A Very OK Podcast
Episode 29: “Labor Omnia Vincit”
October 17, 2023
Episode Transcript
(Upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and here with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, it’s great to see you again for another great episode of our show. I’m really excited about this one.
Bob Blackburn: Thank you, Trait. I always enjoy these, and my wife has been listening to our podcast. It’s always fun when someone in the house recognizes what you’re doing. But she’s been listening and enjoying them. And around town, I think more people are discovering the podcast.
Thompson: I think you’re right, Bob. And it’s always— I got in the car the other day, and my wife was listening to one of the episodes that we had had in the past, and it’s always a bit surprising to me. I’m like, oh, she likes my podcast. (laughter)
Thompson: But when we have all these episodes, when we first started out, I think our wives were the only ones that were listening.
(laughter)
Thompson: And now you’re right. I start to get comments from people that I’m not related to that are actually listening to the show. And I’m so glad that we’ve been able to do this and continue this. We’ve been doing this since March of 2021, if you can believe that. We’re continuing this great effort to get these stories out about Oklahoma history. And every time we do one, I always think that might have been our best one yet.
Blackburn: You know, Trait, it goes back to the basic premise of why we have an Oklahoma Historical Society, which has always been to collect, preserve, and share. And share has always been one of the most challenging. You know, collecting we’re—I don’t know—we’re probably still getting—when I say we, I still act as if I’m here— but, we were averaging about 400 collections a year coming into the Historical Society. So collecting has been very good. We’ve made leaps with preservation, but sharing is the most challenging. How do you do that? Well, this podcast has given us a new tool on sharing. So I want to thank you for bringing this into our orbit and making this work.
Thompson: Well, what I love about this is, of course, we’ve got great museums and historic sites all across the state, which I encourage you to go visit. You can go to our website okhistory.org and check out where all of those are. But this is a great medium for sharing history with those who may not be able to go out and visit a museum or travel across the state. And so, this is us bringing history right to your morning commute in the car, or your long road trip, or if you’re sitting on a plane right now, this is us bringing Oklahoma history directly to you.
I want to introduce our guest that we have with us today because I’m very excited to have this person with us. Bob Burke is one of our state’s preeminent historians. And I went to your website, Bob, and I looked for your biography, and it says on your website— so it has to be true—that you’ve written more historical nonfiction books than anyone else in history.
Bob Burke: That’s what they say. But of course, I’ve been writing since right after the Civil War. (laughter)
Thompson: I knew that about you. So I want to introduce Bob. He was born in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, which he’s very proud of. He practices law and writes books in Oklahoma City. He graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma and a law degree from Oklahoma City University. He was the director of the Department of Economic and Community Affairs for the state, which is now called the Department of Commerce, and that was during Governor David Boren’s administration. He managed Governor David Boren’s first campaign for the US Senate in 1978.
He’s written on such diverse topics as baseball, aviation, art, and religion in Oklahoma. His biography of Bryce Harlow was named the Outstanding Oklahoma History Book of the year by none other than the Oklahoma Historical Society, and his book about the life of Ralph Ellison was nominated as a 2005 “Oklahoma Reads” Oklahoma Book Selection. In 2006, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Oklahoma Center for the Book. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame that same year, and he was named as one of the Oklahoma Health Center Foundation’s Treasures for Tomorrow honorees in 2010. And in 2010, he was also inducted into the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame. Bob, one of these days, you’re going to have to really try to make something of your life. (laughter)
Burke: Hey, I am working on it.
Thompson: By the way, in this biography, I cut out a lot.
Burke: Oh, please do, because that bores me.
Blackburn: And Trait, if I can add one anecdote here on Bob. before we get going here and more stories will occur to me as we’re going, but in the long history of the historical society, we’ve always collected photographs. But it was kind of a minor collection, and we estimate that by the late ’70s we had about 40,000 images. But it was fluctuating. We were losing control. They weren’t well cared for. They hadn’t been copied. It was a mess. And but all of us historians, Bob included, I met Bob in the ’70s, but we were all using collections at the historical society from OPUBCO. They had a great collection, which we eventually got, but there was a photographer here in town who is the brother of Tony Hillerman, the famous author of Navajo Series, Barney Hillerman, and Barney had accumulated several collections from the Meyers Collection and others, That Man Stone, and a variety. And I was using his photographs in my books in the late ’70s, early ’80s, while Bob was doing the same thing. Well, at one point, Barney was going out of business. Something was going to happen to that collection. Well, the family wanted money for it. At the time, the historical society was always strapped. We had not yet developed a fundraising methodology on how to go after it.
Thompson: We’re still strapped, by the way. We could use any help you could give us out there.
Blackburn: But we do have money for collections. (laughter)
Thompson: That is true. That is true. We have the Bob Blackburn Collections Endowment now. (laughter)
Blackburn: That’s right. So, we could have responded, but that time we couldn’t. And up steps Bob Burke and says, we have got to save this for the public for all time. Bob led a fundraising effort. We acquired the collection. He donated the money to it, helped orchestrate the acquisition. That really started the expansion of our photo collections. Thereafter, it started growing from 40,000; today, we think—
Thompson: 12 million, 12 million photographs.
Burke: Because remember, you and I were asked to appraise the OPUBCO collection. And so, double B—we’re both double Bs, so he’s BB one, I’m BB two.
Thompson: Yeah. So, if I say Bob, we’re not sure who we’re talking about during this one.
Burke: Hey, our mutual friend Bob Barry, when he was still alive, we really were confused when we would get together.
Blackburn: And Junior.
Burke: But I can’t forget that time, we go out to the garage and at OPUBCO to kind of survey all these. Well, there were what, four million images and they were in about 900 filing cabinets. I thought, we’re not going to be able to look at all of this. Let’s do a sampling. But you’re right. Photographs tell a lot of stories, and I appreciate what you did for all those years because, you know, I think Bob became director of OHS right after Charlie Haskell was governor, right?
(laughter)
Blackburn: It seems like it sometimes. Yeah, I used to have a lot of hair.
(laughter)
Burke: We all did.
(laughter)
Burke: Yeah. You got a nice head of hair though, Trait.
Blackburn: He’s just getting started, though.
(laughter) So let’s just kind of come back in 20 years.
(laughter)
Thompson: Yeah. Come see me in a few years. We’ll see how it is.
(laughter)
Thompson: A few more sessions, of going over across the street to the legislature, and we’ll see how I do. So, well, it’s exciting to have you on the podcast, Bob. I’ve been one to have you on for a long time. And I think the topic that we have to talk about is really a great one for you because one of the main areas of law you practice is workers compensation law.
Burke: Yeah.
Thompson: And so you’ve been in this area, and we’re going to be talking about the labor movement in Oklahoma. And the reason I wanted to talk about this subject is, you know, I give quite a few tours at the Capitol, as you can imagine. I gave one just this weekend to a friend of yours and a group of alumni from Stanford University, and it was a great group of folks. But I always stop at the state seal. And on the state seal is what is called our state motto. Although we, it’s not actually codified in the Constitution as our state motto, which is—and I did look up how to say this properly for all you Latin aficionados out there— Labor Omnia Vincit is the proper way to pronounce our motto, which means work conquers all things. And when I tell people about that motto, I say, you know, a lot of people think it’s just a nod to, you know, we were agrarian folks in the early days. We were hard-working people, you know, bricklayers and farmers and carpenters and all those kind of things. So this is a tribute to our hardworking nature as Oklahomans, which, in a manner of speaking, it is.
But what’s laying behind this phrase is the fact that this is actually paying homage to organized labor. And organized labor in our state had a massive impact on our Constitution, on our laws. It really was everything. And I thought, we need to help people understand more about the labor movement in the state and where we came from, and how we got some of the laws and the provisions in our Constitution. So that made me want to do that. By the way, I’m just going to, since we’re here and we’re talking about the official unofficial state motto, that phrase, Labor Omnia Vincit was adapted from Virgil’s Georgics book. And there’s a phrase in there, and basically the poem was written in support of Augustus Caesar’s “Back to the Land Policy,” which was aimed at encouraging more Romans to become farmers and then became a frequent motto that was used by various aspects of the US labor movement. And, so I, I thought we’d just point that out while we’re on the topic.
Burke: So, it’s been a fight for a long time.
Thompson: It has been a fight for a long time. And, uh, which one is BB one? Help me remember.
Burke: He’s BB one.
Thompson: Okay, Dr. Blackburn is BB one. (laughter)
Thompson: So. I was going see-
Burke: I’m actually a year older, I think.
Blackburn: We are about the same age.
Thompson: And I just feel the same age as you all.
Blackburn: Well, George Nigh calls us two-Bob-squared.
Burke: No, no, you’re right. He does. I forget, that’s what he calls us.
Blackburn: He introduces us the same way, officially.
Thompson: Well, whatever George Nigh says is the gospel.
Burke: Hey, yes it is, it is.
Thompson: Well, BB one, if you could give us, you know what’s important to understand about how we get to... Because, today, you know, in 2001, right-to-work passed. We’re not known as a particularly maybe labor-friendly state today in terms of organized labor. So it’s a quite a surprise to learn that we do have a lot of ties to organized labor. And, Bob, if you could kind of give us a sense what’s going on in the United States in that progressive populist time, 1880s, moving into the 1890s. Oklahoma Territory is formed in 1890. And what’s happening in our country that really leads to the labor movement taking hold in Oklahoma?
Blackburn: Well, I think you really have to go back to the 1870s in territorial history. But to really understand that, to provide a little context, you have to go back to Europe and European traditions. Coming out of the Middle Ages, where you have very strong crafts and labor controlled much of society through these craft guilds. And so Europeans were used to having guilds and craftsmen in different varieties, later unions, but people working together in the same industry. So the glove makers would have a craft, the chimney sweeps would have their craft, they would set the rules for themselves, they would train apprentices. And there was a way to organize and largely in the construction industry. So the cathedrals would have been built by the guilds. And so coming out of the Middle Ages into Europe, you have a tradition of labor working together.
Well, then you throw in the westward expansion into the North American continent and the impact of the frontier. And there’s an entire genre of literature on the impact of the frontier and what makes America unique from Europe. And part of that is we became an agricultural society with land on the frontiers. People could move out away from institutions, away from organization. And, you know, all these American myths such as, you know, hard work and perseverance and standing on your own and, you know, standing strong, comes out of this frontier experience where it really is a celebration of the individual, which goes up against that European tradition of the group. And so you have this dynamic evolving in America as we go from a largely agricultural society, a Jeffersonian democracy kind of thing, where these are individual Americans, and Thomas Jefferson thought the perfect American was a farmer; growing their own materials, making their own goods. You know, this the self-reliance is kind of an expression of that.
Well, that begins to change, especially after the Civil War. Several things happening. One, we’re evolving into an industrial nation, starting in the 1820s and ’30s. That’s happening very quickly. So rather than just an agricultural nation, an economy, we’re becoming more industrialized, especially after the Civil War, especially in the North. And then you throw on top of that migration out of Europe and especially eastern Europe and coming out of Germany and coming out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as Scotland and Ireland and England, and France to some degree, and the Italians. These people are bringing with them these old medieval traditions of working together as guilds and easily translatable to unions. And so they’re coming to America. And so the labor movements really start after the Civil War, becoming very strong parts of our community. And of course, the struggles, the industrialists and especially farmers are kind of pushing back. But then you throw another layer on top of that trend, which is what we call populism. And populism, socialism are very close cousins. And to step from one to the other is very easy. And it’s a very easy step over to what we call progressivism, which is more of a Theodore Roosevelt kind of thing, who would have been opposed to the socialism. But you get commonalities among the socialists, the populists, the progressives. And part of the the socialist/populist is that, individuals should be considered foremost in society. We’ve got to control the economy to a degree. We need some kind of a social safety net for people. We need to make sure we’re taking care of those who can’t take care of themselves—children, those with disabilities. And, you know, if you fast forward into the New Deal of the 1930s, it’s put on steroids. But that’s all happening in the late 19th century in America. And so, you throw in this unionization, the changing nature of our economy, and then you get the first railroads built into the Indian Territory, 1870, 1871, through the Indian nations. And with them come the workers. The Indians were not going to sit there and work on the railroads. They were not going to be the conductors and the engineers and the maintenance crews. And so the companies building these rail lines were bringing in workers. Many of them were at the bottom of the pay scale, the bottom of society in the east. So you get a lot of eastern Europeans, you get them coming in with their own traditions, and that brings in the unions with the railroads as they come into the territory, and it’s growing slowly and changing.
Things don’t happen overnight. And then you throw into that the emergence of the coal industry. And one reason the Katy Railroad was built where it is through McAlester along that route, is that J. J. McAlester recognized there were coal seams popping out of the ground around Krebs and Hartshorne and McAlester. And so the Katy officials needed that coal to fire the engines that would haul the goods and make them a profit. And so the coal industry starts, and in eastern Oklahoma, it becomes a deep shaft. It’s not strip at the time. It was later turned to strip mining, but at the time it was deep-shaft mining, very dangerous conditions, exploitation. These workers had little voice in the political system and in Indian Territory, even less because they were not citizens. They were not voters. So, if there was an organized government around them, it was tribal, limited to tribal members. And so, they were basically disenfranchised when they came to the Indian Territory. And the union really began as a popular alternative to just doing what the mine owners say. And so with all of these things changing and the industrialization, by the time we get to the Constitutional Convention, you not only have the labor movement growing out of the railroad industry, and by this time, you have all these railroad communities such as Shawnee and Chickasha and El Reno, as well as Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and the railroads being some of the most important investments in any community. You lived or died by being on the rail at the turn of the century. And so you’re putting these little pockets of organized labor and with their salaries and with the money flowing into the community, working with the newspapers, working with the school systems and the people who lead a community.
The bankers, they understand the importance of the railroad, unions have more of a voice. The miners are struggling. You get some strikes finally. But they were organized and become militant to a degree. And then one last layer, then I’ll stop, is that farmers are subject to two whims in their lives. One is climate. They deal with drought. They deal with hailstorms. Maybe the rains don’t come at the right time. Maybe they come too much the wrong time, and they lose their crops, or they’re at the whim of nature, but they’re also at the whim of commodities prices on the world market. And Oklahomans tended to think, well, we’re rugged individualists out here on the frontier. But the price of cotton in England, the price of wheat in Russia would affect them and the soil in the Oklahoma and Indian Territories. Well, as they suffered from from low prices, from the vagaries of nature, they look for who’s the culprit here? Who do we have to blame? And everyone wants to blame somebody else. Well, they were blaming the railroads because they would raise their rates during harvest season. They would allocate cars where they wanted them and if a local group was too militant, they just wouldn’t send the railcars there. And so you get this antagonism between farmers and the rail, and then you throw in the influence of banks. Bankers become the evil empire to the populace. William Jennings Bryan at the national level, the socialists and the populists in Oklahoma. How do you control the banks? How do you control the railroads advocating public ownership of utilities, public ownership of the railroad? That became a big issue at this time. Today, people would think you’re crazy if you advocate behind the railroads and making them our tools of industry, but at the time it was very popular, and many farmers looking for a way out of it started organizing.
Farmers Union is one of the bits still around today, mainly an insurance company, but still with some of the same principles that we recognize the fact that farmers and ranchers should be working together for the common cause, and what can we do as a group? And so they start with all these local chapters around the state. I edited a book years ago on the history of the Farmers Union. It’s a difficult read, but a necessary read on how they grew. And it was as much as social as it was economic. But the farmers unions join their efforts as groups with labor in the mines, labor in the railroads. And as the cities start to grow, Oklahoma City goes from about 4,000 people in 1893 to 50,000 people by 1907. And as Tulsa is growing with oil, then you get the Barbers’ Union and you get the Union of Bricklayers. It goes on and on. So urbanization is happening. And so all of these causes come together. And for our particular story with statehood and the Constitutional Convention in 1906 and 1907, just at the peak of all of these groups coming together, joining forces and saying, we are going to be a force and a voice at the Constitutional Convention,
Thompson: BB two, you’re from Broken Bow, and southeastern Oklahoma is, was mining country. And, you know, you’re from the Choctaw Nation. So the first, the very first union that was formed in what is now Oklahoma was in Indian Territory, and it was the Knights of Labor that organized miners. And this was in August of 1882.
Burke: And the reason that has to happen is, I think it’s uncontroverted, that mines in Oklahoma were the most dangerous in the whole world in the late 1800s. I’ve read statistics before that showed that, the rate of deaths per ton of coal pulled out was double than any other state, was double that in Britain. So, you have these incredible explosions. There was one at Krebs, I think, that killed what, nearly 100 people at one time. One mine explosion. So you have the most dangerous mines in the world.
Thompson: Yeah.
Burke: And as Bob said, nobody is sticking up for these folks. So it was ripe for unionization.
Thompson: Well, in Indian Territory, you know, there was no territorial government. There was no uniform system of laws. You had each individual reservation. And you’re right, those mines, our mines were twice as deadly as those in Pennsylvania; 13.1 men killed for every million tons of coal. And there were ten major mine disasters that were recorded between 1885 and 1906.
Burke: Yeah. So, somebody has got to represent the unions. Okay? Another thing is happening. As the need for unionization came along because of the dangerous mines, you also have, in the populist movement, a hatred of big business. Because, you know, we talk about today, you’ll see about some merger, where some company buys somebody else. This was happening big time as the 20th century was born. You have huge companies that are formed from buying others. Even in Oklahoma, you have like the Rock Island Railroad had bought up all the local railroads. So, as you get to the Constitutional Convention, you have people like Peter Hanraty, who had come here originally from Scotland via Pennsylvania, that would become the union leader and vice chairman of the Constitutional Convention. I note, too, that the unions were so important to the Constitutional Convention that our first governor, Charlie Haskell—Charles Haskell—I didn’t know him to call him Charlie.
(laughs) But Charles Haskell actually made a motion at the Constitutional Convention that the pen that was signed, that people signed for our Constitution was to be given to Samuel Gompers, who was the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) before it ever got together with the CIO as we know it today. So, you have big business. You have people like Charles Haskell and “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, who became chairman of the Constitutional Convention. Certainly, Bill Murray is a big-time populist, and they called them trusts. But all the big companies were not necessarily a trust, but there was a terrible hatred of big business, and that, frankly, the big business and the consolidation of businesses was causing commodity prices to increase. The railroads: big business.
So, you come to the Constitutional Convention and you have people like Peter Hanraty and Kate Barnard, our first commissioner of Charities and Corrections. I’ll talk about Miss Kate in a moment. But Peter Hanraty was such an interesting guy. He had started working in the coal mines in his native Scotland at age nine, so he immigrated to the United States. He works in the mines in Pennsylvania. He tries to do some organizing there and basically was run out of Pennsylvania. So, he ends up in Indian Territory. And his job in the mines, was to go in and to light, or begin, a dynamite charge. And many of the explosions were caused by all the dust in the coal mines. In fact, a side note, Hanraty saved no telling how many lives because having had the experience of doing that, he later developed a process of where they would wet down the dust, and that at least, when they did have an explosion, it caused it to be less severe. So, Hanraty becomes a major leader in the coal patch and in the mines. And then we get to the Constitutional Convention, he’s the vice chairman. He and Charles Haskell want to be known as the voice of the populists. In fact, Charles Haskell had, on the campaign trail, he talked about there are two kinds of people: producers and parasites. And he talked about the producers are the people, everybody from farmers to the craftsmen, people who were producing things for consumption by American society. Then the parasites were, frankly, the big business people who were sitting off in Chicago or somewhere in the east, and they were the parasites. And so, you had this feeling that we’ve got to do everything we can in our Constitution to prevent big government, which they assumed was run by the parasites, and we have to limit the authority of corporations. That’s why we certainly had the most liberal constitution of its day. And that’s why we have a Corporation Commission today, because these guys were absolutely insistent that we controlled corporations.
Thompson: William Jennings Bryan thought our Constitution was better than the American Constitution.
Burke: Oh, yeah. And then he would come down occasionally, and we have several— he was living in Missouri— and several of our provisions of our Constitution actually came from Missouri. He would hand-deliver them down here.
Blackburn: You know, Trait, one thing too, as Bob was giving that overview. You know, we’ve always had leaders from different parts of society. We have those that we need economic development. We’ve got to do this. We have to have schools. Well, the people respond. And if you can’t get the will of the people and a majority, you’re not going to elect the people you want elected. And part of the resentment at the time that gave Peter Hanraty and Kate Barnard such support across the state is that many farmers were in debt. Debt was a huge issue on the frontier. And with the Homestead Act, after five years of living on property and making certain improvements, you got title to it. And once you got title, fee title to your land, you could mortgage it. And most of the people who had made the land runs who came in had very little with them. So they didn’t have the capital.
Oklahoma did not have much of a banking system. And even in the Constitution, single-unit banking came out of that because they didn’t trust banks, but people would take out a mortgage on their land to buy the plow later, to buy the tractor or build a barn, or to buy your chicks so you could raise poultry, or to get in the market buying horses, mules, or planting your next wheat crop. Whatever it might be. There was always this need for capital, and many Oklahomans had borrowed money. And then when you get a drought or a crop failure or the price goes to half of what it was when you planted and you took out your loan, you have this general distress among farmers across the territory. And they’re on small plots that are not highly productive at a time when farms are being consolidated nationally, and it would be in Oklahoma as well. But you still had people on that land still with this dream of being a farmer, of living this independent life, of growing your own food, and your own crops and being the master of your own kingdom. But yet they were burdened with this debt, and looking at the railroads as taking advantage of them at the worst time of the year. And so the Peter Hanratys of the world had a very willing electorate out there saying, yeah, go get them. And that’s the way politics works.
Thompson: Yeah, it’s really interesting. You know, when you look at what was being faced by farmers in Oklahoma Territory, between 1889 and 1897, wheat prices fell 15%, corn prices 17%, cotton by 30%. And so, in many cases it was costing more to produce these, and these are three key crops here in Oklahoma. Then you would get by the time you went and sold, and the farmers started looking around and saying, by the time we have to ship things at the railroads, by the time the middlemen all get their cut, we’re getting nothing out of this. And so this is when they start getting together and they, there’s an organization called the Farmers Alliance that pops up in the 1890s. And the Farmers Alliance, really they wanted to start setting up these cooperatives and where we can all kind of gather together, we can sell our stuff together, and we can try and take out the middleman. Well, unfortunately, it wasn’t terribly successful because what they found out was even with these cooperatives, they all had overhead, and they all had to be able to, you know, they had set up these stores that only farmers could use, and then everybody was buying on credit. Well, when everybody’s buying on credit, no one is able to pay cash at the time, then they’re not able to sustain themselves. And so, the Farmers Union is created in 1902 to assist members in buying and selling. They want to educate the agricultural class and scientific farming methods. They want to systemize methods of production and distribution and bring farmers up to the standards of other industries. By 1904, there are 150,000 members of the Farmers Union across the United States, and the Farmers Union comes to Oklahoma in 1903 and has 524 local organizations within 18 months. By the way, I got this information from the great historian, Danny Goebel.
Burke: Okay.
Thompson: Whose book is kind of like one of my go-tos when I’m looking at early Oklahoma history.
Burke: Hey, looked at that early this morning.
Thompson: It’s called Progressive Oklahoma: The Making of a New Kind of State. And I can’t recommend it highly enough if you’re wanting to know kind of the foundations of our state. But yeah, there was this sense in pre-Civil War, if you’re a farmer, you’re selling most of your stuff within a local market. What’s going on in Europe, or what’s going on in the eastern part of the United States, it’s impacting you a little, but it’s not impacting you a lot. And it’s the same with industrialization. You know, pre-Civil War, you’re going to go set up, you’re maybe, you’re a silversmith or maybe you’re a carpenter, and you’re going to be dealing with a local market. But once we get into industrialization, there was this feeling of helplessness. Now you’re an employee of another trust or a giant corporation, and now you don’t have as much power to determine your own destiny. And the unions came along to try and alleviate that sense of helplessness, that in other words, when we all get together collectively, we’re going to have this ability to move the needle. And of course, in the mines, you know, Hanraty wasn’t successful right off the bat. There were several strikes that were several years long, and it took a long time to get some traction on actually getting what they wanted to get in terms of pay raises, in terms of a reasonable workday, child labor, all of those kinds of things.
Burke: Yeah. Especially before statehood, there was one strike, for four and a half years. And it was really tough for the Hanratys and the leaders of the time to sustain the miners during that time. But, so you have the farmers that organized because they recognized that there is strength in numbers, and they as an individual farmer, as an individual miner, or in the cities, as an individual streetcar driver, they realize that they can’t do that by themselves. But I really believe that we would not have had the incredible early history in Oklahoma of a great impact of organized labor had it not been for the distrust of big companies and the horrible mine conditions in McAlester, Krebs, Hartshorne, those areas. And a third thing, the distrust of commodity markets and the railroads. All of this foments, and as Bob said, then politicians—Charles Haskell, was not a union organizer. He was from Muskogee, but he knew if he was going to be elected as the first governor of Oklahoma, he had to be a populist. He had to address the issues that all the people were facing. Because everybody had lots of problems.
And so, we come together to the Constitutional Convention, and I love to tell the story about the only woman who was able to address the Constitutional Convention in Guthrie is a five-foot, 90-pound dynamo. Kate Barnard had come to Oklahoma with her father around 1900. Some of her first, she became famous, really because, two reasons: she raised a lot of money. She would put little ads in the newspaper. Bring all of your clothing down to my address, and I will distribute it to the poor. She also was very interested in mine safety and child labor laws. In fact, she wrote the child labor law provisions in the constitution. I can just see this. I would have loved to have been there when she would address, with her 90 pounds, would stand up on a rock at Krebs and address a bunch of miners. But she would convince them to approve the constitution because she went around this state and was as responsible as any person in getting the people of Oklahoma to approve this new constitution. She would not have been allowed to speak to the Constitutional Convention, however, without the intervention of several of the unions. Before statehood, the farmers and the miners union, they all got together at a big meeting in Shawnee and came up with what we know from history is 24 things that they wanted in the Constitution called the Shawnee Demands. And there were things that today we would just assume that everybody’s always had, like, fewer, I mean, don’t work more than eight-hour days. Don’t, have children, 12-year-old kids being exploited in the mines or on farms, and so all of this is coming together at one time.
But Miss Kate took advantage of that and went around the state and was allowed, because of the influence of the unions, to address the Constitutional Convention. And she told them like it was, you know, she said, if you don’t approve some of these items on the child labor laws especially, then I hope that your crops—she’s telling people, you farmers who come up here as delegates to the Constitutional Convention—I hope that your crops die and wither away like the children who are going to wither away if you don’t pass these child labor law provisions.
Thompson: Tell us what you really think, Kate.
Burke: Yeah, hey. Well, at 90 pounds, she would tell them.
Thompson: Well, you know Kate Barnard, she wouldn’t have been, as you mentioned, she wouldn’t have been allowed to address the Constitutional Convention if she did not have a huge power base behind her, and that power base came from the unions. We talked a little bit about this when Bob and I did our episode on Kate Barnard a few months ago, but she founded several labor unions in Oklahoma City. She founded the Federal Union number 12374 for unskilled laborers in 1907, and she builds her own power base. In other words, she wasn’t going to sit around and wait to be recognized. She was going to go out there. She was going to build her own power base, and she was going to be heard. And yes, once again, she was one of the driving forces at the Shawnee Demands, which was in August of 1906.
And what’s interesting about the Shawnee Demands is it’s not one labor union. It’s a group of labor unions that get together both the industrial and the agrarian labor union. So you’ve got the Farmers Union, the Twin Territories Federation of Labor, and then you have other independent railroad brotherhoods that meet and they say, okay, we know from the Enabling Act that is passed that we’re going to get to vote on a constitution. If we’re going to have a constitution, then here are some of the things we want. The agrarian folks wanted, they wanted a commissioner of agriculture. They wanted a liberal homestead exemption law, and they wanted the prohibition of gambling and farm products. The labor forces wanted an eight-hour work day for miners and public employees, the creation of the labor commissioner, the chief mine inspector. They wanted health and safety measures for laborers and protection for employees injured on the job, which is something you still work in today, Bob. And also getting, Bob, into that progressive and populist era. We want the initiative petition, we want the referendum, we want the ability to recall, we want direct primary elections as well, which is something that was not common at the time.
Burke: Yeah. Hey, Bob Blackburn, would you agree with me that no other special interest had as much input into the Oklahoma Constitution as the unions of the day?
Blackburn: I would. You know, today we look around, and we see the power and the voice of tribal interests that was not there at the time. The federal government, with the Curtis Act of 1898, says we’re going to abolish tribal governments. Indian people were allotted their own land and just said, hey, we’re moving on from the Indian Territory. So they were really oppressed at the time. They were not really a major voice. There were a few American Indians, but mainly the mixed bloods like Clem Rogers at the Con-Con, but he was not speaking so much as a Cherokee as he was as a big rancher-landowner. So, yes, I would say that they were the best organized of any of the individual parts of the community. Tulsa and Oklahoma City were separated by parties. Oklahoma City was more of a democratic town. Southern democrat, I might add. Not so much modern Democratic Party. Tulsa was more of a Republican Party. Politically, the parties were not as strong as they would become because the state was so split with the land runs and the way settlement patterns came about. So the Cherokee Outlet may have been a majority Republicans, but then the old Kiowa and Comanche lands open in 1901 would have been more Southern Democrats. So you get this patchwork quilt of settlement where the political parties cannot really put things together yet.
Burke: And the parties were not powerful at all.
Blackburn: No, no. Very weak. And the Republicans had had the advantage of patronage during the territorial years with the territorial governors, all with one exception, appointed by Republican presidents. So the Republican Party had patronage, but that was going away. And so, people are always looking ahead, how am I going to get these jobs? And so the parties were secondary. The tribes had been silenced for the moment and labor and farmers all came together at the right time.
Thompson: Going back to your comment about the Constitutional Convention honoring Samuel Gompers. Charles Haskell had the resolution, and he gave him one of the pens. And it said, “in commemoration of the first constitution that has ever been written in the United States, in which the labor interests have taken a part, the same protecting the interests of the common people more fully than any other constitution in the United States.”
Burke: Oh, yeah. I mean, the eastern states, especially some of those that were highly unionized, they marveled at how Oklahoma was able to enact provisions in a constitution that protected common folks, you know, and that’s because of this basic distrust of big government and distrust. I mean, our Constitution went so far as to—and I think it’s still in there—someday I’ve got to sue on that. (laughter)
Burke: No, because, because it even sets the flashpoint of kerosene. Our constitution does.
Thompson: And the, you know, that’s one of the things when people make fun of our constitution, they say it’s more like, you know, an episode of, or reading an edition of War and Peace than it is what should be a constitution, which is a basic framework. And then to let the legislature write the laws that sort of fill all of that out. But you have to understand what’s going on in Oklahoma, and it goes back to the time when, once again, people felt terribly exploited.
Why did they set the flashpoint of kerosene? Because the people that were selling kerosene were putting gasoline in the kerosene, and they were trying to sell less-expensive kerosene, water it down with gasoline, which has a higher flash point, which means that if you do something wrong, you’re going to blow yourself up. And that actually happened several times. So they said, we’re not going to let that happen anymore. We’re going to protect the people. Here’s the flash point of kerosene.
Burke: Exactly, yeah. Because of this distrust of business. You know, one of the things, the Shawnee Demands, when we get to the Constitutional Convention, the unions don’t get everything, but they do get a mine inspector. You’ll remember, Bob, until 1976, when we had the “Yes, All Eight” campaign. We still elected the state mine inspector. I always thought, as a young aide to David Boren, there was an office in the basement of the State Capitol of the state mine inspector. The light was never on in there because for many, many, many years, we elected, and reelected a guy named Ward Padgett. Now, I never knew if he existed or not. I never met him. Did you?
Blackburn: No.
Burke: Now, he did, and George Nigh said he was a good guy because he was from McAlester. But we elected the, we elected for nearly three-quarters of a century after the constitution, we elected the state mine inspector. We did away with that. We still elect the labor commissioner, and that’s unusual for states to do that. We have a very good one right now, I might say.
Blackburn: I agree.
Burke: We, but that populist attitude of the day is still with us, 100, nearly 120 years later.
Thompson: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And there’s been several proposals over the last few years by the legislature, to curb the initiative petition process or to change it a little bit to where it’s, well, you need to go get a certain number of signatures in every congressional district or in all these different places. And the people have really pushed back on that. I think, because, you know, there is this sense of wanting to be able to take matters into your own hands if the legislature, if the powers that be aren’t getting it done for you.
Blackburn: You know, Trait, excuse me Bob, this is a little away from labor, but I think we have to understand it to understand the success of the labor forces at the time of the Con-Con is that Oklahoma has a culture that’s been dominated not numerically but by strength of the culture of the Scots-Irish culture. James Webb, a US senator, wrote a book about the Scots-Irish in American history. And he goes into this culture that goes back to the Highlands of Scotland, where you fear those people coming out of London who want to take away your weapons. You have a fear of government at a distance. You want local control. You want someone in your valley or your tribe to be that. So you get that in the county commissioners in the Constitutional Convention, who have probably more power than any other elected officials at the time. And that’s the way Oklahomans wanted it. And Scots-Irish culture is still there today. When I talk, when I get questions from reporters about a certain election, I say, well, you’ve got to throw in that Scots-Irish attitude that all of us have. Most of us have Scots-Irish culture. My family does.
Burke: I did that test with Ancestry.com. I’m 99.2% Scotch-Irish.
Blackburn: And I’m over 80. So, you know, we all share-
Thompson: I guess I need to do the test. I don’t know.
Blackburn: But that was so dominant. And as James Webb says in his book, it may not be the majority of people, but it’s going to be the dominant culture because it is so strong, and it’s so embedded in this American ideal of the rugged individualist on the frontier. You take that, and you still see it today with don’t mess with a gun on my hip, don’t tell me what to do out of Washington, DC. We don’t want those federal funds, and that’s happened in Oklahoma. Alfalfa Bill did not want federal relief money in the 1930s; largely a Scots-Irish attitude about government at a distance.
Burke: So when he was governor, he said “the New Deal is a raw deal.”
(laughing)
Blackburn: Yeah. And then you get into this isolationism. Right now, America’s going through these pains again of do we isolate ourselves, withdraw aid from Israel, from Egypt, from Ukraine? This isolationism is part of that Scots-Irish culture, is that let’s take care of the people in our valley, and let’s keep others from coming in and changing the way we live. And that’s been there, and it was there in a very strong sense, when Peter Hanraty and Kate Barnard were speaking to the people. This is people power. We’ve got to rise up and represent us in our valley, in our community, and it’s still a part of our political dialog today.
Burke: I think one of the most ironic things about elections in the history of Oklahoma, is that in our first election, Kate Barnard was the leading vote getter. She was our first commissioner of Charities and Corrections, and we elected that until that same “Yes, All Eight” campaign in 1976 made that, and well, we did away with that and just simply have a commissioner of labor, and we have a corrections department, but we did away. We had that for three-quarters of a century. But Miss Kate led all vote getters, including Charles Haskell, who was our first governor. Yet Miss Kate could not vote for herself. Because we were still a decade-and-a-half away from women’s suffrage.
Thompson: So, BB two, I’d be interested—at the risk of getting a little political—but, you know, and we don’t have time for a deep dive into this, but looking forward, you know, with our our labor roots in Oklahoma and now looking at where Oklahoma is today in terms of embracing sort of the union sentiment in unions, where did that shift happen over time?
Burke: I think the shift happened after World War II, because after World War I, you had a proliferation of unions in Oklahoma, everybody from bricklayers to streetcar drivers. You had a lot of strikes. Now, that’s not just in Oklahoma, but then after World War II, we had times of prosperity. Companies were making money, so they were not, in my opinion, as tough on workers as people had been before. And then, Oklahoma ultimately passes a right-to-work law in this century. I mean, it took 40 years to do it because it was tried for a long time. History. I don’t know what effect that election had on Oklahoma.
Thompson: And basically, right-to-work means that you, if you’re working in a union shop, you can’t be compelled to join the union.
Burke: Absolutely. Yeah.
Blackburn: And Trait, excuse me, Bob.
Burke: No, I was just going to say, I don’t know, in our lifetime, will we ever know the effect of that vote, which has been 20 years ago? I don’t know how you measure that.
Blackburn: I think you can measure it politically, if not socially or economically, but another element there, after World War II, and the reason the unions remained as strong as they did, is that the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce created a new division in 1947 called industrial development. How do we bring industry to state? They saw the impact of Tinker Air Force Base, which started as Midwest Air Depot and then renamed it, and then in Tulsa, you get the old Douglas Bomber Plant becoming American Airlines, which is unionized. Business leaders in Oklahoma City, we want that same thing. So, how do we get the jobs? How do we get others to bring in? Well, almost all of the companies that come in during that era all the way from Western Electric, which was the industrial side of Ma Bell, which was making all of the switches, all of the phone sets, everything else was unionized. The last really to be recruited was General Motors, which was unionized. And I had a person very involved with all that saying, we never worried that they were unionized. We just wanted their jobs in Oklahoma. But when General Motors came in, Western Electric was there.
You get other industries that are unionized. They’re putting together their political action committees. Yeah, the business owners have their own so-called PACs and say, hey, you know, let’s pass the envelope around all the executives, and everyone puts in $100 bill. That was just the way of life in Oklahoma. Well, the unions then do the same thing. So at General Motors, passed the envelope, everyone puts in $10. They don’t have $100, but they might have $10. And then they work. I remember when my wife ran for the legislature in ’94, Bob, you remember that year, same year Frank Keating was elected who was a proponent of right-to-work. Almost every Democrat had to use printers that had the union label on it. You did not print a brochure or a poster that didn’t have that union stamp on it. The Firefighters Union in Oklahoma City, the the Fraternal Order of Police, which is really a union, was very active. The Printers Union was still very active. And so into the ’90s, you still have unions being very much a part of the political system.
And right-to-work, in my opinion, was largely political. How do you weaken your opponents? That’s just the nature of competition, whether it’s sports or the world of politics, is that we can weaken the Democrats by weakening the people who are supporting these candidates. And so it really starts to change in the ’90s. And then in general, in American public opinion, I think Ronald Reagan had an impact on the attitude towards— when he fired all of the air traffic controllers.
Blackburn: That was a huge blow.
Thompson: Even though he had been a union guy during his time in Hollywood.
Blackburn: But of course, the reality for him, how do you weaken your opponent?
Blackburn: And that’s just the way it is in any part of life. But the unions really start taking a hit in the ’80s and ’90s and into the 21st century.
Burke: And it has to be partisan, because throughout our history, Republicans have been known to be pro-business, and Democrats nationally and in Oklahoma were more, not necessarily pro-labor unions, but were, they took the opposite view, and with few exceptions, as we have elected more Republican officeholders, I believe that the attitude in Oklahoma now is totally pro-business. From the legislative, from the—I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m saying that our governor is pro-business. Because I, as a representative of injured workers for 43 years, like a fair playing field. But there are those in Oklahoma who want pro-business justices on the Supreme Court. Well, I want a pro, I want justices on the Supreme Court who are unbiased and who will give all parties— but, I mean, we have an attitude, largely in the legislature and in the executive office, let’s be pro-business. Now, part of that is, hey, we want to create jobs. And this industrial development— and Bob is so correct, that the Oklahoma City Chamber in doing that, in getting jobs. But we can’t be just totally pro-business. But what’s interesting to me as a historian is that our attitudes here in the 2020s are 180 degrees what they were at statehood. We were pro-individual in 1907. We, because of all these unions, we really were, we have a distrust of big business. We do not have that now, and in fact we promote big business.
Thompson: Well, and now the legislature has made several attempts to give a large sum of public money to entice big business to come to Oklahoma. And perhaps that’s just the way of doing things now. As we get ready to wrap up, I do want to tell one story. I’m not sure. Were you aware there was a labor strike when they built the State Capitol?
Burke: I don’t think so.
Thompson: Yeah, so I uncovered this in the editions of the Daily Oklahoman from 1916. So the March 2, 1916, edition of the Daily Oklahoman, the granite workers wanted a raise. They were making $4 a day. These were the people that were out there. So, the granite on the Capitol, there’s just really a small section of Oklahoma granite on the Capitol. It was quarried at Ten Acre Rock near Tishomingo, Oklahoma. It was brought up to the Capitol grounds, and it was unhewn. And so, there were granite workers working that were carving the granite to place on the building. And they wanted a raise from $4 a day to $4.50 a day. And so, 95, there were 95 granite cutters that were employed in the construction of the Capitol, and it says, “they refused to go to work on Wednesday.” And the granite was about half completed on the entire building. And they walked off the job, and so, I’ve kind of traced this through several other articles. Well, the strike eventually goes to all the other workers on the building too. So, it goes from the granite workers to a general strike. Everybody walks off the job. And this goes for about six weeks.
Burke: Wow.
Thompson: There was a six-week labor strike on the Capitol.
Burke: This is the year before the Capitol is finished.
Thompson: That’s right. The Capitol was finished in June of 1917. And so, April 18, 1916, edition of the Daily Oklahoman said “Monday marked the beginning of the second week of the resignation of all the union workers on the State Capitol building. The day was occupied by conferences by officials of the Oklahoma State Federation of Labor and the offices of the organization in the Patterson Building.”
Burke: Now, who was paying the workers?
Thompson: So this would have been the Stewart Construction Company.
Burke: Okay. Because they were the general contractor.
Thompson: But, April 21, 1916, edition, “the laborers employed in the construction of the Capitol, who had been out on strike the last 10 days, will return to work Friday morning, according to a statement by J. H. Fredrickson, who was the supervisor on the project.” And they reached an agreement after a series of conferences between the strikers and the representatives of the granite workers.
Burke: Did the granite workers get that 50-cent raise?
Thompson: As best as I can recall, they ended up getting that raise to $4.25.
Burke: Oh, okay. I could have mediated that in two days. (laughter)
Thompson: I bet you could have. I bet you could have, Bob. But, so a six-week strike on the Capitol building, interestingly enough, they still finished the Capitol about two months ahead of schedule. So even with all of that.
Burke: With that extra quarter a day. Yeah, that’s incentive.
Thompson: So, well, this has been very enlightening. And Bob, I want to thank you for taking time to come on the program and to talk about this and I think a lot of folks out there out there will learn a lot about our labor history in the state of Oklahoma.
Burke: It’s very interesting. Thank you for having me.
Blackburn: Thank you, Bob.
Thompson: Well, BB one, as always, (laughter) it’s been a lot of fun with you too. And so, we’ll look forward to talking to you for our next episode.
Blackburn: Very good. Thank you, Trait.
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory, I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
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