Indiana, where Timothy McVeigh was executed the other day, and Oklahoma, where he blew up a federal building, have more in common than might be expected of a Great Lakes state and a Great Plains state. Among characteristics they share are conservative politics, a suspicion of government, sharp memories of the Depression, ruthless exploitation of natural resources, and a history of kickback scandals involving politicians, capitalists and public employees.
Indiana is the crossroads of America, with access to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Railroads and interstate highways slice through it. Yet it is inward looking and unimaginative. Its people are called Hoosiers, after a canal builder who employed the toughest, most reliable workers. The name has a country bumpkin image.
The venal patronage politics of the state, now somewhat modified by the courts, was typified by the so-called Two Per Cent Club of public employees required to kick back 2 per cent of earnings to political parties; otherwise, they lost their jobs. The Ku Klux Klan operated openly there, claiming to control not only the Governor and the legislature but the courts as well. Indiana is the home of the American Legion and the John Birch Society. Anti-Catholicism flourished there. Oddly enough, so did Notre Dame, the university where the Fighting Irish played football with religious zeal.
Run-down river town
For all its right-wing politics and red-neck image, Indiana bred Eugene Debs, a socialist thrown up by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. In 1900, he got the first of four nominations for the presidency.
Terre Haute, on the former Wabash Cannonball line, the city in which McVeigh was executed, is a run-down river town with a spicy past. Its growth was halted in the 1920s by coal strikes, Prohibition, floods, and a chronic lack of civic leadership. Little survived from the booming past but thriving brothels. When the city shut them down, the mayor, Leland Larrison, complained: "Instead, we've got some high-class massage parlours. Now, they're in the motels. It's a rich man's game now. It costs you $50 to $70. Ten bucks was the going price when I was in there. The average salesman can't sneak $50 on to the expense account." Hizzonna de Maya clearly knew which side his broad was buttered.
For all the rough-house stuff - the kickbacks, the brothels and the graft - Indiana has quite a list of literary figures and other artists to its credit, among them Lew Wallace, Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, Kurt Vonnegut, Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter. The $14 million-a-year TV host, David Letterman, is also a Hoosier. So was the Irish-American James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote that heart-warming, heart-wrenching poem, Little Orphan Annie:
"Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,
An' wash the cups an' saucers up an' brush the crumbs away,
An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep,
An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her boardan' keep. . . Oil and wheat
"Ooook-lahome!" The rollicking Rodgers and Hammerstein song is probably the first intimation many of us had of the oil, petroleum and wheat State, with the Red River Valley forming its southern saw-toothed edge. The name is Choctaw Indian: okla (people) and homma (red).
Others of us learned about Oklahoma from Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, leaning with great compassion and beautiful artistry towards the unfortunate "Okies" of the 1930s Dust Bowl, caterpillar-tractored off their land by the banks and sent off as spalpeens, along Route 66, to become exploited fruit-pickers in the rich Valley of California.
Agriculture was Oklahoma's main business until the big money moved in and "agribusiness" led to bigger farms and fewer farmers. (Irish papers: please copy!) Oil was what made some Oklahomans rich, following wildcatting and ruthless exploitation of a natural resource, with ready cash benefits for the few and general depression for the many which is characteristic of extractive industries everywhere.
We get some sense of the political muscle exercised by the "good ole boys" of the oilrich South from the fact that they were permitted to drill an oil-field underlying residential areas of Oklahoma City, including the grounds of the State Capitol. Perhaps it was this example that emboldened Bush Junior's oil-soaked friends to strong-arm the president into promoting mineral exploration in areas of natural and delicate grandeur.
A decline in Oklahoma's petroleum reserves led to the development of nuclear energy, which came under intense scrutiny when Karen Silkwood, a nuclear industry employee (her story was filmed), was killed in a car "accident" - certainly murdered - while on her way to speak to a reporter about safety standards in a nuclear plant.
As in Indiana, graft is rife in Oklahoma too. Twenty years ago, two-thirds of its county commissioners were involved in the biggest kickback scandal in US history.
The deeply right-wing politics of Indiana and Oklahoma may have been the force - together with army formation - that conditioned Timothy McVeigh to commit the atrocity he visited upon Oklahoma City, where, significantly, he chose a federal building as his target. It is usually from such a cramped intellectual background that militia forces and such do-it-yourself zealots emerge.
In Indiana and Oklahoma, the press has long been ultraconservative, inculcating and sustaining closure of the mind. Tulsa, chief oil-centre of Oklahoma, became the headquarters of Oral Roberts, the fundamentalist evangelist broadcasting across the US. Like many of his kind, Roberts built his empire with dollars contributed by gullible TV viewers. The press - which might have looked closely at his operation - supported him on grounds of "freedom of religion". But what about freedom of thought?