Category Archives: History

In 1944, Major General Patrick J. Hurley was given what proved to be an impossible task: reconciling the Nationalist Chinese of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists of Mao Zedung.

Hurley was one of the most influential Oklahomans of the first half of the twentieth century. Born to Irish immigrant parents in the Choctaw Nation, he became a prominent Tulsa attorney and businessman and an Army officer who served with distinction in World War I. In 1929, Hurley was named Secretary of War in the Hoover administration, thus becoming the first Oklahoman to hold a cabinet-level position.

Although a partisan Republican, during World War II Hurley became Franklin Roosevelt’s personal envoy to the Soviet Union and later the Far East. It was in this later capacity he arrived in China, initially to mediate the tense relationship between the autocratic Chiang and prickly U.S. General Joseph Stilwell.

Stilwell, however, had already reached the point of no return. Against Hurley’s advice, he confronted Chiang with an ultimatum that resulted in Stilwell’s replacement.

Although the Communists and Nationalists were nominal allies against the Japanese, their armies functioned more or less independently and sometimes at odds with each other. Hurley’s task was to set the foundation for a united China during the final stages of the war and going forward.

The U.S. position was a difficult one. Its alliance of necessity with the Soviet Union aside, the United States was not keen on promoting communism. Those familiar with the situation, though, generally found the Communists better organized and disciplined and less corrupt than the Nationalists. Stilwell’s staff, in fact, clandestinely equipped and assisted the Red Army, and  continued to do so even after Stilwell was recalled.

Throughout his time in China, and during two trips back to Washington, Hurley contended not only with the seemingly intractable differences between the Communists and the Nationalists, but intrigue within the U.S. State Department.

John Carter Vincent, the official in charge of Washington, fought long-term commitments to Chiang, preferring “flexibility which would permit cooperation with any leadership in China ….” State Department officials in China leaked confidential information to Mao, undermining Hurley’s attempts to negotiate a coalition government led by Chiang.

Vincent gained considerable influence following Roosevelt’s death, and in November 1945, Hurley called a press conference in Washington to announce his resignation. He told reporters that State Department personnel in China had collaborated with the Communists in an effort to oust Chiang and the Nationalists.

The furor thus created effectively ended, but he does not seem to have minded much. He moved to Santa Fe, N.M., where he became involved in uranium mining, and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate three times. He died in 1963 at the age of 80.

Hurley is now largely forgotten, but at least one important monument to him remains in Tulsa. In 1929, Hurley and a business partner built the first “apartment hotel” in the city at 1314 S. Main St. Restored in the 1990s, the Ambassador Hotel is today the city’s most exclusive boutique hotel.

One of the things I’ve wondered for many years is whether drugs could have played a role in Tulsa’s 1921 race riot.

Drugs, and especially opiates, were a serious problem, even in those days. At least as far back as 1907, before statehood, police raided an opium den in what was then a town of seven thousand. By 1921, morphine and cocaine addiction had become a serious problem.

In January, federal agents raided a soft drink stand adjacent to McNulty Park — the stadium which would serve briefly after the riot as a holding area for black Tulsans — operated by one Irma “The Midget” Harisson. When a search of the premises failed to turn up the expected contraband, one of the agents grabbed the four-foot, six-inch Harisson by the ankles, turned her upside down, and shook her until cocaine capsules fell from her clothes.

Over the next several months, two doctors were sent to federal prison for illegally selling morphine and cocaine; two men were arrested in Tulsa and charged with possession of one thousand grains of morphine; a double amputee working in a shoe-shine parlor was found with five morphine and three cocaine capsules; a man named J.L. Love was fined $500 and sentenced to a year in prison for morphine possession; and two men were apprehended at the train station with a valise full of “liquid morphine.”

In May, police caught two drug dealers by making a buy with a marked silver dollar.

In the immediate aftermath of the May 31-June 1 Tulsa riot and for years afterward, official blame fell mostly on armed blacked men who went to the county courthouse to defend a prisoner they believed was about to be lynched. A confrontation ensued, shots were fired and riot was on.

Several of those men were described, by both whites and blacks, as dope peddlers and drug users. Today that claim is generally dismissed and in all likelihood rightfully so. But the fact it would be accepted as plausible suggests the extent of the drug problem in Tulsa at the time.

After the riot, police reported white drug dealers did indeed enjoy a windfall from the riot. One of the buildings destroyed in the fires that engulfed much of the black neighborhoods, they said, had been a well-known den, and Officer Henry Carmichael reported white dealers were “unusually active” since their black competitors had been temporarily put out of business.

Certainly, the riot was not about drugs, and I wouldn’t want anyone to make too much of this. But, as I said, I have long wondered if just may the riot did provide an opportunity for underworld characters to settle scores or get rid of competition.

I guess it’s just one of those things we’ll never know.

Bat Masterson called Bill Tilghman “the greatest of us all.” Theodore Roosevelt said he would “charge hell with a bucket.”

Tilghman was one of the last of the old west lawmen. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he never crossed the line to the other side. Never even skirted it. He was everything in life that Masterson and the Earps and Wild Bill Hickock were in legend. He died in the line of duty at age seventy, shot to death by a corrupt a federal agent while trying to clean up an Oklahoma boom town.

Like many men of his time and place, Tilghman began as a buffalo hunter in the years after the Civil War, when the railroads were stretching across the prairie and cattle were trailing north from Texas. He found his way to Dodge City, where he opened a saloon, despite being a teetotaler, and got his first job as a lawman. It was also where he met Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.

In 1889, he moved to Guthrie. Over the next few years, he, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas became known as the Three Guardsmen, deputy U.S. marshals who arrested around three hundred desperadoes over the next decade and killed several more. Tilghman’s most famous exploit was the arrest of Bill Doolin in a Hot Springs, Ark., mineral bath.

Tilghman retired in 1910 and was elected to the state Senate, but resigned a year later to become Oklahoma City’s police chief. In 1923, Gov. Martin Trapp persuaded Tilghman to come out of retirement a second time, to accept a special commission as marshal of Cromwell, a notorious unincorporated community in the Greater Seminole Oil Field known as the “wickedest city in the world.” Cromwell had it all: prostitution, gambling, liquor and drugs. And one of the worst influences was a federal Prohibition officer named Wiley Lynn.

Lynn shot Tilghman twice on the night of Nov. 1, 1924, as they struggled for a gun. The old lawman died almost immediately. Typical of the times, Lynn was acquitted when several witnesses mysteriously disappeared; he and state Bureau of Investigation Agent Crockett Long shot each other to death eight years later in a Madill drug store.