The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends!

Act II of the Rogers and Hammerstein 1943 classic Oklahoma! opens with the song "The Farmer and the Cowman."  The song highlights the adversarial relations which, in the imaginative Oklahoma of the play, constitute the full spectrum of human difference.  In the universe of this musical, everyone -- with the sole exception of the Syrian pedlar Ali Hakim -- is white.  I wrote in a previous post about the many seemingly exclusive Oklahomas we encounter in art.  John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Woody Guthrie, S.E. Hinton, Lynn Riggs, Fus Fixico, Will Rogers... encountering their works one after another would lead the audience to think Oklahoma is not one place at all.

I remembered the song only last week.  It reminded me again that this monster success (over 2000 Broadway performances) isn't just a story.  It purports to be the story.  Consider these lyrics:

Territory folks should stick together,

Territory folks should all be pals.

Cowboys dance with farmer's daughters,

Farmers dance with the ranchers' gals.

One would be forgiven for thinking these white people were the people of the "territory."

Oklahoma was admitted to statehood in 1907. The play takes place just before that. The first thing to note is that the town of Claremore, where the action takes place, was not in the Oklahoma Territory.  Claremore was in the Indian Territory, which was merged with the Oklahoma Territory to form the state of Oklahoma.  Claremore is the seat of Rogers County, which straddled the line between the Cherokee and Creek Nations. So where are all the Native people in Oklahoma!?

Congress called for a special census for the new state, so we actually have population figures for Claremore, Oklahoma in 1907.  There were 2064 residents, of whom 16% were Native American and 10% were African American.  Where were all the Black people in Oklahoma!?

This is what academics like to call "erasure." It doesn't just take place in imaginative works, either.  Between 1890 and 1907, in the Creek Nation alone, the white population went from 40,674 to 144,457! Overwhelming the Creek people with white emigrants, legislatively privatizing Creek land through individual allotments so that the surplus could be sold, and then stealing the allotments themselves all constitute erasure in fact. By all means, check out Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann or And Still the Waters Run by Angie Debo.

The farmer and the cowman? How about the banker, the real estate dealer and the murderer? They were friends.