Chapter 14 | Section 1
Governor Mary Fallin
Mary Fallin has never lost an election in almost three decades of public service spanning from the state house to lieutenant governor to Congress to governor of Oklahoma. Her career in public service began in 1990 when she was elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives and went on to serve two terms. Then voters elected Fallin lieutenant governor in 1995, as Oklahoma’s first woman and first Republican to hold that position, which she served for twelve years. She then served in Congress representing the Fifth District of Oklahoma, beginning in 2006, and earned re-election in 2008. When Fallin became governor in 2011, she was only the fourth Republican to hold the position since statehood in 1907. And only four Oklahoma governors, including Fallin, have served two consecutive terms. During Fallin’s second term as governor, her name surfaced briefly as a potential vice-presidential candidate on the 2016 Republican ticket.
Mary Fallin (second from right) with her family. In 2006, Fallin became the second woman from Oklahoma to be elected to the US House of Representatives. After completing two terms in Congress, Fallin was elected as the governor of Oklahoma in 2010 and began serving in 2011 as the fourth Republican governor in state history.
Courtesy of the Oklahoman.
Fallin was raised a Democrat in Tecumseh, but she became a Republican after graduating from college. Both of her parents had served as mayor of Tecumseh. After graduation from Oklahoma State University in the late 1970s, Fallin moved to Oklahoma City and worked in state government for about five years. During that time, she determined that she was a conservative Republican. She believed in fiscal discipline in spending and in keeping the role of government limited. She also held conservative views on social issues. In describing her introduction to the Republican Party, she recalled, “That was back in the good old days when Oklahoma had a lot of money and politics was big—oil and gas days—we went to a lot of Republican events,” Fallin said. “In fact, I even went to the inauguration of President Reagan in Washington and that was a blast.” Fallin was not alone in her enthusiasm for the new president and his party. A growing number of Oklahomans concluded that the Republican Party aligned better with their economic, social, political, and religious beliefs.
From a Democratic to a Republican Majority
From Oklahoma statehood in 1907 through World War II and the early Cold War in the 1950s, Democrats dominated politics in Oklahoma. All Oklahoma governors had been Democrats, and the state had very few Republican legislators. This was a time when Democrats outnumbered Republicans five to one. A shift in one-party dominance from Democrat to Republican began to take place in the early 1960s. In 1962 Oklahoma elected its first Republican governor, Henry Bellmon, a farmer from Billings in north-central Oklahoma and a military veteran who served in the Marines during World War II. Bellmon’s message of self-reliance and improving the moral fiber of the state had wide appeal to those who felt at odds with recent social changes. Republican Dewey Bartlett, also a military veteran who had served in the navy during World War II and moved to Tulsa after the war, working in oil and gas, succeeded Bellmon as governor in 1966. Bartlett focused on business development and handed out “Okie” lapel pins to foster state pride and reinvent the once derogatory or negative term used to refer to poor migrants in the 1930s.
Bellmon was elected to the Senate in 1968, and Bartlett joined him as Oklahoma’s other senator in 1972. In the 1980s Republican registration increased, resulting in more Republican seats in the US Congress. Bellmon returned for another term as governor in 1986, and then Don Nickles, a Republican businessperson from Ponca City, succeeded Bellmon as senator in 1980. The Republican Party held two US House seats after 1986, when James Inhofe, a Tulsa businessperson with experience serving in the state house, the state senate, and as mayor of Tulsa, was elected to represent Tulsa and vicinity.
Although the state was shifting its political alignment from Democratic to Republican during the 1980s, many Democratic politicians continued to serve the state of Oklahoma in a variety of ways. Democrat George Nigh, for example, campaigned in all 77 counties and served two terms as governor during the 1980s.
George Nigh’s political career spanned nearly forty years from 1950 to 1987. During that time he served as a state representative, lieutenant governor, and governor of Oklahoma for two terms in the 1980s. From 1992 to 1997, Nigh served as president of the University of Central Oklahoma.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Born in McAlester in 1927, George Nigh earned a bachelor’s degree from East Central State College in Ada and taught history and government at McAlester High School. Nigh’s political career began in 1950 when he was the youngest member ever elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives. During his time in the state house, he contacted Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and received their permission to adopt their song Oklahoma! as the state song. He served as lieutenant governor from 1966 to 1978 and governor from 1978 to 1987.
Vicki Miles-LaGrange and the Influence of Hannah Atkins
“My dad always said education was a way up and a way out,” Miles-LaGrange told the Oklahoman. “In our house, it was nonnegotiable.” Growing up in the historically segregated section of far northeast Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Vicki Miles-LaGrange was the daughter of educators. She was a protégée of Hannah Atkins, a Democrat and the first African American woman elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives. During her twelve years of service in the state house, from 1968 to 1980, Atkins sponsored landmark legislation concerning education and mental health. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Atkins as a US delegate to the United Nations. She served on Republican governor Henry Bellmon’s cabinet as Secretary for Social Services and Secretary of State.
As a graduate of Howard Law School and a protégée of Hannah Atkins, Vicki Miles-LaGrange became the first African American woman to be elected to the Oklahoma Senate in 1986. Beginning in 1993, she served as a judge for the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma and chief judge from 2008 to 2015. Since her retirement in 2018, Miles-LaGrange remains steadfast in her commitment to improve legal systems around the world.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
As a teenager Miles-LaGrange was a member of “Hannah’s Helpers,” a group of junior high and high school students who campaigned for Atkins. Through this experience, Miles-LaGrange learned about public service. She went on to attend Vassar College in New York and then Howard Law School in Washington, DC. After law school, she worked at the US Department of Justice in DC, and then returned to Oklahoma City to work as assistant district attorney for Oklahoma County. In 1986, she ran successfully for the state senate, becoming the first Black woman elected to that body. Miles-LaGrange left the state senate in 1993, when she was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the position of US attorney and US District Court judge for the Western District of Oklahoma. She served as chief judge for that district from 2008 to 2015. Today she works to improve the legal systems in other countries, including Rwanda, China, Brazil, and Sudan. Thus, Miles-LaGrange has spent her entire career in public service.
Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in Oklahoma
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a proposed amendment to the US Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for women. In 1972, almost fifty years after the constitutional amendment was originally proposed, it passed both houses of Congress and went to the state legislatures for ratification. At first the ERA seemed to have widespread support in Oklahoma. During the 1970s, a grassroots campaign arose to elect more women to the Oklahoma legislature and achieve more support for ratification of the ERA. Wanda Jo Peltier Stapleton, for example, campaigned for the ERA as part of the Oklahoma Women’s Political Caucus.
Growing up in Checotah, Stapleton learned firsthand about the legal vulnerability of married women and the need for women to have legal access to property, Social Security, and credit. Widowed at a young age with two children, she worked her way through Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU) in 1963, graduate work at the University of Kansas and the University of Oklahoma, and then returned to OBU as an English professor. Stapleton’s new style of feminism worked well in Oklahoma, blending rural values with a belief in equality for women through education and the workforce.
A member of the Oklahoma Women’s Political Caucus, Wanda Jo Peltier Stapleton was a part of the grassroots campaign promoting the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in Oklahoma during the 1970s. Although Stapleton was successful in blending Oklahoma’s traditional rural values with a belief in the equality for women in her own style of feminism, Oklahoma did not ratify the ERA.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Oklahoma, however, was one of fifteen states, mostly southern and western states, that did not ratify the amendment. This had a lot to do with the growing opposition of conservative women and men to the amendment. Opponents worried about the impact of the ERA on protective legislation (laws that offer protection to a certain group, such as maternity leave) for women, the possibility that women would be drafted into military service, that homemakers might be forced to work outside the home, and that the ERA would have a negative impact on traditional family structure. By 1977, the ERA received ratification in 35 of the required 38 states needed to approve the constitutional amendment. The ERA failed to receive the necessary 38 state ratifications before the 1982 deadline, though, so it was not adopted. Yet three more states ratified the amendment between 2017 and 2020. A joint resolution was introduced in Congress to eliminate the original deadline, but the ERA has yet to be adopted.
Nationally, in the 1980s, with the ascendancy of the Reagan administration and the rise of the New Right, a movement emerged that included both small government conservatives and religious traditionalists (often called the Religious Right). This new form of religious and social conservatism took hold in the Republican Party that focused on a pro-family and pro-life platform. In the 1970s, many Oklahomans would describe themselves as evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans. As it entered into a more conservative era in the 1980s, Oklahoma came under the increasing influence of large evangelical denominations, such as Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Oral Roberts was a pastor and faith healer in small Pentecostal churches in Georgia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. He expanded his support in Oklahoma and went from preaching at large tent revivals to taking his message to radio and TV. Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association included radio and TV programming, a publishing company, and professional fundraising. Oral Roberts University opened its doors in Tulsa in 1963 and housed the global ministry.
Picher, Oklahoma, a lead and zinc mining town, became the focus of environmental concerns as early as 1973 when contaminated water began to leak from its newly closed mines. Ten years later Picher became part of the EPA’s Tar Creek Superfund site. The site contains 1,400 mineshafts in the Picher area, 70 million tons of waste tailings, and 36 million tons of mill sand and sludge. This photo of Picher shows just how close the town residents lived to toxic chat piles that in part forced the closure of the town in 2009.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Oklahomans in the Reagan Administration
In the early 1970s, Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick became disillusioned with the more liberal leanings of the Democratic Party and founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. Born in Duncan and raised in a Democratic family, Jeane Kirkpatrick studied political science and worked for the State Department and the Department of Defense in Washington, DC. She pursued an academic career as a political science professor at Georgetown University and received a PhD in political science from Columbia University.
Kirkpatrick then worked as President Reagan’s national security advisor during his 1980 presidential campaign as the Republican candidate. As a Democrat, she was hesitant to take a job in Reagan’s Republican administration until the president reminded her that he too had once been a Democrat. After a successful campaign, President Reagan nominated her as US ambassador to the United Nations. By the mid-1980s Ambassador Kirkpatrick officially became a member of the Republican Party and returned to her position as professor at Georgetown.
William J. Crowe Jr. grew up in Oklahoma City. After one year at the University of Oklahoma, he transferred to the US Naval Academy and graduated in 1946. He had an active naval career in submarines and took advantage of educational opportunities to receive an master’s degree in education from Stanford University and PhD from Princeton University.
Following his promotion to rear admiral, Crowe commanded US Naval Forces in the Persian Gulf. He then was promoted to vice admiral and became the deputy chief of Naval Operations for their Plans, Policy and Operations division. In 1980, he was further promoted to four-star rank and was named commander in chief of NATO forces in Southern Europe. In 1983, he was appointed as commander in chief of Pacific Forces, the largest geographic command in the US military. In 1985 Crowe served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan. Later, President Clinton presented Admiral Crowe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Major General Rita Aragon and Her Military Service
A native of Dale, Oklahoma, Rita Aragon served as Oklahoma’s first woman brigadier general in the Oklahoma National Guard. Later she was promoted to major general. “The harder I worked, the luckier I got,” Aragon has maintained in an oral history interview about her life and military service. Aragon was a teacher, and when her husband died, she struggled to provide for her two young daughters. In 1979, at age thirty, she joined the National Guard to help support her family. She has said that many people join the National Guard due to economic insecurity and for the paycheck. Still others joined the reserves after 9/11 to exercise their patriotic duty to the United States.
During her time in the Oklahoma National Guard, Major General Rita Aragon set many firsts for women in the military during the 1970s and 1980s. Aragon became the first woman to achieve the rank of brigadier general in the Oklahoma National Guard, and the first woman to command the Oklahoma Air National Guard. In 2012, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The federal government ended the draft in 1973, and the military became an all-volunteer force. This transition opened up more opportunities for women. US military academies, for example, began accepting women in 1975. Many of the gender barriers eroded. By the 1980s women were deploying to active combat zones. And in 1991, 41,000 women deployed to the Middle East during the first Gulf War, including Rita Aragon.
During the 1980s, Aragon was rising through the ranks, all the way to the rank of general. In February 1989, General Aragon became the first woman commander in the Oklahoma Air National Guard when she assumed command of the 137th Services Flight at Will Rogers Air National Guard Base in Oklahoma. Then she served for two years as commander at Will Rogers Base National Guard, the first Oklahoma woman base commander. At the same time, she served as an elementary school principal in Oklahoma City. Aragon became the first woman to hold the rank of brigadier general in the Oklahoma National Guard and the first woman commander of the Oklahoma Air National Guard in March 2003. During her career she served two tours in the Pentagon—as assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and as assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force for Manpower and Personnel. She was the senior Air National Guard officer responsible for military and civilian personnel management, education, training, and resource allocation.
The shift from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority continued in the 1990s, but women’s representation in elected positions in both parties remained minimal. For example, during the early 1990s, Mary Fallin was only one of three Republican women in the Oklahoma House of Representatives out of 31 Republican members, and she was only one of eight women of 101 house members. Then in 1993 and 1994 seven women were elected to the Oklahoma House. Four were Democrats and three were Republicans. In 1994 Republicans held both Senate seats, five of six US House seats, and the governor’s office. At the state level, Governor Frank Keating and enough Republicans served in the Oklahoma government to move Keating’s agenda through the legislature. Republicans held an outright majority in the state house by 2004 and the state senate in 2008.
The Oklahoma Republican Party has been centrally organized since the 1960s. By 2000 Christian conservatives firmly established themselves as a major force in the party, and most Oklahomans described themselves as evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. In 2004, exit polling placed the proportion of self-identified evangelicals at 44 percent, almost double the national percentage. And since roughly 2011, multiple conservative factions in the state party have maintained a strong presence, including Tea Party followers, states’ rights conservatives, and Libertarians.