The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929

6. The Battle for Whiteness: Making Whites in a White Man’s Country, 1916–1924

Q  Q  Q Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q 6 The Battle for Whiteness MAKING WHITES IN A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY, 1916–1924 What did it mean to be a Klansman? N. Clay Jewett, the Grand Dragon of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan, spread the word about what he considered the highest of callings. “Klankraft,” as he put it, meant “the exemplification of the noble ideals of chivalry.” It required the defense of “the chastity of our women” and “the protection of our homes.” It proceeded from a “spirit of pure patriotism” and a “sublime reverence for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” To Jewett, the Klan represented “honor and justice in all things.” Almost needless to say, it called white men to do battle for the “maintenance of white supremacy.”1 The Klan’s mission was capacious, bringing together matters political and spiritual, affairs public and intimate. But in this long litany of Klan virtues, a listener hears no reference to an issue that so dominated the political life of the state that it had helped motivate its creation: landownership. Closer examination reveals that this silence was part of a larger absence: there is no reference to class in Jewett’s listing of the nature and purpose of Klankraft. In a state riven by violent class conflict and insurgent agrarianism, this silence on land and class constituted an act of suppression. Jewett, the Klan, and others on the right in Oklahoma in the 1920s aimed to redirect whiteness away from the issue of land—a potent part of class conflict in the region—in their effort to harness whiteness for their own political purposes. 176 ■ LIVING UNDER ALLOTMENT They had reason to do so. The years that stretched from 1916 to 1924 witnessed fierce class conflict during a period of economic transformation in the region. In this period, oil extraction increasingly overshadowed agriculture in east-central Oklahoma’s economy. This transformation intensified battles between tenant farmers and landlords and between wage laborers and employers. Furthermore, tenants and oil workers largely lived in rural areas and the boomtowns that sprang up among the farms, whereas landlords and employers inhabited what passed for more settled towns and cities in the young state. This pattern encouraged Oklahomans to experience and express class conflicts as struggles pitting the rural poor against the town-dwelling rich. Both racism and class consciousness were part of white agrarianism. For white Oklahoman agrarians, whiteness was no “false consciousness” distracting them from the reality of race. Rather, whiteness and class were equally real parts of one whole: the way they understood themselves. Since statehood, white working-class farmers and mine workers had given the power of their racialized class consciousness to a variety of causes that posited that the central issue in Oklahoma politics was the exploitation of white men at the hands of profiteering capitalists. This racially infused class politics threatened the political and economic security of Oklahoma’s landlords, land speculators, and mine owners and operators. More threatening still, from the point of view of Oklahoma’s business classes, was the growth of interracial working-class action in the years immediately preceding World War I. In response to what looked like an emerging alliance among white, black, and Indian working-class people, Oklahoma’s smalltown and urban business classes promoted a politics of unity that fused race and nation: a unity of white Americans. The Klan provided the most infamous support for this politics of white American unity, but it came in many other guises—especially campaigns for wartime loyalty, 100 percent Americanism, and moral uprightness. Each of them asserted that white American people needed to draw together to defend and purify American whiteness. For these white middle-class and affluent Oklahomans, drawing together as white people and as Americans meant that white tenant farmers and oil workers had to reject class politics. It meant that the poor had to live as decent white people according to racialized, middle-class standards of propriety. Fundamentally, it meant that poor whites needed to conceive of themselves in terms of race first, not class. This notion, promulgated by the white business classes, resonated with the racism that was part of white THE BATTLE FOR WHITENESS ■ 177...