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);