Edna Ferber's America

4. The Cowboys, the Indians, and the Jew: Cimarron

63 4 THE COWBOYS, THE INDIANS, AND THE JEW Cimarron Not long before she died in 1968, Ferber considered writing a book about American Indians.1 She visited schools and families in tribal communities from Florida to Arizona, taking her usual, copious notes on her experiences. She considered different protagonists: a young anthropologist , a historian, and a worker on the reservation. But Ferber never resolved the lead-character question because she never wrote the novel, leaving forever open the question of what she would have done with a chance to rewrite her original rumination centered on American Indians : the 1929 Oklahoma epic Cimarron, a novel that reaped tremendous financial success, but troubled Ferber both at the time of its publication and as she watched her legacy take shape. “All the critics and the hundreds of thousands of readers took Cimarron as a colorful romantic Western American novel,” she wrote in A Peculiar Treasure, even though to her, the novel was “a malevolent picture” (1939, 302). She meant to do more with Cimarron than excite audiences with a cowboy-and-Indians story, and with its focus on racial tension, appropriation, and the construction of society, she did.         1. There is, of course, a long-standing debate over what people such as the Osage tribe or nation featured in Cimarron should be called. Ferber used “Indians,” and for a time, it seemed that “Native Americans” would be the more appropriate term. Although most tribes prefer to be called by their tribal name—Nez Perce, Osage, Cherokee—recently, “American Indian” has regained currency, and I will use that. Edna Ferber’s America 64 Cimarron uses the founding of the new state of Oklahoma to throw into relief the anxieties surrounding nation-building, particularly when the colonization of another nation—in this case, the Osage—is already in place. Through investigation of the intersections of ethnic and racial tensions inherent within the formative process, Ferber tells the story of the Oklahoma Sooners and how a territory became its own peculiar state. While researching Cimarron, Ferber corresponded with a man named Fred E. Sutton, who wrote: “You ask if I can give you any information about some of the more important marriages of the Osages with white people” (Letter [1929], 1). Ferber’s usual themes may have been on her mind as she planned her Oklahoma novel, but she faced unusual adversity . In the Tulsa Tribune, a local reviewer named Hilda Downing claimed to approve of Cimarron, but also hinted at the trouble Ferber experienced as she interviewed Oklahomans. “There are those who distort Miss Ferber ’s brusqueness and charming frankness into snobbishness,” she wrote (3). She may have been referring to a anti-Semitic depiction of Ferber in a Bartlesville, Oklahoma, newspaper: “‘Say, Big Boy,’ [Ferber] blatted in that tone children of the Ghetto are apt to use after about the third shot of Oklahoma corn, ‘I know my business’” (Gilbert 1978, 361). As Heidi Kanaga writes, “Her putative racial allegiances as a Jewish American were viewed as incongruent and in fact inimical to the appropriate origin of the ‘authentic’ Western chronicle” (2003, 184). Locals (as presaged by the “Say, Big Boy” quotation) were unappeased, and continued to disparage the novel until Cimarron became a movie starring Irene Dunne and Richard Dix in 1931, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Ferber called it “the finest motion picture that has ever been made of any book of mine” (A Peculiar Treasure [1939], 303). Once Oklahoma was placed onscreen, residents were happy to see the story in what they considered a more favorable and glamorous light. (Some consider Cimarron to have another, different iteration other than the film, as Ann Shapiro writes in her article “Edna Ferber: Jewish American Feminist”: “There is no doubt that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein read Cimarron and were influenced by the work of their friend and colleague, Edna Ferber, when they wrote their hit musical [Oklahoma!]” (2002, 55–56). The novel itself never gained the affection reserved for either film or any version of the musical, although non-Oklahoma reviewers acknowl- 65 The Cowboys, the Indians, and the Jew: Cimarron edged that it did contain the Ferber stamp of sweeping historical portrayal . “Cimarron is not the sort of book one reads again and again for beauties newly discovered,” said the New York Times Book Review article, “Miss Ferber’s Vivid Tale”: “it is a book...