Oklahoma s Governor

Oklahoma, state of many Indians,* spent last fortnight in a mist of political metaphysics. Four members of the Legislature accused Governor Henry S. Johnston of not being Governor. They said his secretary, small, attractive, dark-haired, formidable Mrs. O. O. Hammonds, was "Governor in fact." They asked Governor Johnston to call a special meeting of the Legislature to investigate himself (TIME, Dec. 5). How an alleged non-Governor could convene the Legislature, the legislators did not explain. Perhaps they thought Mr. Johnston would know because among his reputed misdemeanors was taking an interest in things psychic. But Mr. Johnston gave the legislators' requests not even the ghost of a serious reception. When 110 legislators assembled two weeks ago in Oklahoma City and notified him that the Legislature was in special session, he said to their committee: "Your body has a legal right to meet as citizens only and not as a branch of the legislative body. I decline and hereby refuse to receive any report from you as representing a legally convened legislature." He cited a State Supreme Court decision to that effect. He posted three companies of National guardsmen to patrol the state capitol and prevent "all insurrectionary meetings," following the tactics of onetime Governor Jack C. Walton, who was impeached in 1923. At dead of night, speaker E. P. Hill of the House of Representatives and H. Thomas Knight, another anti-Johnston agitator, summoned their colleagues to secret conclave in the Huckins Hotel. In pajamas, night-shirts, bathrobes and galluses, without chairs enought to go around,/- the sleepy statesmen preferred charges against Governor Johnston, including incompetency, conspiracy to defraud, improper appointments, illegal use of state funds. They also framed charges to impeach Chief Justice Frederick P. Branson of the State Supreme Court, author of the decision declaring them a nonlegal gathering.

State Senators persuaded Governor Johnston to remove the guard from their chamber. He did so without recognizing the Senators' authority to set themselves up as a court of impeachment. To establish their authority the Senators asked various judges to preside over them. The judges refused but the Senators voted to try Governor Johnston anyway.

Having got into their chamber, the Senators invited the Representatives to come and meet there too. Governor Johnston blocked this move with his guardsmen. Back to the Huckins Hotel went the irate Representatives, to add "moral turpitude" to their list of Governor Johnston's crimes. Specifically, he was supposed to have conferred with Mrs. Hammonds, his secretary, in a hotel bedroom after 2 a. m. one morning. Also to have lived with his wife in a two-family house of which Mrs. Hammonds and her husband occupied half.

Said Governor Johnston: "What can you do against men who will go to extremes? . . . All of us are discussed sometimes and more or less in the pool halls, on street corners and in barrooms. . . . I am not going to dignify this third-rate quilting party by discussing it."

The legislators went on meeting, nevertheless, as the Legislature. The Senators voted 22 to 8 to constitute themselves a court of impeachment. Eighty Representatives answered a roll call, organized committees, voted to prohibit all other branches of the State Government from interfering with the proceedings of the House as an inquisitorial body. The Senate took a recess and waited for the House to bring in impeachment proceedings.

Governor Johnston steadfastly ignored his antagonists but cast anxious glances toward the U. S. Supreme Court. To that tribunal, august in Washington, he was determined to carry Oklahoma's vexatious problems: When is a Governor not a Governor? When can a Legislature legislate?

* In 1834, Congress set off much of what is now Oklahoma as Indian Territory. Thither were moved the Five Civilized Nations -- Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles. Then the U. S. regained the Indian Territory by a treaty and opened it for settlement (1889). In 1890, Oklahoma Territory was divided from the Indian Territory. More Indians were sent there -- Sacs, Foxes, lowas, Pottawatomies. Also Cheyennes and Arapahoes. Then more Cherokees. Then some Kickapoos. In 1907, the Indian Territory was lumped with Oklahoma Territory and admitted to the Union as the State of Oklahoma, famed since for oil wells, yellow pine, Ku Klux Klan, cal ow politics. Of the seven Governors the state has had, six have been threatened with impeachment by bands of political freebooters who from time to time dominate Oklahoma. /-Many sat or lay on the floor.