William H. Murray

William Henry Davis "Alfalfa Bill" Murray (November 21, 1869 – October 15, 1956) was an American educator, lawyer, and politician who became active in Oklahoma before statehood as legal adviser to Governor Douglas H. Johnston of the Chickasaw Nation. Although not American Indian, he was appointed by Johnston as the Chickasaw delegate to the 1905 Convention for the proposed State of Sequoyah. Later he was elected as a delegate to the 1906 constitutional convention for the proposed state of Oklahoma; it was admitted in 1907.

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 which contained racist and antisemitic claims.

Early life, education, and family
William Henry Davis Murray was born on November 21, 1869, in the town of Toadsuck, Texas (renamed "Collinsville" in the 1880s). 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. 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, Texas. 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.

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 Texas State Democratic Convention. In 1891, he wrote for The Farmer's World, a Dallas newspaper. In 1892, he ran 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 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 which 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.

States of Sequoyah and Oklahoma
Murray's relationship with the Chickasaw Governor Johnston benefited his political career. By 1903, American Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes were talking of seeking statehood for Indian Territory as an independent, Indian-controlled state, to be called the State of Sequoyah.

In 1905, the tribes organized a convention to draw up a state constitution. Governor Johnston appointed Murray to represent the Chickasaw at the convention in Muskogee. Of the six delegates at the convention, four were Native Americans; Murray and Charles N. Haskell were the only non-tribal, European Americans. The delegates drafted a constitution, which in a referendum was overwhelmingly approved by the voters of the Five Tribes.

Trying to avoid another state that might be dominated by Democrats (because of the Five Civilized Tribes' origin in the Southeast and their histories of slave-holding and alliance with the Confederacy in the Civil War), President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, opposed separate statehood for Sequoyah. 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. Murray was elected as the delegate for District 104, which included Tishomingo. At the convention in Guthrie, Murray worked closely with Robert L. Williams and again with Charles N. Haskell. They became lifelong friends and political allies.



Due to his experience in Chickasaw politics, Murray was elected by the delegates in 1906 as the President of the Constitutional Convention. He kept Haskell close to him; one newspaper reported the latter was the "power behind the throne." Together, the two men controlled the convention, gradually shifting power away from the president and vice-president of the convention, Pleasant Porter (Creek) and Green McCurtain (Choctaw). The Oklahoma Constitution produced under their guidance was substantially based on elements of the Sequoyah Constitution.

The proposed constitution included white-supremacist and segregationist causes strongly supported by Murray. President Roosevelt objected to these clauses and obtained their deletion before the constitution was submitted to Congress. The US Congress admitted Oklahoma to the Union as the 46th state on November 16, 1907.

Speaker of the Oklahoma House
With the state constitution in place, elections were held in 1907 for offices of the new state government. Murray was elected as a state representative and, after being admitted to office, as the first Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives. His ally Charles Haskell was elected as the state's first governor.

As a speaker, Murray often opposed the progressive work of Kate Barnard, Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, supported anti-corporate 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.'" Murray left the state legislature after one term and did not seek re-election in 1908.

1910 and 1918 gubernatorial campaigns and United States Congress
In 1910, Murray ran for governor but lost in the Democratic primary, but lost to Lee Cruce. In 1912, Murray lead the Oklahoma delegation to the 1912 Democratic National Convention, where he supported Woodrow Wilson. Also that year, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. During his first term he opposed the Federal Reserve Act. He won re-election in 1914, but lost in 1916. He ran in the 1918 Oklahoma gubernatorial election and lost the Democratic primary.

Bolivia colony
Murray first visited South America in early 1919, seeing Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay. He was considering starting a colony of Americans decided on the sparsely settled Gran Chaco. Murray believed "Anglo-Saxon and Germanic races" should settle the area. Murray purchased 500,000 acres at 10 cents per acre with the requirement he settle 200 American families on the land. Between December 1919 and March 1920, he signed up 271 families for his colony. United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned Murray that the border dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay made the area he was settling particularly dangerous, but Murray continued his plan until Paraguay built a fort across the river from his claim. Murray returned $50,000 to colonists who had signed up and lost about $5,000 of his own money.

In July 1921, he met with President Augusto Leguia of Peru and negotiated a 240,000 acre colony where he planned to settle 160 families. The Peruvian government promised to build a road provide access to the land. However, the road was never built and Murray abandoned the colony.

In 1922, he negotiated with Bautista Saavedra's government for a colony in Bolivia, this time in the Tarija Department twelve miles north of Yacuiba. He received 42,000 acres under a 99-year lease for $1,800. He agreed to settle 25 families by December 31, 1925, and the colony had its export taxes waived. While Saavedra supported the colony, Flores Adolfo from the Tarija Department argued against the colony being built on traditional Indian lands in his district. Proponents of the colony advocated it as a buffer between Paraguay and was approved by the Bolivian Congress in 1923.

Colonists were required to follow the laws of Bolivia and a code of laws personally written by Murray. Amongst Murray's laws were a ban on brothels and saloons, a requirement to build a poultry shed within two years, a law that Murray owned all agriculture equipment, and a requirement he must personally approve all land transfers. Any change to the laws required a majority vote and Murray's consent. He barred colonists who were members of labor unions, socialists, Republicans, or born outside the United States. 41 families signed up with 15 leaving on May 4, 1924. About 80 colonists boarded the Oroya in New Orleans before sailing through Havana, the Panama Canal, to Antofagasta, Chile. The caravan then traveled by rail to Tartagal and then on foot to the Tarija Department through the Andes Mountains. The group arrived at Aguairenda, the colony site, on June 18, 1924.

The colonists immediately discovered much of the best land in the area was already leased by local Indigenous people. Colonists, mostly living in the school run by the local Catholic mission, were dissatisfied with the colony's poor living conditions. Most colonists left by the end of 1924 and Murray returned home in June 1925 to recruit more colonists. Later that year he shifted to trying to recruit Indians from their village at El Palmer. With the shift in strategy, the colony grew to nearly 400 and ran Bolivia's first cotton gin. Conflict in the Bolivian Legislature led President Hernando Siles to demand he create a profitable cotton colony or relinquish his concession. His lease was cancelled on August 6, 1928, and Murray transitioned to raising cattle before finally leaving Aguairenda on July 24, 1929. He returned to Oklahoma on August 24, 1929. After attending a "Constitutional Convention Reunion" later that year and announced another campaign for governor in January 1930.

Governor of Oklahoma
Murray won the Democratic nomination, defeating Frank Buttram, the son of a tenant farmer and oil millionaire, in the runoff election. He easily defeated Republican Ira Hill in the November election. His campaign slogan, at a time of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, railed against "The Three C's – Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and Coons."

Murray was inaugurated as the ninth Governor of Oklahoma on January 12, 1931, and filled state jobs with many of his political allies and members of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention. He faced the harsh problems of the Great Depression. Under the previous Governor, William J. Holloway, the state government had accumulated a deficit of over $5,000,000 in its effort to encourage jobs and provide welfare. Mass unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, the deficit, and bank failures haunted Murray's administration. In 1931, the legislature appropriated $600,000 for emergency necessities. Through money collected from state employees, businessmen, and his own salary, Murray financed programs to feed Oklahoma's poor. No federal relief program had yet been instituted. Murray became a national leader for the victims of the Depression, and called for a national council for relief to be held at Memphis, Tennessee in June 1931.

During "Alfalfa Bill" Murray's campaign for governor, he promised to crack down on corruption and favoritism for the rich, to abolish half the clerk jobs at the State House, to appoint no family members, to reduce the number of state-owned cars from 800 to 200, never to use convict labor to compete with commercial labor, and not to abuse the power of pardon. Once in office, he appointed wealthy patrons and 20 of his relatives to high office, purchased more cars, used prisoners to make ice for sale and clean the capitol building, and violated all the other promises. When the State Auditor pointed out that 1,050 new employees had been added to the state payroll, Murray simply said, "Just damned lies." For each abuse of power, Murray claimed a mandate from "the sovereign will of the people."

The government of Oklahoma faced failure, not only because of the massive deficit, but because many of Oklahoma's citizens could not pay their debts. To speed the collection of funds, at Murray's urging the Legislature created the Oklahoma Tax Commission. This three-member commission was responsible for the collection and administration of taxes, licenses and fees from all citizens. The new agency established safeguards against tax evasion and helped to stem the drain on the state's tax revenue. In 1933, he supported the abolition of Oklahoma's state property tax, leaving that tax revenue for local governments.

Due to the severity of the depression, Murray relied on the Oklahoma National Guard to enforce the state's laws through the use of martial law. Murray did this in spite of impeachment threats from the Oklahoma Senate. During his tenure as governor, Murray called out the Guard and charged them with duties ranging from policing ticket sales at University of Oklahoma football games to patrolling the oil fields. He also used the national guard to enforce segregation and prevent Black families from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods.

Murray also used the Guard during the "Toll Bridge War" between Oklahoma and Texas. A joint project to build a free bridge across the Red River on U.S. Highway 75 between Durant, Oklahoma and Denison, Texas turned into a major dispute when the Governor of Texas blocked traffic from entering his state on the new bridge. The Red River Bridge Company of Texas owned the original toll bridge and had a dispute over its purchase deal. Murray sent the Guard to reopen the bridge in July 1931. Texas had to retreat when lawyers determined that Oklahoma had jurisdiction over both banks of the river.

Murray used the Guard to reduce oil production in the hopes of raising prices. Because of the vast quantity of newly opened wells in Texas and Oklahoma, oil prices had sunk below the costs of production. Murray and three other governors met in Fort Worth, Texas to demand lower production. When the Oklahoma producers did not comply, on August 4, 1931, Murray called out the Guard, declared martial law, and ordered that some 3,000 oil wells be shut down.

By the end of his administration in 1935, Murray had used the National Guard on 47 occasions and declared martial law more than 30 times. As the state constitution prevented governors from succeeding themselves in office, Murray could not run for reelection and left office on January 15, 1935.

1932 presidential campaign


In August 1931, Murray launched a campaign for the 1932 United States presidential election in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. His slogan was "Bread, butter, bacon, and beans." He testified in front of the United States Congress in January 1932 on the effects of the Great Depression in Oklahoma and dominated the 1932 Oklahoma Democratic State Convention, earning the Oklahoma Democratic Party's support for his campaign. He railed against Wall Street and demanded cash bonuses for veterans.

He campaigned against Franklin Delano Roosevelt claiming he suffered from syphilis. Huey Pierce Long, Jr., the former governor of Louisiana and U.S. senator, recalled visiting Murray in his hotel room at the 1932 Democratic National Convention in Chicago:

"'Alfalfa Bill' was very gracious ... While we talked at length, he dwelt upon the virtue in the possible candidacies of everybody except Franklin Roosevelt and himself, even suggesting me as a candidate. He understood the favorite son game. I soon saw that I was fencing with a past master in politics. Had I listened to him very long, he would have been at work to make a favorite son candidate out of me. I was then moving Heaven and earth to keep down other favorite son candidates. ... Favorite son moves were the most dangerous things we had to fight. ..." He was introduced at the 1932 Democratic National Convention by Henry S. Johnston and received little support outside the Oklahoma delegation.

1938 gubernatorial and 1942 senate campaigns
In 1938, Murray ran for governor, and lost in the Democratic primary. Later that year, he tried to run for the United States Senate as an Independent, but his nominating petitions were rejected. In 1940, he ran again for the United States House of Representatives against William C. Rogers on isolationism and an new old age pension without tax increases. In 1942, he ran for the Senate again and lost in the Democratic primary.

Later life and death
His wife, Mary Alice Hearrell Murray, died in Oklahoma City on August 28, 1938. Her body lay in state in the Oklahoma Capitol on the afternoon of August 29, 1938; she was the first woman to receive the honor. She was buried in Tishomingo the following day.

After his retirement, Murray became widely known for his radical racist, antisemitic, and conspiracy views. Murray supported Strom Thurmond's insurgent Dixiecrat bid for the presidency against Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. In 1948, he chaired a Dixiecrat state convention in Oklahoma.

Murray's son, Johnston Murray, had followed his father into Democratic Party politics. The senior Murray administered the oath of office to his son in 1951 after he was elected as the state's fourteenth governor.

He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1951.

Murray did not live long past his son's governorship. He died on October 15, 1956, of a stroke and pneumonia. He is buried in Tishomingo.

Legacy and honors

 * Murray State College of Agriculture and Applied Science, is named in William Murray's honor. The community college is located in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.
 * Alfalfa County, Oklahoma and Murray County, Oklahoma are named in his honor.
 * Lake Murray is named in his honor.
 * Lake Murray State Park is named in his honor.
 * The Alfalfa Bill Century Bike Ride is an annual fundraiser in Johnston County.
 * The William H. Murray bridge, more commonly known as Pony Bridge, is officially named after Murray.

Removal of honors
In June 2020, Murray Hall and North Murray Hall at Oklahoma State University were "un-named" and a search for new names began.

Antisemitism and racism
In the 21st century, Murray's legacy has drawn criticism from historians, such as William Savage Jr, because he supported racist and antisemitic policies, and because he published segregationist books. He supported the passage of the first Jim Crow laws in Oklahoma and he advocated the deportation of Jewish people to Madagascar.

Works

 * Memoirs of Alfalfa Bill Murray and the True History of Oklahoma, three volume work (1945)
 * Murray's Essays on Pocahontas and Pushmataha (1924)
 * The Negro's Place in the Call of Race
 * Palestine
 * Rights of Americans
 * Uncle Sam needs a Dictator

State of the State speeches

 * First State of the State Speech
 * Second State of the State Speech
 * Third State of the State Speech