Oklahoma! and Oklahoma (the show and the state)

Recently PBS, America's public/educational television network, has been broadcasting a recording of a recent performance of the 1943 Broadway musical show Oklahoma!

 
I am afraid that Oklahoma! upsets me, as I see it as very politically incorrect.

Let's look at several aspects of the past and present of the real entity that is Oklahoma-- that is, the state.

Beginning in 1831,* President Andrew Jackson, in defiance of the US Supreme Court, forcibly uprooted the Indians of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes who had been living in the Southeastern United States and compelled them to migrate hundreds of miles--with enormous hardship including hunger and even death--to Oklahoma. Oklahoma was then known as "Indian Territory" and was to be a home, in fact essentially a refuge, for the Indians--theirs and theirs alone.

However, it was only a matter of a few decades before this promise was broken and Oklahoma was opened up to settlement by white settlers. True, a fairly sizeable tract of the state of Oklahoma is today Indian reservations, but they do not comprise a majority of the state's area.

Now, to look at Oklahoma today: Oklahoma is one of the most conservative states in the US. The city of Norman, Oklahoma, being the seat of the University of Oklahoma, is generally considered liberal; but evidently liberal relative to Oklahoma is still not really very liberal. In an event that was the subject of another PBS program, the following occurred in Norman: The Norman City Council attempted to issue a proclamation recognizing Gay History Month. This might seem harmless to a great many people, but evidently in Oklahoma such a move is controversial. A number of people, including the assistant pastor at a local church, stood up to make speeches attacking gay people, usually using false "facts." For example, the assistant pastor asserted--wrongly--that nearly half of LGBT people are infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

 

There was a young man in the audience that day, and he listened to those speeches. He himself was gay, and hearing how gay people were so reviled in his community--even in supposedly liberal Norman--caused him to commit suicide.

The assistant pastor, certainly one of the people whose words so tragically influenced this  young man, will not admit that he and his words had any role in the young man's suicide, though, I believe, he has admitted that his statistics on gays and STDs were incorrect. And, he later was elected to the City Council, replacing a woman who, at least at the time of the election, was widely known to be a lesbian.

So my knowledge of these past and recent events associated with Oklahoma affects my view of the state and is the reason why any praising or aggrandizing of Oklahoma by the musical show bothers me.

 
Maybe I need to keep in mind that Oklahoma! is a work of art and not see it as a political or social statement. However, its composer and librettist, Rogers and Hammerstein, are the same Rogers and Hammerstein who, six years after Oklahoma!, in 1949, wrote the musical South Pacific, in which they did in fact attempt to make a social statement, a statement about racial prejudice which was definitely ahead of its time.

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*The removals took place over several years. The Choctaw were the first to be relocated, in 1831, and the Cherokee the last, in 1838. Data from Wikipedia.

 

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