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Anthony Sanders

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1. Oklahoma isn’t just football, oil, & musicals. The state itself has had just one constitution, although big enough to accommodate several more, but today on #50Weeks50Constitutions we’ll also look at a century of constitutional history leading up to that founding document.

2. We start nowhere near Oklahoma, in the Southeast. Numerous Native American tribes were still living there around the year 1800. In the years following, through formal treaties, forced expungement by private & government violence, & head’s up migration, the tribes moved west.

3. Many of those from the east that ended up in Oklahoma were from the “Five Civilized Tribes,” the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, & Seminole. (As you might guess, the tribes themselves did not come up with that collective description.)

4. But, as Justice Gorsuch said recently, “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.” The tribes settled in the misnomer of “Indian Territory,” an area of land defined through its absence of formal state or territorial structure in the eyes of the US government.

5. Just b/c the feds didn’t structure things didn’t mean there was no structure. In 1834 the Choctaws drafted a constitution & the Cherokees did 5 years later. Others followed. The US Constitution was an influence on these, w/ bicameralism, separation of powers & a judiciary.

6. Indian Territory at first ran from today’s Oklahoma north to the Canadian border. But white settlement pushed the feds to convert bits & pieces to official territories & then states, pushing resettled & original Great Plains tribes out in the process.

7. In 1889 almost 2 million acres that had not been assigned to any tribe was opened up thru a land rush. It literally was first-come, first-served where the first settler to reach a 160 acre tract got to make their own. This is where the nicknames “Sooner” & “Boomer” came from.

8. The next year Congress made the western half of what is now Oklahoma the “Oklahoma Territory.” The eastern half, where the 5 Tribes still resided, was all that was left of Indian Territory. Further, the Curtis Act of 1898 decreed that tribal governments would cease by 1906.

9. The question for Indian Territory was what to do about statehood? Join w/ “Oklahoma Territory”? Make 2 states? Remain unorganized? A group of Native Americans took the lead to push for 2 states & write a constitution for their half. This led to the Sequoyah Convention of 1905.

10. The constitution the Sequoyah delegates drafted didn’t become law, but it contributed toward the one that eventually did. At over 35,000 words it was pretty long, capturing the contemporary populist spirit. The people voted for it overwhelmingly, but it died in Congress.

11. With the demise of the Sequoyah approach a unified State of Oklahoma became inevitable. The people selected their delegates. There were 99 Democrats (the “90 and 9”), 12 Republicans (the “12 Apostles”) & 1 independent (the “renegade”).

12. Multiple past losing (& future losing) Democratic Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan was a keen observer of an emerging Democratic-dominated state. He warned his Sooner friends “It will be your own fault if you do not frame the best constitution ever written.”

13. According to his later campaign speeches, they succeeded. The result was even longer than the Sequoyah (over 50,000 words) & the longest constitution at that point in U.S. history. W/ a populist distrust of legislatures, it had numerous details on corporations, banks, etc.

14. The Constitution also had many provisions we find familiar, including a separation of powers clause, a lengthy bill of rights, 2 year house seats & 4 years in the state senate. The governor’s term was 4 years, but forbidden from serving in consecutive terms (later amended).

15. The bill of rights had this admonishment of elected officials, which shows the framers weren’t messing around (and unfortunately might count some of us out).

16. The convention purposely ended on September 17, 1907 (Constitution Day, of course) & went to the voters, of whom 71% approved it. The Constitution then went to Washington where President Teddy Roosevelt approved it and the State of Oklahoma was born.

17. The Constitution has been amended many times since 1907, including a balanced budget amendment & the first state to adopt term limits for legislators, in 1990. At this point it’s over 90,000 words. That’s a pretty good sized book!