William Henry Davis Murray (November 21, 1869 – October 15, 1956) was an American educator, lawyer, and politician, who served as the first speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, a U.S. congressman from Oklahoma, and as the 9th governor of Oklahoma. He was a Southern Democratic member of the Democratic Party who opposed the New Deal and supported racial segregation.
Murray started his political career with several failed runs for political office in his home state of Texas before moving to Indian Territory, where he married Mary Alice Hearrell Murray, the niece of Chickasaw Nation Governor Douglas H. Johnston. Although not American Indian, he was appointed by Johnston as the Chickasaw delegate to the 1905 Convention for the proposed State of Sequoyah, and later, he was elected as a delegate to and president of the 1906 Oklahoma Constitutional Convention for the proposed state of Oklahoma.
Murray was elected as a representative and the first speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives after statehood. He also was elected as U.S. representative (D-Oklahoma), serving between 1913 and 1917.
In the 1920s, he traveled South America, attempting to start a colony. He eventually negotiated a contract for a colony with the Bolivian government under President Bautista Saavedra in 1922, but the colony, Aguairenda, was largely unsuccessful. President Hernando Siles eventually cancelled the colony's lease in 1928 after it failed to become profitable, and Murray returned to Oklahoma.
After returning to Oklahoma, he was elected the ninth governor of Oklahoma, serving from 1931 to 1935. During his tenure as governor in years of the Great Depression, he established a record for the number of times he used the National Guard to perform duties in the state and for declaring martial law at a time of unrest.
In his later life, Murray published a three-volume memoir and several books that contained racist and antisemitic claims. Historian Reinhard H. Luthin described his populist campaign tactics and rhetoric as demagoguery. His son, Johnston Murray, was later elected governor of Oklahoma.
Early life, education and family William Henry Davis Murray was born on November 21, 1869, in Collinsville, Texas. He was born to Uriah Dow Thomas Murray, a grist mill worker, and Bertha Elizabeth (Jones). Uriah Murray was born in Tennessee in 1839, moved to Texas in 1852, and was descended from Scottish immigrants. Uriah served as a veteran in the Confederacy, specifically within Company D of the 1st Texas Cavalry. He had two older brothers, John Shade Murray and George Thomas Murray. He had a younger sister and brother who died in infancy. His mother died when he was two years old, and in 1873, his father remarried to Mollie Green, a widow from Montague, Texas.
After the marriage, Murray moved with his father and brothers to Montague. Uriah opened a grocery store and butcher shop and had seven more children with Mollie Green. On September 18, 1881, he ran away from home with his two older brothers. He worked picking cotton, chopping wood, and as a bricklayer before attending public school in Keeter. Murray attended College Hill Institute in Springtown, Texas, and started selling books to pay for school. He graduated from College Hill with a teaching degree in 1889 and began teaching in a public school in Parker County, Texas. During this time he attended a Campbellite church, but was not particularly religious.
Early career in Texas Murray became politically active and joined the Farmers' Alliance and the Democratic Party and was a vocal critic of the People's Party. In 1890, he was a delegate to the Texas State Democratic Convention. In 1891, he wrote for The Farmer's World, a Dallas newspaper. In 1892, he ran for the Texas Senate against Oscar Branch Colquitt and George Taylor Jester, coming in third in the Democratic primary. In late 1893, he launched The Corsicana Daily News and The Navarro County News with his brother George. In 1894, he again lost a race for the Texas Senate to Colquitt.
After reading the law and passing the Texas bar exam in 1897, he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and began practicing law. He later worked as a writer for the Fort Worth Gazette. He was a skilled orator and campaigned for James Stephen Hogg when the latter ran for governor of Texas.
Indian Territory On March 28, 1898, Murray moved to Tishomingo, the capital of the Chickasaw Nation in the Indian Territory (now eastern Oklahoma), where he quickly became a political and legal advisor to Douglas H. Johnston, the governor of the Chickasaw Nation. After he married Johnston's niece Mary Alice Hearrell Murray on July 19, 1899, he was allowed to practice in Chickasaw courts and started a law practice with Chickasaw Senator M. V. Cheadle. The couple had five children, including Johnston Murray.
He acquired his nickname "Alfalfa" around 1902, while working as a political operative for Palmer S. Moseley, gubernatorial candidate for the Oklahoma Territory. Murray frequently toured to give talks to local farmers about politics and farming. He often referred to a large tract of alfalfa that he cultivated. Arthur Sinclair, who heard one of his speeches, reported to the editor of the Tishomingo Capital-Democrat that he had just seen "Alfalfa Bill" deliver one of his finest speeches. The name stuck with Murray for the rest of his life.
Sequoyah and Oklahoma constitutional conventions In 1905, tribal governments in Indian Territory] organized a convention to create a constitution for the proposed State of Sequoyah. Governor Johnston appointed Murray to represent the Chickasaw at the convention in Muskogee. Of the 55 delegates convened for the constitutional convention, 40 were Native American, 14 were white, and one was black. The delegates drafted a constitution, which in a referendum was overwhelmingly approved by a 56,279 to 9,073 vote, although half of the qualified voters did not participate in the election. The Sequoyah Constitution produced by the convention was 35,000 words with 18 articles heavily influenced by the Progressive Era.
Trying to avoid two new states that might be dominated by Democrats, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt opposed separate statehood for Sequoyah and Oklahoma. Roosevelt insisted that the Indian and Oklahoma territories had to be admitted as one state – Oklahoma. In response to Congress's passage of the Enabling Act in 1906, the people of the two territories held a joint convention.
Chickasaw Governor Johnson encouraged Murray to campaign for the new Oklahoma Constitutional Convention and he defeated C. A. Skeen in the Democratic primary to be a delegate for District 104, which included Tishomingo. In the general election, he received 1,309 votes to the Republican candidate Martin Cheadle's 748 votes and the Socialist candidate James D. French's 113 votes. Of the 112 delegates elected, 99 were Democrats, 12 were Republicans, and one was elected as an independent; 55 each were from Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory, with the Osage Nation electing the final two.
At the convention in Guthrie, Murray worked closely with Robert L. Williams and again with Charles N. Haskell.
Murray was elected by the delegates in 1906 as the president of the Constitutional Convention by a vote of 97 to 11 over Republican P. B Hopkins. He kept Haskell close to him, with one newspaper reporting that Haskell was the "power behind the throne". The Oklahoma Constitution produced under their guidance was substantially based on elements of the Sequoyah Constitution.
Murray, racism, and the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention During the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention, Murray supported including segregated schools in the constitution. During the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, Murray fired all African American clerks and white janitors and rehired them with the white workers as clerks and the African American workers as janitors. Murray also supported including segregated schools in the Oklahoma Constitution, as well as antimiscegenation clauses. According to biographer Keith Bryant Jr., Murray believed African Americans should be taught "agriculture, mechanics, and industrial jobs" because they were "a failure as a soldier, doctor, and lawyer." He also opposed efforts by more radical members to include provisions preventing African Americans from voting in the state.
The first draft of the state constitution included Jim Crow regulations for schools and railroads, as well as antimiscegenation clauses. According to Bryant, Murray and Haskell were sympathetic to the inclusion of the provisions, but they ultimately supported their removal after Oklahoma Territory Governor Frank Frantz announced President Roosevelt would not support the new constitution if they were included.
Oklahoma politics Speaker of the Oklahoma House With Oklahoma statehood eminent, Murray initially wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, but he withdrew when it became apparent that he could not defeat Robert L. Owen in the primary. He ran for the Oklahoma House of Representatives, instead, and was elected. Davis Turner, the representative from Murray County, nominated Murray for speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives during the 1st Oklahoma Legislature, and he was elected by a vote of 97 to 0. His allies, Charles N. Haskell and Robert L. Williams, were elected as the state's first governor and chief justice, respectively.
As speaker, Murray often opposed the progressive work of Kate Barnard, commissioner of Charities and Corrections, largely due to his opposition to women's suffrage and women in politics. Biographer Keith Bryant argues Murray thought "a woman officeholder was an abomination."
On public education, Murray supported the creation of five agricultural high schools that later became junior colleges. Four were named after his friends, and the fifth was named after himself. Some of these junior colleges still live on as the modern day including Cameron University, Connors State College, and Murray State College.
Murray also supported the state's first hotel inspection law and required hotels to have 9-foot-long bed sheets. Under his leadership, the legislature passed strong prolabor laws including a mine safety code, factory inspectors, a ban on advertising for strikebreakers, and a ban on convict-made goods. Murray allowed Pete Hanraty to write many of the mining regulations. However, he opposed laws to totally ban child labor by citing his own youth working.
He supported anticorporate legislation, and pushed for Jim Crow laws similar to those in Southern states to limit the rights of African Americans.
"We should adopt a provision prohibiting the mixed marriages of negroes with other races in this State, and provide for separate schools and give the Legislature power to separate them in waiting rooms and on passenger coaches, and all other institutions in the State ... As a rule they are failures as lawyers, doctors and in other professions...I appreciate the old-time ex-slave, the old darky – and they are the salt of their race – who comes to me talking softly in that humble spirit which should characterize their actions and dealings with the white man".Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2006.
Murray left the state legislature after one term and did not seek re-election in 1908. He attended the 1908 Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Oklahoma.
1910 and 1918 gubernatorial campaigns and United States Congress