May 16, 2023 • 33 mins
There was one portrait of Oklahoma’s history that towered over all others. One with sweeping prairies and singing and dancing cowboys. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! became synonymous with America’s westward expansion. It also left out a key part of the state’s history and people.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I can't remember the first time I saw the musical Oklahoma,
and I don't remember not knowing the words to the
opening song. There's a bright golden haze on the meadow.
There's a bright golden haze on the meadow. The corn
is as high as an elephant.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Sigh, and it looks like it's climbing clear up to
the sky. Oh what a beautiful burning, Oh what a
beautiful day. I've got a beautiful feeling. Everything's going my way.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Chokema sostrepho at Amanda Cob Greatham, Chickasha sayah, my name
is Amanda Cob Greatham. I'm a Chickasauce citizen. I am
a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma,
and I am very much from this born and raised
in southern Oklahoma and the Chickasaw Nation.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
The song of Amanda's childhood is called Oh What a
Beautiful Morning, and it's the opening number to Richard Rogers
and Oscar Hammerstein's classic American musical Oklahoma.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
An interesting aspect to me of Oklahoma's mythology is the
extent to which it is relatively unquestioned. The whole idea
of there being a bright golden haze on this meadow.
This is something that is both highlighted but also obscured.
(01:40):
It's a haze you can't necessarily see clearly, so it's
designed to make you feel something, but not necessarily to
be clear about what that is.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Amanda's writing a book about all this, about the gaps
between myths and the state's actual history. Oklahoma the musical
is front and center. She's calling her book right Golden
Haze Oklahoma, Indian identity in myth and memory.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Public history and memory combined. This is what we collectively
agree our history to be. You have specific stories that
are generally based on some fact, but then they take
a turn and start to turn into the world of
(02:25):
legend mythology. They work past that.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Amanda argues that one of those stories is Oklahoma, and
that it's been able to work past fact and history
partly because it's got all the makings of the type
of story that dominates American mythology, of the West.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Of the coming to a new place, overcoming the odds,
people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, of the building
of something out of nothing, a perceived nothing, a perceived empty,
vast planes or vast wilderness. It's the getting of the
song Oklahoma itself.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The massively famous title song of the musical.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
It couldn't be a better time to start in life.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
It ain't too early, and it ain't too late, starting.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
As a farmer with a brand new wife.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
So living in a brand new state.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
It is a version of the ultimate American story.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
This ultimate American story sits alongside some other big and
pretty romantic ideas about westward expansion in the US, the
taming of the land, a vision of not just Oklahoma,
but the American West and the country itself.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Something sort of idyllic, edenic, if you will, like, here
is this perfect place, this perfect, pure and untouched place, which,
of course it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
The musical's vision of Oklahoma. This romantic vision is really
at odds with the histories we've been telling you, the
forced removal of Native people in the eighteen hundreds, government
policies that took land so white settlers could get it.
The musical is set in nineteen oh six, the year
before Oklahoma became a state. In reality, that land was
(04:28):
far from empty, far from an untouched eden. Amanda cob
grief them remembers the first time this all started to
dawn on her. She was in middle school in the
audience with the musical she loved being performed for the
state's seventy fifth anniversary.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
And that's when so many different schools, community theaters, production
groups were doing the musical Oklahoma as part of their
celebration year, right, And I remember, you know, seeing it
again and standing and listening to it and clapping your
hands and all of those things, and then thinking, why
is it that there are no Indians in this musical?
(05:06):
How is it that this show is just bright white?
Speaker 3 (05:10):
How is that possible?
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Knowing when and where this takes.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Place, Amanda is still grappling with that question. How musical
that she has really fond memories of from state celebrations,
school performances, her dad singing it on car trips, could
be obscuring something so much darker. How it could skip
(05:37):
over a big part of the state's real history. How
it could make something violent the era of native land
being taken swiftly, brutally, seem warm and fuzzy, bright and golden.
I'm Alison Errera and this isn't trust. If you haven't
(06:04):
seen Oklahoma the musical, you've probably at least heard of it.
It dominates imagery of the state. But back before it
was a smashing success.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Stories of OKI's and the grapes of Wrath dominated the
national narrative about.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Oklahoma the dust Bowl. The depression. Times in Oklahoma were hard,
and people around the country knew that.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
And Oki was a dirty word, and all of Oklahoma's
were represented as sad and ignorant and destitute.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
But then in the nineteen forties, the musical Oklahoma came along.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
It was so popular and its story, in all of
its golden glow and nostalgia, was far more persistent.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Oklahoma is a story about cowboys and farmers living in
a territory just before statehood. It takes place around the
turn of the century, when there were deep divine over land.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Things are changing. There is discussion about prairies closing up,
frontiers closing up. There's more offences than there used to be.
There's contentious relations between the cowboy and the farmer, but
that's all the background. The story itself hinges on a romance.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Between Laurie, a farmer's daughter, and Curly, a cowboy. There's
also a sprinkle of violence, but in the end.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
It makes you feel good. It's a very heartwarming story
about simple folk in the Southwest in a kind of
pastoral world that is idyllic, as are many pastoral worlds.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
This is Tim Carter. He's a musicologist at the University
of North Carolina. His book is called Oklahoma, The Making
of an American Musical. He spent years researching, writing, and
just thinking about this musical, and Tim says that when
it hit Broadway, no one really understood how big it
would be.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
I think when Rogers and Hammerstein started out, they didn't
think they were going to produce this great success that
was going to have such massive implications both for Broadway
and more broadly. But by some magic, it.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Was enormously and incredibly popular. It had a record number
twy two hundred and twelve performances on Broadway, and.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
It became the longest running musical on Broadway of its time.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It was such a big deal. Tim says some of
this success was a matter of timing. Oklahoma arrived at
a big moment.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
It was performed in nineteen forty three on Broadway, so
a very crucial time, banging in the middle of World
War Two. So clearly there was a certain amount of
propaganda there if you like that needed to go on
here about belonging to the land that was grand along
(09:10):
with and making people realize that there were things worth
fighting for in the middle of World War two, at
a time when the World War wasn't going so well
for the Allies, and it was the job of Broadway
and of the arts in general to try and make
a contribution to the war effort.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
New York was a big transit point for members of
the Armed Forces before going to Europe. Service members often
got a chance to go to a Yankees game or
a show. Imagine you're about to ship off overseas and
go fight against Hitler's army.
Speaker 5 (09:45):
Goodness knows whether you're going to come back or not, and.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
You find yourself in the heart of Times Square, in
a seat on Broadway, and.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
You hears a group on the stage singing, we know
we belonged to the land, and the land we belonged
to is At that point it has to be a
powerful memory. It becomes a question of identity and keeping
that identity in your mind as you're going through the
horrors of warfare.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And for many the message hit home.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
I was talking about Oklahoma once to a retirement community,
and I was doing my usual talk about the staging
of Oklahoma, the theater guild and so on, and there
was an elderly gentleman in the front row who started crying.
And I went up to him afterwards and I said, oh, sir,
I hope I didn't upset you or offend you or
(10:37):
anything like that. And he said to me, no, no, no, no, no.
I was crying because I was there. And I said,
what do you mean I was there? He said, I
was there in nineteen forty three when I was in
transit to go to Europe to fight at the front,
and I was one of those people who actually heard
(10:57):
and saw Oklahoma. And at that point I thought, oh,
my goodness, it was a very powerful memory on his part,
very powerful memory.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Following World War Two, the musical only became more ingrained
into American identity.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It traveled all over the world as part of America's
post World War two Cold War cultural efforts, and year.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
After year, decade after decade, it seeped into American culture.
It's been performed on the big screen where.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
The wind comes sweeping down the plane.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
High schools, in community theaters, grade schools, choirs and back
on Broadway. Amanda says it told a story that many
Americans wanted to believe in.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
It was really easy to use as a tool to
make people feel good about being Americans right, and good
about the stories of our origin of frontier history on
the prairie. But that's not actually what would have been
happening in history at that moment.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
So let's go back to what was actually happening here before.
It was the state of Oklahoma, when this land was
called Indian Territory.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Which was carved out and set aside by policymakers in
order to house tribes who were forcibly removed on the
Trail of Tears.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Quapa, and other tribal nations gave up
their ancestral homelands in exchange for new treaty homelands assigned
in Indian Territory, and there was a promise that this
would be Indian land, land that would never be made
to be part of any state. The federal government opened
Indian Territory in the eighteen thirties, and almost immediately, non
(13:09):
native people around the country tried to figure out how
to get this land out of Native hands and so
over decades, the government made laws and policies inside new
treaties with tribal nations that chipped away at Native land.
Tribes were even pushed out of some two million acres
of land around what's now Oklahoma City. This was called
(13:29):
the Unassigned Lands. The Battle to Settle those Unassigned Lands.
It was one of the first big steps toward Oklahoma statehood.
That story starts with a group called the Boomers.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
The history of Boomers has very much been erased.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
And it all comes to a head in the late
eighteen seventies with men like David Paine.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
David Payne was the founder of what he called the
Oklahoma Colony. They saw themselves as colonists, and he would
get people to join together with him as fellow colonists,
and then they would lead raids into Indian territory, into
the Unassigned Lands.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Amandasa's Pain knew it was against federal law to intrude there,
and that federal marshals would come in and kick out
his followers.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
This was purposeful, both the raids to settle and also
the desire to be ushered out.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Pain lit a violent campaign against Native people in the
Unassigned Lands. He made a lot of noise around the
country too. He and his followers, who called themselves Boomers,
began a national media campaign.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
To paint themselves as victims. How can there be any
land left in the United States upon which the white
man cannot go? And that was a very successful media campaign.
And one way to make that work was of course,
to go in, start to settle, and be ushered out
to have standoffs with the federal marshals.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
The Boomer movement picked up a lot of support from cattlemen, farmers, speculators, businessmen,
and politicians. They all had interests in undoing federal laws
that protected Indian territory. Shouldn't they have the right to
this land too? That was the argument and pain and
the Boomers won out, and.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
What it culminated in was the opening of the Unassigned Lands.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
In eighteen eighty nine, President Benjamin Harrison declared sections of
Indian Territory open for settlement. Within weeks, tens of thousands
of people arrived at the outskirts of Indian Territory ready
to rush in and claim one hundred and sixty acres.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
April the twenty second, eighteen eighty nine, the day of
the first largest and most glorified land run.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
The land run, a rush to stake out so called
free land.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Well, freeland never came at such great a cost.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
There was more more than one land run, but the
one Amanda's talking about is the most remembered picture. This
hundreds of men on horseback, schooners, others on foot, women,
children lined up. They were waiting for the sound of
a cannon and then they'd take off, doing whatever it
(16:27):
took to stay claim to this land. Some people went
in ahead of that starting gun to get the best plots.
Cheaters basically, but history likes to call them the sooners,
so that's the quick version. The US promised land to
tribes who were forced here. That land was chipped away,
(16:47):
and in spite of the promises made to indigenous people,
eventually this place became a state, Oklahoma. But when it
all gets remembered now, it's usually celebratory. There are the
enactments of land runs at state celebrations and in grade
school where kids get to go outside and pretend to
lay clean to plots on a playground. There's a big
(17:10):
land run monument in Oklahoma City. And if you're a
college football fan, then you probably know about the University
of Oklahoma where Amanda teaches.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
We are right here on the campus of the University
of Oklahoma, well known for its football team, the mascot
the Sooners. Who then when there is a touchdown, what happens.
A land run reenactment.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Happens every home game touchdown, a stadium full of people, cheer,
shotguns go off. Two horses named Boomer and Sooner lead
a covered wagon onto the football field and race around
the stadium. But in all those versions of this history,
there's something missing from the football cheer, the land run monument.
(17:57):
It's the same thing Amanda noticed was missing from the
music Native people. It's in a mission that's hurtful. In
those school land run reenactments I mentioned, Native children have
had to take part two for decades, reenacting an event
that drove their own ancestors off their land. The reason
(18:17):
we're going on about what happened in Indian Territory is
that this it's the history of Oklahoma, a history that
didn't make it into the musical, and that a mission.
It's kind of surprising once you consider where Rogers and
Hammerstein got the idea for their musical They didn't come
up with the story themselves. It came from someone else,
(18:38):
someone who was no stranger to the state's actual history.
Rogers and Hammerstein based Oklahoma on a play written a
decade earlier by a playwright who was born in Indian
Territory within the Cherokee Nation, and though the musical took
place in the Oklahoma territory, the original story before Rogers
(18:58):
and Hammerstein changed it took place in Indian Territory. We'll
be right back.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I don't think there's really a clean way to understand
musical Oklahoma without going back to that. This is a
both a play written by Roley Lynn Riggs, Cherokee citizen,
and these are the people that he knew.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Lynn Riggs was a lot of things for someone born
in Indian Territory in eighteen ninety nine. He was gay,
a playwright, he loved writing letters and poems, and he
was mixed race, being Cherokee from his mother's side.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
He was born pre statehood, but then would have been
raised in the young state of Oklahoma.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Amanda cop Greetham says that Riggs knew the complexity of
this place. It was his neighbor's story, his family story,
his story.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
He often called himself haunted by Home.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
We wanted to highlight some of his letters with a voice.
Speaker 6 (20:01):
I can't make and drama or poetry. The quality of
a night storm in Oklahoma.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Home, Oklahoma was everywhere in Riggs's letters and plays, with.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
A frightened farmer and his family fleeing across the money
yard to the.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Cellar he lived in New York, he lived abroad, He wrote,
He found himself writing over and over again about people
that he knew, the characters that he knew, the cadence
of their speech, the things that they talked about, the
songs that they sang.
Speaker 6 (20:33):
When a son and his wife stumbled drunkly into his
mother's house, the words that came out of brazen, tortured throats,
the murderer's hands threads.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
When he says haunted, I think he meant it. This
was something that both tortured him in some ways, but
that he had great love and affection for.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Riggs wrote a lot of plays, but his best known
work was called Green Grove the Lilacs. That's the play
that became Oklahoma. As Riggs described it, the play is
about a vanishing era in the Midwest, filled with characters
he knew in places he'd been.
Speaker 6 (21:08):
The reason I continue to write about Oklahoma people is
that I know more about the people in childhood and
youth than any other. But it so happens that I
knew mostly the dark ones, the unprivileged ones, the ones
with the most desolate fields, the most dismal skies. And
so it isn't a surprise that my plays concerned themselves
with poor farmers, forlorn wives, tortured youth, plowhands, peddlers, criminals,
(21:31):
with all the range of folk victimized by brutality, ignorance, superstition,
and dread.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Riggs started to play in nineteen twenty nine. In his letters,
he said it was going to be something new, a
drama intercut with American folk songs. Folk music was important
to Riggs because it was important to the place he
was from. One of the songs people sang there was
called Green Grove the Lilacs, Green.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
Brold, Lilac Soul Spot, Glenn with the dew, I'm lone
with a dollon cents of Lodon with the year, and
by the next meeting.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Riggs finished Green Grow the Lilacs in nineteen thirty one.
It had a run on Broadway and played sixty four shows.
When Rogers and Hammerstein decided to use his play as
the basis for Oklahoma, they acknowledged how great the story
already was. In an interview with The New York Times,
Hammerstein said, quote, give credit where credit is due. Mister
(22:38):
Riggs's play is the wellspring of almost all that is
good in Oklahoma. I kept most of the lines of
the original play without making any changes in them, for
the simple reason that they could not be improved upon,
at least not by me. Riggs got royalties two hundred
and fifty dollars a week for life, but just eleven
years after Oklahoma premiered on Broadway Way, Riggs died of cancer.
(23:03):
Both stage versions of Riggs's stories center on the romance
between Laurie and Curly. Both versions have a surly farmhand
who comes between them. In Riggs's play, he's called Jeter.
In Oklahoma, he's Judd. Riggs even bases a character on
his Aunt Mary. She becomes Aunt Eller in both shows.
You've had eighty years to see this, so we're not
(23:25):
gonna worry about spoilers. In both versions, Curly asks Laurie
to marry him, Jud's jealous. There's a struggle. Curly allegedly
kills Judd or Jeter. This sets up the final tension,
will Curly go to jail or will he go free
to live happily ever after with Laurie. So much of
(23:45):
the two shows is near identical, but one of the
big changes between the two is how they end. Near
the very end of Riggs's play, Curly and Laurie get married.
Curly gets sent to jail for killing Jeter, but he
busts back out to come back to see his new wife.
The drama hits its peak when a posse of neighbors
show up to haul Curly back to jail. What are you?
(24:13):
He's a plow perminal he is breaking.
Speaker 5 (24:14):
Out of jail.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Was away at Eller accuses the neighbors of trying to
take Curly from his bride. But what's key is she
accuses them of siding with the Federal Marshal of the
United States. The way she's talking, the US isn't her
government but a foreign government in States, just foreign country?
Speaker 4 (24:33):
Is me ye?
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Poor and the mob, well, they're from Indian Territory. People
like Rigs And just a quick note, some of the
language Riggs wrote nearly one hundred years ago, might be
offensive today.
Speaker 5 (24:54):
I'm having one in territory.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
I'll plump fullman and myself me too, but I can
aunt Eller shoes the mob away. Curly stays with his
bride Laurie, before the posse comes to take him away
in the morning. Just before the curtain falls, Curly singing
a condemned cowboy with a guitar. As endings go, it's
pretty unresolved, ambiguous, all in keeping with Riggs's world of hardship,
(25:21):
clashes and complicated underdogs in Indian Territory. Here's Amanda cop
greatham So.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Although the Rogers and Hammerstein interpreted the musical itself as
Holy White, in reality this is a play about Native Americans.
It is actually probably an all Native American play or musical.
And when then Green Girl the Lilacs was then sort
(25:49):
of taken and turned into the Rogers and Hammerston extravaganza,
you know that it became well that context didn't move
with it.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
By the time the story returned to Broadway in nineteen
forty three as Oklahoma, it was a new kind of
musical theater. Singing and dancing wasn't just used to divide scenes.
They drove the story forward, and that story was lighter
and easier to digest. That meant Riggs's ending had to go.
There was no place in the new show for a
(26:20):
quiet wedding, a jail break, and a curtain coming down
on a mournful cowboy, so Rogers and Hammerstein tweaked the ending.
Tim Carter says, the big famous title song was actually
a big happy accident.
Speaker 5 (26:33):
Rogerson Haberstein couldn't really figure out how to bring the
show to its end. Okay, if we can't solve it dramatically,
let's stick a song in there and hope for the best.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Curley doesn't go to jail, he gets to Mary Laurie.
So the ending had to become a celebration. So they
jumped to a wedding party for Laurie and Curly, a
song sung by the whole cast, a dance number with
Farmers and Cowman, where a wedding party morphs into something else,
something political.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
You don't see the wedding. Instead, they sing a song
about statehood, brand new state, brand new state, gonna.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Treat you great.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So to me what you have? You have this romance
that really is standing in as a metaphor for statehood.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
Now, of course, that made the show a hit. It
also gave the Oklahoma side to the show Oklahoma, a
much greater prominence. But then, of course, the song took
on a life of its own.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
This is the story that premiered on Broadway in the
middle of World War Two, a musical that builds to
a rousing song that would become one of the biggest
hits of the twentieth century. Since nineteen forty three, this
musical has had a lot of power. It's become a
blueprint for Broadway shows with big singing and dancing, but
it's also become so much more. Its closing number was
(28:25):
quickly adopted as Oklahoma State Song and still is seventy
years later. Oklahoma the Musical is fundamental to how many
people in America and around the world think about Oklahoma,
the state, and the American story itself, the expanding West, pioneers, settlers,
and cowboys. It's bright and golden, and as Amanda cap
(28:47):
Greatham says, hazy, what's missing from this version of Oklahoma
is the place where Lynn Riggs grew up, a place
called Claremore within the boundaries of Indian territory, a whole
backstory of Native Pole who were pushed aside by white settlers.
A story for the collective memory that leaves out the
most painful parts.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Cultural memory that which a collective or a nation chooses
to remember together. That's the process by which we negotiate
what's included, what's excluded, what events we assign meaning to,
and what meanings we assign to them. That's what cultural
memory is for, to bind people together. Got to remember.
The other half of memory is forgetting those go hand
(29:31):
in hand.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
I asked Amanda how she feels about the land Run
Sooner football games or Oklahoma the musical. I have.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Collapped and yelled Boomer Sooner at football games. I ran
the land Run as a kid. At the end of
the music Loklahoma, when they're singing it, everybody in this
state anyway stands up and clap your hands. And I
admit these things freely because I'm not ashamed of my
participation in it. Here's the thing, though, what is it
(30:04):
obscuring when you start to ask yourself that, When you
ask yourself, wait, are we all included in this identity?
It's as if the state of Oklahoma thinks that if
you just sing this song loud enough that you won't
be able to hear anything else. And that's just almost true,
but it isn't.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Amanda also says there's something important to keep in mind
about the stories that take hold in our memories. It's
that they can change. New ones can come in and
help redefine our sense of our history, add voices we
haven't been hearing from. There's always room for a new
Oklahoma story to take hold, maybe a big movie or
a TV show like Reservation Dogs that can help recalibrate
(30:48):
that cultural memory and make room for voices that have
been missing, a voice like Lynn Riggs and a story
like Green Grow the Lilacs.
Speaker 6 (30:57):
The play is concerned with the more golden day and
Oka golden in the sense that the people I'm writing
about were magnificently adapted to their environment, party vigorous gay
people and their lives being rounded and buried were full
of unpredictable choices.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
I'm saying, let's embrace the complexity of history. I think
that there's a different, hopefully a golden future out there somewhere.
Won't be perfect, but it need not be hazy.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
For more about the show, go to bloomberg dot Com
slash in Trust In Trust is a production of Bloomberg
and iHeartMedia. This episode was hosted by me Alison Erera
and it was reported by Victor Eves. Rachel Adams, Hurt
and I did additional reporting. Victor Eveyas is our senior producer.
(32:12):
Jeff Grocott is our senior editor. Sage Bauman is our
executive producer and head of Podcasts. Additional support from Katie Boyce,
Gilda de Carle, and Kathleen Quillion. Sound engineering by Blake Maples.
Our fact checking was done by Molly Nugent. Theme music
by Laura Ortman, photography by Shane Brown, Voice acting by
(32:35):
Jack Jackson. You can email us at podcasts at Bloomberg
dot net. Find Intrust anywhere you get your podcasts
I can't remember the first time I saw the musical Oklahoma,
and I don't remember not knowing the words to the
opening song. There's a bright golden haze on the meadow.
There's a bright golden haze on the meadow. The corn
is as high as an elephant.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Sigh, and it looks like it's climbing clear up to
the sky. Oh what a beautiful burning, Oh what a
beautiful day. I've got a beautiful feeling. Everything's going my way.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Chokema sostrepho at Amanda Cob Greatham, Chickasha sayah, my name
is Amanda Cob Greatham. I'm a Chickasauce citizen. I am
a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma,
and I am very much from this born and raised
in southern Oklahoma and the Chickasaw Nation.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
The song of Amanda's childhood is called Oh What a
Beautiful Morning, and it's the opening number to Richard Rogers
and Oscar Hammerstein's classic American musical Oklahoma.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
An interesting aspect to me of Oklahoma's mythology is the
extent to which it is relatively unquestioned. The whole idea
of there being a bright golden haze on this meadow.
This is something that is both highlighted but also obscured.
(01:40):
It's a haze you can't necessarily see clearly, so it's
designed to make you feel something, but not necessarily to
be clear about what that is.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Amanda's writing a book about all this, about the gaps
between myths and the state's actual history. Oklahoma the musical
is front and center. She's calling her book right Golden
Haze Oklahoma, Indian identity in myth and memory.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Public history and memory combined. This is what we collectively
agree our history to be. You have specific stories that
are generally based on some fact, but then they take
a turn and start to turn into the world of
(02:25):
legend mythology. They work past that.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Amanda argues that one of those stories is Oklahoma, and
that it's been able to work past fact and history
partly because it's got all the makings of the type
of story that dominates American mythology, of the West.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Of the coming to a new place, overcoming the odds,
people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, of the building
of something out of nothing, a perceived nothing, a perceived empty,
vast planes or vast wilderness. It's the getting of the
song Oklahoma itself.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The massively famous title song of the musical.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
It couldn't be a better time to start in life.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
It ain't too early, and it ain't too late, starting.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
As a farmer with a brand new wife.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
So living in a brand new state.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
It is a version of the ultimate American story.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
This ultimate American story sits alongside some other big and
pretty romantic ideas about westward expansion in the US, the
taming of the land, a vision of not just Oklahoma,
but the American West and the country itself.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Something sort of idyllic, edenic, if you will, like, here
is this perfect place, this perfect, pure and untouched place, which,
of course it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
The musical's vision of Oklahoma. This romantic vision is really
at odds with the histories we've been telling you, the
forced removal of Native people in the eighteen hundreds, government
policies that took land so white settlers could get it.
The musical is set in nineteen oh six, the year
before Oklahoma became a state. In reality, that land was
(04:28):
far from empty, far from an untouched eden. Amanda cob
grief them remembers the first time this all started to
dawn on her. She was in middle school in the
audience with the musical she loved being performed for the
state's seventy fifth anniversary.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
And that's when so many different schools, community theaters, production
groups were doing the musical Oklahoma as part of their
celebration year, right, And I remember, you know, seeing it
again and standing and listening to it and clapping your
hands and all of those things, and then thinking, why
is it that there are no Indians in this musical?
(05:06):
How is it that this show is just bright white?
Speaker 3 (05:10):
How is that possible?
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Knowing when and where this takes.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Place, Amanda is still grappling with that question. How musical
that she has really fond memories of from state celebrations,
school performances, her dad singing it on car trips, could
be obscuring something so much darker. How it could skip
(05:37):
over a big part of the state's real history. How
it could make something violent the era of native land
being taken swiftly, brutally, seem warm and fuzzy, bright and golden.
I'm Alison Errera and this isn't trust. If you haven't
(06:04):
seen Oklahoma the musical, you've probably at least heard of it.
It dominates imagery of the state. But back before it
was a smashing success.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Stories of OKI's and the grapes of Wrath dominated the
national narrative about.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Oklahoma the dust Bowl. The depression. Times in Oklahoma were hard,
and people around the country knew that.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
And Oki was a dirty word, and all of Oklahoma's
were represented as sad and ignorant and destitute.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
But then in the nineteen forties, the musical Oklahoma came along.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
It was so popular and its story, in all of
its golden glow and nostalgia, was far more persistent.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Oklahoma is a story about cowboys and farmers living in
a territory just before statehood. It takes place around the
turn of the century, when there were deep divine over land.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Things are changing. There is discussion about prairies closing up,
frontiers closing up. There's more offences than there used to be.
There's contentious relations between the cowboy and the farmer, but
that's all the background. The story itself hinges on a romance.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Between Laurie, a farmer's daughter, and Curly, a cowboy. There's
also a sprinkle of violence, but in the end.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
It makes you feel good. It's a very heartwarming story
about simple folk in the Southwest in a kind of
pastoral world that is idyllic, as are many pastoral worlds.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
This is Tim Carter. He's a musicologist at the University
of North Carolina. His book is called Oklahoma, The Making
of an American Musical. He spent years researching, writing, and
just thinking about this musical, and Tim says that when
it hit Broadway, no one really understood how big it
would be.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
I think when Rogers and Hammerstein started out, they didn't
think they were going to produce this great success that
was going to have such massive implications both for Broadway
and more broadly. But by some magic, it.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Was enormously and incredibly popular. It had a record number
twy two hundred and twelve performances on Broadway, and.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
It became the longest running musical on Broadway of its time.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It was such a big deal. Tim says some of
this success was a matter of timing. Oklahoma arrived at
a big moment.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
It was performed in nineteen forty three on Broadway, so
a very crucial time, banging in the middle of World
War Two. So clearly there was a certain amount of
propaganda there if you like that needed to go on
here about belonging to the land that was grand along
(09:10):
with and making people realize that there were things worth
fighting for in the middle of World War two, at
a time when the World War wasn't going so well
for the Allies, and it was the job of Broadway
and of the arts in general to try and make
a contribution to the war effort.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
New York was a big transit point for members of
the Armed Forces before going to Europe. Service members often
got a chance to go to a Yankees game or
a show. Imagine you're about to ship off overseas and
go fight against Hitler's army.
Speaker 5 (09:45):
Goodness knows whether you're going to come back or not, and.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
You find yourself in the heart of Times Square, in
a seat on Broadway, and.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
You hears a group on the stage singing, we know
we belonged to the land, and the land we belonged
to is At that point it has to be a
powerful memory. It becomes a question of identity and keeping
that identity in your mind as you're going through the
horrors of warfare.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And for many the message hit home.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
I was talking about Oklahoma once to a retirement community,
and I was doing my usual talk about the staging
of Oklahoma, the theater guild and so on, and there
was an elderly gentleman in the front row who started crying.
And I went up to him afterwards and I said, oh, sir,
I hope I didn't upset you or offend you or
(10:37):
anything like that. And he said to me, no, no, no, no, no.
I was crying because I was there. And I said,
what do you mean I was there? He said, I
was there in nineteen forty three when I was in
transit to go to Europe to fight at the front,
and I was one of those people who actually heard
(10:57):
and saw Oklahoma. And at that point I thought, oh,
my goodness, it was a very powerful memory on his part,
very powerful memory.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Following World War Two, the musical only became more ingrained
into American identity.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It traveled all over the world as part of America's
post World War two Cold War cultural efforts, and year.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
After year, decade after decade, it seeped into American culture.
It's been performed on the big screen where.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
The wind comes sweeping down the plane.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
High schools, in community theaters, grade schools, choirs and back
on Broadway. Amanda says it told a story that many
Americans wanted to believe in.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
It was really easy to use as a tool to
make people feel good about being Americans right, and good
about the stories of our origin of frontier history on
the prairie. But that's not actually what would have been
happening in history at that moment.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
So let's go back to what was actually happening here before.
It was the state of Oklahoma, when this land was
called Indian Territory.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Which was carved out and set aside by policymakers in
order to house tribes who were forcibly removed on the
Trail of Tears.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Quapa, and other tribal nations gave up
their ancestral homelands in exchange for new treaty homelands assigned
in Indian Territory, and there was a promise that this
would be Indian land, land that would never be made
to be part of any state. The federal government opened
Indian Territory in the eighteen thirties, and almost immediately, non
(13:09):
native people around the country tried to figure out how
to get this land out of Native hands and so
over decades, the government made laws and policies inside new
treaties with tribal nations that chipped away at Native land.
Tribes were even pushed out of some two million acres
of land around what's now Oklahoma City. This was called
(13:29):
the Unassigned Lands. The Battle to Settle those Unassigned Lands.
It was one of the first big steps toward Oklahoma statehood.
That story starts with a group called the Boomers.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
The history of Boomers has very much been erased.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
And it all comes to a head in the late
eighteen seventies with men like David Paine.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
David Payne was the founder of what he called the
Oklahoma Colony. They saw themselves as colonists, and he would
get people to join together with him as fellow colonists,
and then they would lead raids into Indian territory, into
the Unassigned Lands.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Amandasa's Pain knew it was against federal law to intrude there,
and that federal marshals would come in and kick out
his followers.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
This was purposeful, both the raids to settle and also
the desire to be ushered out.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Pain lit a violent campaign against Native people in the
Unassigned Lands. He made a lot of noise around the
country too. He and his followers, who called themselves Boomers,
began a national media campaign.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
To paint themselves as victims. How can there be any
land left in the United States upon which the white
man cannot go? And that was a very successful media campaign.
And one way to make that work was of course,
to go in, start to settle, and be ushered out
to have standoffs with the federal marshals.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
The Boomer movement picked up a lot of support from cattlemen, farmers, speculators, businessmen,
and politicians. They all had interests in undoing federal laws
that protected Indian territory. Shouldn't they have the right to
this land too? That was the argument and pain and
the Boomers won out, and.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
What it culminated in was the opening of the Unassigned Lands.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
In eighteen eighty nine, President Benjamin Harrison declared sections of
Indian Territory open for settlement. Within weeks, tens of thousands
of people arrived at the outskirts of Indian Territory ready
to rush in and claim one hundred and sixty acres.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
April the twenty second, eighteen eighty nine, the day of
the first largest and most glorified land run.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
The land run, a rush to stake out so called
free land.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Well, freeland never came at such great a cost.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
There was more more than one land run, but the
one Amanda's talking about is the most remembered picture. This
hundreds of men on horseback, schooners, others on foot, women,
children lined up. They were waiting for the sound of
a cannon and then they'd take off, doing whatever it
(16:27):
took to stay claim to this land. Some people went
in ahead of that starting gun to get the best plots.
Cheaters basically, but history likes to call them the sooners,
so that's the quick version. The US promised land to
tribes who were forced here. That land was chipped away,
(16:47):
and in spite of the promises made to indigenous people,
eventually this place became a state, Oklahoma. But when it
all gets remembered now, it's usually celebratory. There are the
enactments of land runs at state celebrations and in grade
school where kids get to go outside and pretend to
lay clean to plots on a playground. There's a big
(17:10):
land run monument in Oklahoma City. And if you're a
college football fan, then you probably know about the University
of Oklahoma where Amanda teaches.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
We are right here on the campus of the University
of Oklahoma, well known for its football team, the mascot
the Sooners. Who then when there is a touchdown, what happens.
A land run reenactment.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Happens every home game touchdown, a stadium full of people, cheer,
shotguns go off. Two horses named Boomer and Sooner lead
a covered wagon onto the football field and race around
the stadium. But in all those versions of this history,
there's something missing from the football cheer, the land run monument.
(17:57):
It's the same thing Amanda noticed was missing from the
music Native people. It's in a mission that's hurtful. In
those school land run reenactments I mentioned, Native children have
had to take part two for decades, reenacting an event
that drove their own ancestors off their land. The reason
(18:17):
we're going on about what happened in Indian Territory is
that this it's the history of Oklahoma, a history that
didn't make it into the musical, and that a mission.
It's kind of surprising once you consider where Rogers and
Hammerstein got the idea for their musical They didn't come
up with the story themselves. It came from someone else,
(18:38):
someone who was no stranger to the state's actual history.
Rogers and Hammerstein based Oklahoma on a play written a
decade earlier by a playwright who was born in Indian
Territory within the Cherokee Nation, and though the musical took
place in the Oklahoma territory, the original story before Rogers
(18:58):
and Hammerstein changed it took place in Indian Territory. We'll
be right back.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I don't think there's really a clean way to understand
musical Oklahoma without going back to that. This is a
both a play written by Roley Lynn Riggs, Cherokee citizen,
and these are the people that he knew.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Lynn Riggs was a lot of things for someone born
in Indian Territory in eighteen ninety nine. He was gay,
a playwright, he loved writing letters and poems, and he
was mixed race, being Cherokee from his mother's side.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
He was born pre statehood, but then would have been
raised in the young state of Oklahoma.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Amanda cop Greetham says that Riggs knew the complexity of
this place. It was his neighbor's story, his family story,
his story.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
He often called himself haunted by Home.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
We wanted to highlight some of his letters with a voice.
Speaker 6 (20:01):
I can't make and drama or poetry. The quality of
a night storm in Oklahoma.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Home, Oklahoma was everywhere in Riggs's letters and plays, with.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
A frightened farmer and his family fleeing across the money
yard to the.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Cellar he lived in New York, he lived abroad, He wrote,
He found himself writing over and over again about people
that he knew, the characters that he knew, the cadence
of their speech, the things that they talked about, the
songs that they sang.
Speaker 6 (20:33):
When a son and his wife stumbled drunkly into his
mother's house, the words that came out of brazen, tortured throats,
the murderer's hands threads.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
When he says haunted, I think he meant it. This
was something that both tortured him in some ways, but
that he had great love and affection for.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Riggs wrote a lot of plays, but his best known
work was called Green Grove the Lilacs. That's the play
that became Oklahoma. As Riggs described it, the play is
about a vanishing era in the Midwest, filled with characters
he knew in places he'd been.
Speaker 6 (21:08):
The reason I continue to write about Oklahoma people is
that I know more about the people in childhood and
youth than any other. But it so happens that I
knew mostly the dark ones, the unprivileged ones, the ones
with the most desolate fields, the most dismal skies. And
so it isn't a surprise that my plays concerned themselves
with poor farmers, forlorn wives, tortured youth, plowhands, peddlers, criminals,
(21:31):
with all the range of folk victimized by brutality, ignorance, superstition,
and dread.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Riggs started to play in nineteen twenty nine. In his letters,
he said it was going to be something new, a
drama intercut with American folk songs. Folk music was important
to Riggs because it was important to the place he
was from. One of the songs people sang there was
called Green Grove the Lilacs, Green.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
Brold, Lilac Soul Spot, Glenn with the dew, I'm lone
with a dollon cents of Lodon with the year, and
by the next meeting.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Riggs finished Green Grow the Lilacs in nineteen thirty one.
It had a run on Broadway and played sixty four shows.
When Rogers and Hammerstein decided to use his play as
the basis for Oklahoma, they acknowledged how great the story
already was. In an interview with The New York Times,
Hammerstein said, quote, give credit where credit is due. Mister
(22:38):
Riggs's play is the wellspring of almost all that is
good in Oklahoma. I kept most of the lines of
the original play without making any changes in them, for
the simple reason that they could not be improved upon,
at least not by me. Riggs got royalties two hundred
and fifty dollars a week for life, but just eleven
years after Oklahoma premiered on Broadway Way, Riggs died of cancer.
(23:03):
Both stage versions of Riggs's stories center on the romance
between Laurie and Curly. Both versions have a surly farmhand
who comes between them. In Riggs's play, he's called Jeter.
In Oklahoma, he's Judd. Riggs even bases a character on
his Aunt Mary. She becomes Aunt Eller in both shows.
You've had eighty years to see this, so we're not
(23:25):
gonna worry about spoilers. In both versions, Curly asks Laurie
to marry him, Jud's jealous. There's a struggle. Curly allegedly
kills Judd or Jeter. This sets up the final tension,
will Curly go to jail or will he go free
to live happily ever after with Laurie. So much of
(23:45):
the two shows is near identical, but one of the
big changes between the two is how they end. Near
the very end of Riggs's play, Curly and Laurie get married.
Curly gets sent to jail for killing Jeter, but he
busts back out to come back to see his new wife.
The drama hits its peak when a posse of neighbors
show up to haul Curly back to jail. What are you?
(24:13):
He's a plow perminal he is breaking.
Speaker 5 (24:14):
Out of jail.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Was away at Eller accuses the neighbors of trying to
take Curly from his bride. But what's key is she
accuses them of siding with the Federal Marshal of the
United States. The way she's talking, the US isn't her
government but a foreign government in States, just foreign country?
Speaker 4 (24:33):
Is me ye?
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Poor and the mob, well, they're from Indian Territory. People
like Rigs And just a quick note, some of the
language Riggs wrote nearly one hundred years ago, might be
offensive today.
Speaker 5 (24:54):
I'm having one in territory.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
I'll plump fullman and myself me too, but I can
aunt Eller shoes the mob away. Curly stays with his
bride Laurie, before the posse comes to take him away
in the morning. Just before the curtain falls, Curly singing
a condemned cowboy with a guitar. As endings go, it's
pretty unresolved, ambiguous, all in keeping with Riggs's world of hardship,
(25:21):
clashes and complicated underdogs in Indian Territory. Here's Amanda cop
greatham So.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Although the Rogers and Hammerstein interpreted the musical itself as
Holy White, in reality this is a play about Native Americans.
It is actually probably an all Native American play or musical.
And when then Green Girl the Lilacs was then sort
(25:49):
of taken and turned into the Rogers and Hammerston extravaganza,
you know that it became well that context didn't move
with it.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
By the time the story returned to Broadway in nineteen
forty three as Oklahoma, it was a new kind of
musical theater. Singing and dancing wasn't just used to divide scenes.
They drove the story forward, and that story was lighter
and easier to digest. That meant Riggs's ending had to go.
There was no place in the new show for a
(26:20):
quiet wedding, a jail break, and a curtain coming down
on a mournful cowboy, so Rogers and Hammerstein tweaked the ending.
Tim Carter says, the big famous title song was actually
a big happy accident.
Speaker 5 (26:33):
Rogerson Haberstein couldn't really figure out how to bring the
show to its end. Okay, if we can't solve it dramatically,
let's stick a song in there and hope for the best.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Curley doesn't go to jail, he gets to Mary Laurie.
So the ending had to become a celebration. So they
jumped to a wedding party for Laurie and Curly, a
song sung by the whole cast, a dance number with
Farmers and Cowman, where a wedding party morphs into something else,
something political.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
You don't see the wedding. Instead, they sing a song
about statehood, brand new state, brand new state, gonna.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Treat you great.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So to me what you have? You have this romance
that really is standing in as a metaphor for statehood.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
Now, of course, that made the show a hit. It
also gave the Oklahoma side to the show Oklahoma, a
much greater prominence. But then, of course, the song took
on a life of its own.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
This is the story that premiered on Broadway in the
middle of World War Two, a musical that builds to
a rousing song that would become one of the biggest
hits of the twentieth century. Since nineteen forty three, this
musical has had a lot of power. It's become a
blueprint for Broadway shows with big singing and dancing, but
it's also become so much more. Its closing number was
(28:25):
quickly adopted as Oklahoma State Song and still is seventy
years later. Oklahoma the Musical is fundamental to how many
people in America and around the world think about Oklahoma,
the state, and the American story itself, the expanding West, pioneers, settlers,
and cowboys. It's bright and golden, and as Amanda cap
(28:47):
Greatham says, hazy, what's missing from this version of Oklahoma
is the place where Lynn Riggs grew up, a place
called Claremore within the boundaries of Indian territory, a whole
backstory of Native Pole who were pushed aside by white settlers.
A story for the collective memory that leaves out the
most painful parts.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Cultural memory that which a collective or a nation chooses
to remember together. That's the process by which we negotiate
what's included, what's excluded, what events we assign meaning to,
and what meanings we assign to them. That's what cultural
memory is for, to bind people together. Got to remember.
The other half of memory is forgetting those go hand
(29:31):
in hand.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
I asked Amanda how she feels about the land Run
Sooner football games or Oklahoma the musical. I have.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Collapped and yelled Boomer Sooner at football games. I ran
the land Run as a kid. At the end of
the music Loklahoma, when they're singing it, everybody in this
state anyway stands up and clap your hands. And I
admit these things freely because I'm not ashamed of my
participation in it. Here's the thing, though, what is it
(30:04):
obscuring when you start to ask yourself that, When you
ask yourself, wait, are we all included in this identity?
It's as if the state of Oklahoma thinks that if
you just sing this song loud enough that you won't
be able to hear anything else. And that's just almost true,
but it isn't.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Amanda also says there's something important to keep in mind
about the stories that take hold in our memories. It's
that they can change. New ones can come in and
help redefine our sense of our history, add voices we
haven't been hearing from. There's always room for a new
Oklahoma story to take hold, maybe a big movie or
a TV show like Reservation Dogs that can help recalibrate
(30:48):
that cultural memory and make room for voices that have
been missing, a voice like Lynn Riggs and a story
like Green Grow the Lilacs.
Speaker 6 (30:57):
The play is concerned with the more golden day and
Oka golden in the sense that the people I'm writing
about were magnificently adapted to their environment, party vigorous gay
people and their lives being rounded and buried were full
of unpredictable choices.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
I'm saying, let's embrace the complexity of history. I think
that there's a different, hopefully a golden future out there somewhere.
Won't be perfect, but it need not be hazy.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
For more about the show, go to bloomberg dot Com
slash in Trust In Trust is a production of Bloomberg
and iHeartMedia. This episode was hosted by me Alison Erera
and it was reported by Victor Eves. Rachel Adams, Hurt
and I did additional reporting. Victor Eveyas is our senior producer.
(32:12):
Jeff Grocott is our senior editor. Sage Bauman is our
executive producer and head of Podcasts. Additional support from Katie Boyce,
Gilda de Carle, and Kathleen Quillion. Sound engineering by Blake Maples.
Our fact checking was done by Molly Nugent. Theme music
by Laura Ortman, photography by Shane Brown, Voice acting by
(32:35):
Jack Jackson. You can email us at podcasts at Bloomberg
dot net. Find Intrust anywhere you get your podcasts
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