Explanation:The dawn of the twentieth century found the region between Kansas and Texas in transition. Once set aside as a permanent home for indigenous and uprooted American Indians, almost two million acres of Indian Territory had been opened to settlement in 1889. Joined with a strip of land above the Texas Panhandle, the two areas were designated "Oklahoma Territory" by an act of Congress the following year. Subsequent additions of land surrendered by tribal governments increased the new territory until it was roughly equal in size to the diminished Indian Territory. Land was the universal attraction, but many white pioneers who rushed into Oklahoma Territory or settled in Indian Territory hoped for a fresh start in a new Eden not dominated by wealth and corporate power. Freedmen dreamed of a new beginning in a place of social justice where rights guaranteed by the Constitution would be respected. Most Native Americans, whose land was being occupied, had come to realize the futility of their opposition to the process that would soon unite the two territories into a single state. A few Indians, most wedded to tribal traditions, simply ignored a process they could not understand and refused to participate in an allotment of land they had once been promised would be theirs "forever."
The birth of the new state occurred in an era of protest and reform. Populist and Progressive currents merged to sweep reform-minded Democrats to an overwhelming victory in 1906 in the selection of delegates to a Constitutional Convention tasked with forging Indian and Oklahoma territories and the Osage Nation into a single state. The constitution drafted at the convention in Guthrie in 1906–07 was not as "radical" as Pres. Theodore Roosevelt suggested, but it did reflect its authors' belief that the will of the people, not powerful corporations, should determine state policy. A series of provisions, including a corporation commission, popular election of many state officials, initiative and referendum, preferential balloting for U.S. senators, a single term for the governor, a weak legislature, and inclusion of details in the constitution normally enacted by statute, reflected the founding fathers' conviction that corporate influence on state government should be held in check.
