on the force, who would be one of the officers who arrested Dick Rowland on May 31, 1921. Trekell, History of the Tulsa Police Department, 379; “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator,” Tulsa Tribune, June 1, 1921, State Edition, 1.
114. “Oklahoma Mob Leaders Discovered by the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker, February 9, 1918, 1.
115. Brown’s letter in the Industrial Worker does not identify the other three “wreckers.” They were William Shue, Ramsey Miller, and Richard Nelson. Brown incorrectly says that all five were indicted for murder, whereas Nelson was not. Brown correctly notes that bail was paid by the “RIGHT people,” an apt description of Harry Tyrrell. “Townsend, Shue, and Miller Held to Higher Court,” Tulsa Daily World, January 24, 1917, 1.
116. “Oklahoma Mob Leaders Discovered by the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker, February 9, 1918, 1. Brown reports that Meserve was assisted by Bill Barber, described as out on bond after having been convicted of murder. This may be William J. “Bill” Baber, who was police chief in 1906–07. He lost his job (then “city marshal”) after pistol-whipping a man who had been “telling stories” about him. In 1914 he shotgunned to death two US deputy marshals (including Moran’s predecessor) who appeared at his front door searching for liquor. He was finally convicted of manslaughter for one death in April 1917 but appears to have remained out on bail until 1918. Trekell, History of the Tulsa Police Department, 28–29, 40–41. F. W. LaFallette, a business agent of the Tulsa’s plumbers union, was another alleged whip hand. “A Sketch of the Activities of Agricultural Workers Industrial Union No. 110,” Industrial Solidarity (Chicago, IL), June 10, 1922, 2; Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 101, 107–08, 230n23, 233n43. LaFallette was associated with C. E. Lahman in the pursuit of disloyalty. Report of John Whalen dated September 8, 1917, USMIR reel 6, frame 286. Lahman was a director of the Tulsa branch of the American Protective League (APL). The league, organized by yet another advertising man, was a collection of amateur “G-men” who conducted Stasi-like surveillance. The Tulsa Council and APL cooperated closely in the hunt for disloyalty. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 92, 151–54. For APL, see Joan Jensen, The Price of Vigilance (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1968). Burr Gibbons was also an APL captain. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, Gibbons’s photo caption after page 60.
117. Baldwin Papers, 103.
118. “I. W. W. Members Flogged, Tarred and Feathered,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 1.
119. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 69–70. Prior to Meserve’s appointment, loyalty investigations were handled by Gibbons; Wash Hudson, a future member of the KKK and leader of the Democratic Party in the Oklahoma Senate; and Earl Sneed, future Tulsa city attorney. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 71–72. For Hudson, see Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest, 45. For Sneed, see “Earl Sneed is Slated to be Tulsa’s New City Attorney,” Tulsa Daily World, April 12, 1918, 3 (Sneed stands well with the “better element”).
120. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 75; also, Hilton, “The Oklahoma Council of Defense,” 35n42. Brown also claimed that a preponderance of evidence showed that police judge T. D. Evans was “parties criminis [sic] to the outrage.” White, “I.W.W. and Mid-Continent,” 75. Evans’s orders to arrest witnesses and to remove the men from jail are certainly suggestive. It is unlikely, however, that Evans traveled to the “lonely ravine” and no one accused him of being there. He owed his judgeship to the controversy over his predecessor’s practice of attending police raids. “Will Oliphant Succeed Cavitt?,” Tulsa Daily World, April 28, 1917, 4; “City Fathers to Appoint Officers,” Tulsa Daily World, May 1, 1917, 3; “T. D. Evans Named Municipal Judge,” Tulsa Daily World, May 2, 1917, 4. The former judge was the aforementioned E. O. Cavitt. Brown claimed that “all those who conducted the prosecution were the same ones who conducted the outrage,” which would include Cavitt. “Oklahoma Mob Leaders Discovered by the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker, February 9, 1918, 1. That would be consistent with Cavitt’s “judicial” practices and prior association with Townsend in controlling police work. “Policemen Learn Under Cavitt Plan,” Tulsa Daily World, October 22, 1916, 3; “Jail Officers, Is Plea of Mother,” Tulsa Daily World, January 25, 1917, 1, 5.
121. NCLB Pamphlet, 14. The December 21 witness statement adds that the Knights were mostly men of “good society in Tulsa, business and professional men.” NYSA, 100– 03 (emphasis in original). For Moran’s knowledge and background, see Trekell, History of the Tulsa Police Department, 32–33, 385 (assistant police chief in 1911–12); “John Moran Resigns Federal Job to be Chief of Police,” Tulsa Daily World, April 10, 1918, 1. His brother Rees was chief in 1915–16 following Foster Burns’s ouster. “TPD History ‘The Chiefs,’” Tulsa Police Department, www.tulsapolice.org/content/history/chiefs.aspx. Moran’s sister Mary would be the first woman elected to Tulsa city office, becoming chief auditor. “Evans and Bigger Tulsa Ticket Win,” Tulsa Daily World, April 7, 1920, 1.
122. NYSA, 134–35.
123. The I.W.W. paper Industrial Worker of November 24, 1917, claimed in an article titled “Who is to Blame for Tulsa” that an unnamed Tulsa minister “is said to have helped apply the boiling tar to the raw flesh of the beaten men.” Assuming Brady was the ringleader, it is possible that the minister was associated with him.
124. “Oklahoma Mob Leaders Discovered by the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker, February 9, 1918, 1. If he was there, Lewis must have had a busy day on Friday. The then last chief of the Cherokee Nation, W. C. Rogers, was buried that afternoon near Skiatook. “Last of Cherokee Chiefs Committed to Earth Again,” Tulsa Daily World, November 10, 1917, 1, 5. Lewis had been Rogers’s secretary.
125. Sellars says that J. Edgar Pew was named as a Knight in Brown’s letter in Industrial Worker. While Brown’s letter refers to Pew as having “taken over” Townsend after the murder indictment, it does not actually accuse Pew of being in the “lonely ravine.” Compare Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 108, 233n43 and “Oklahoma Mob Leaders Discovered by the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker, February 9, 1918, 1.
126. Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies, 233n42. In fairness, the Copperhead’s “associates” were the “Sons of Liberty” and “Knights of the Golden Circle.” Nicole Etcheson, “A Union Awash in Conspiracies,” New York Times, October 8, 2014, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/a-union-awash-with-conspiracies. The Tulsa Council was already awash with military affectations, including McFarlin’s “Army of Liberty” and Lindsey’s “Army of Economy.” “$5 a Month Will Now Buy a Bond,” Tulsa Daily World, October 18, 1917, 1; Lilah D. Lindsey, “Tulsa County Army of Economy,” Tulsa Daily World, October 31, 1917, 1. Still, the Knights adopted the atrocity tactics of the original southern KKK. Ironically, the original “Knights of Liberty” were involved in an effort to overthrow slavery. “Moses Dickson and The Knights of Liberty,” Phoenix Masonry, www.phoenixmas onry.org/moses_dickson_and_the_knights_of_liberty.htm.
127. Dale and Morrison, Pioneer Judge, 10–11 (name change and deep devotion to the South), 31 (loved raids and hazardous exploits), 58, 274, 359, 379, 402 (devotions to Southern/Civil War history).
128. “I. W. W. Danger in Tulsa Not Ended,” Tulsa Daily World, November 11, 1917, 1; “The Penalty,” Tulsa Daily World, November 12, 1917, 4 (Knights a “sterling element of citizenship, that class of taxpaying and orderly people who are most of all committed to the observance of the law”) and (“we see no reason why they should not continue the good work.”); “True Side of Tulsa,” Tulsa Daily World, November 13, 1917, 4 (Knights a “patriotic body”); “Muskogee Forms Secret Vigilance Organization,” Tulsa Daily World, November 14, 1917, 14 (Muskogee mayor and businessmen form Knights chapter); “Rope as Well as Tar,” Tulsa Daily World, November 16, 1917, 4 (only criticism is Knights did not go far enough and should listen to newspaper suggestions to lynch).
129. Condon resigned around November 26 to devote himself to war work. “Oklahomans Will Go to War Front,” Tulsa Daily World, November 26, 1917, 2. For subsequent editorial praise for the Knights, see Tulsa Daily World, December 4, 1917, 4 (the Tulsa Outrage gave the city “considerable satisfaction from the nocturnal turn-out and as it was Tulsa’s party nobody cares much what [a New York newspaper] thinks about the incident.”); “Quite a Different Matter,” Tulsa Daily World, December 20, 1917, 4; “Drastic Treatment,” Tulsa Daily World, December 28, 1917, 4 (“a wise application of extra-legal methods is often a benefit.”); Tulsa Daily World, March 30, 1918, 4 (there should be as many units of Knights as of I.W.W.); “The Aegean Stables,” Tulsa Daily World, April 6, 1917, 4 (I.W.W. has “no liberties to be considered, except the liberty to reform and behave themselves.”).
130 “Must Avoid Excesses,” Tulsa Daily World, April 10, 1918, 4. Lorton was born in Missouri and raised there and in Kansas, arriving in Oklahoma in 1911. Harlow, Makers of Government in Oklahoma, 790–91, Thoburn and Wright, Oklahoma: A History of the State and its Peoples, 52–53; Charles Barrett, Oklahoma After Fifty Years: A History of the Sooner State and its People, 1889–1939 (Hopkinsville, KY: Historical Record Association, 1941), 749–50.
131 “Grand Ball New Year’s Eve Is Planned by Tulsa Home Guards to Raise Funds,” Tulsa Daily World, December 14, 1917, 7. Lorton was not alone in indiscretion. In his report to the US attorney general, Meserve ascribed the lack of injuries at the Pew house to the fact that the whole family was sleeping at a remote part of the house, calling into question the newspaper reports that Pew’s wife and one child were sleeping in a front bedroom directly above the blast. Compare “Nitro Blows Up Home of Oil Man,” Tulsa Daily World, October 30, 1917, 6 and Meserve to US attorney general, January 16, 1918, 1–2. Also, Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 14 (Mrs. Pew was not there).
132. Brown quotes an unnamed Home Guard lieutenant that the guard was ordered to bring “down their arms and stack them at their armory [the Convention Hall].” According to Brown, it was there that the Knights “made up and secured their arms.” NCLB Pamphlet, 14. Within the guard itself, Williams’s appointee Rook was the top of the chain of command. The Knights standing at “present arms” and guarding the approach demonstrated military training. While the Home Guard was still being organized, it incorporated an existing “guard” of war veterans headed by Rook.
133. According to Brown, Colonel Clarence Douglas, executive secretary of McFarlin’s Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, declined an invitation to attend. NCLB Pamphlet, 13–14. This demonstrates the “caliber” of men considered for “Knighthood.” Colonel Douglas may have had his reasons, but they did not include opposing the Tulsa Outrage. He wrote the head of Sacramento’s Chamber of Commerce urging “the Tulsa treatment be applied locally in the vicinity!” “Capitalist Press Counsels Violence,” Industrial Worker, February 2, 1918, 1. His History of Tulsa lauds the Knights for their “quick and effective methods” in stamping out disloyalty, penning that “under darkened shadows in an oak forest was held Tulsa’s famous coming-out party.” Douglas, History of Tulsa, Vol. 1, 469–73.
134. The 1917 structure represents the smaller shoulder of the current building. The larger shoulder and the iconic tower were added in 1929. For building background, see “The Bank at 320 South Boston,” Historic Tulsa (blog), historictulsa.blogspot. com/2011/02/bank-at-320-south-boston.html.
135. “Door to Bank Vault Weighs 17 Tons in Stocking Feet,” Tulsa Daily World, November 11, 1917, 65. The World’s lavish review of the Exchange National Bank building was included as a special insert. “Exchange National Bank Section,” Tulsa Daily World, November 11, 1917, 55–66.
136. “Great Wealth Found on the Upper Floors,” Tulsa Daily World, November 11, 1917, 66.
137. Nigel Sellars, “Wobblies in the Oil Fields: The Suppression of the Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma,” in Davis D. Joyce, ed., “An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before”: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 133.
138. Tulsa County’s goal was the highest per capita in the United States. “Tulsa Never Fails,” Tulsa Daily World, October 17, 1918, 4.
139. “Council of Defense Sounds Bond Alarm,” Tulsa Daily World, October 12, 1918, 3. Oklahoma papers had been headlining the German collapse for weeks and no paper fell so hard for the “German propaganda” as the Tulsa Daily World.
140. “Knights of Liberty Bobbed Up in Liberty Bond Sale Program,” Tulsa Daily World, October 12, 1918, 1.
141. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 222; Lampe, Sooners in the War, 87 (also placing Robert McFarlin’s picture beside the write-up of Tulsa’s Knights of Liberty). 142 “Miller Exonerated in Sring’s Killing,” Tulsa Daily World, March 27, 1918, 1 (quoting Daniels: “his act is what every loyal American would have been forced to do by the blood in his veins”). No one considered whether there was a weapon found where the waiter was said to have reached. Ironically, the very next column in that day’s World reported the rejection of another killer’s self-defense claim because no weapon accessible to the decedent was located. That case did not involve alleged disloyalty. “Check Leads to Fatal Shooting,” Tulsa Daily World, March 27, 1918, 1.
143. The council prefaced the hearing with a public warning that “open-season” had been declared by infuriated Tulsans and that evidence of disloyalty would not be tolerated. “Council of Defense Warns Aliens Not to Tempt Fate by Hun Remarks,” Tulsa Daily World, March 26, 1918, 1.
144. “Mob Victim Places Self in Hands of Sheriff McCullough,” Tulsa Daily World, April 18, 1918, 1, 2; “Council of Defense Condemns Mob Attack on John Kubecka,” Tulsa Daily
World, April 19, 1918, 1, 5. Miller was drunk, got himself identified, and the alleged adulterer turned out to be innocent. “Woman in Knights of Liberty Case Not Ted White’s Wife,” Tulsa Daily World, April 20, 1918, 1; “Kubecka Enlists in Service of Country,” Tulsa Daily World, April 21, 1918, 10. Nonetheless, the Tulsa Council’s 1919 official his tory lauded Miller as an “efficient detective” of the council’s “well-organized” investigative department. Lampe, Tulsa County in the World War, 69.
145. “Let Law and Order Reclaim Tulsa from Masked Mob’s Rule,” Tulsa Daily World, April 18, 1918, 1.
146. “Plans Made to Make Thefts Unpopular,” Tulsa Daily World, November 15, 1918, 8 (new anticar theft Vigilance Committee to use “same system that stamped out I. W. W. activities in Tulsa” or “a few feet of rope and a convenient tree,” as with horse thieves). A year earlier, a World editorial had itself invoked the horse thief remedy in justifying action against the I.W.W. “Patience Has an End,” Tulsa Daily World, October 31, 1917, 4.
147. The phrase “big-brained busy men” is borrowed from Colonel Douglas, who used it to describe McFarlin, Lewis, Condon, and others who attended Governor Williams on Belgium Day in Tulsa. Clarence B. Douglas, “The Answer,” Tulsa Daily World, August 12, 1917, 24. For the role of “legitimization” of violence by the “best people,” see Levin, Political Hysteria in America, 6–8, 127
148. Scott Ellsworth, “The Tulsa Race Riot,” Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot, 2001), 50.
149. Scales and Goble, Oklahoma Politics: A History, 108; Clark, “History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma,” viii-ix, 44–47 (“Klan-initiated outbursts were carried out by the same individuals who precipitated violence earlier in non-Klan guises as wartime members of councils of defense or as law officers.”); Thompson, Closing the Frontier, 192–93 (“The Klan, like the council [of defense], dominated the prosperous urban areas of the northeast. Seventy of the Klan’s 102 violent raids occurred in Tulsa County, and another 25 occurred in neighboring Okmulgee and Creek counties.”).
150. “The Penalty,” Tulsa Daily World, November 12, 1917, 4.