(3 of 3)
Making a shambles of conventional U. S. economics, Governor Bryan called for the establishment and operation of banks by the State. He also wanted legislation to put cities and towns into the retail gasoline trade. He would have the Legislature ask Congress to relieve agriculture by means of the equalization fee or the export debenture. Other Bryan demands included a State income tax and the wholesale purchase by the State of road building materials to be resold to contractors at cost. Governor Bryan was determined to give Nebraska a ''business "administration" the like of which the State had not known before—nor for that matter, any other State.
Alfalfa Bill. A "common people's affair" was the inaugural of William Henry ("Alfalfa Bill") Murray as the State's ninth Governor. To the "Sage of Tishomingo" and the author of Oklahoma's Constitution the oath of office was administered by his father, Uriah Dow Thomas Murray, 91, a special notary for the occasion. Governor Murray put aside the baggy wrinkled clothes and red suspenders he had affected for his hitchhiking campaign last year and appeared at Oklahoma City in a well-pressed suit, with his shoes shined and his long, scraggly mustache trimmed. Close at hand as an escort was the Squirrel Rifle Brigade of which all members are officers. Afterwards a great dance was thrown open to the public without written invitations. Governor Murray led the first old-fashioned square dance with "breakdown fiddlers" playing in the corner.
Oklahoma citizens waited to see if Governor Murray would post on his office door the new rules he had promised. Among them were:
"Don't ask me about the weather. The weather bureau is in Washington.
"Don't try to deceive me. Be brief and to the point because I suspect your motive already.
"Don't try to tell me how I was nominated and elected. Perhaps I know more about that than you.
"Don't ask me how I feel. I may feel like damn it and tell you so."
"Phil." When in 1901 Philip Fox La Follette was three, he watched his father, the late great Robert Marion La Follette, inaugurated as Governor at Madison. Last week on the same spot, without fuss or celebration, "Phil" La Follette took the oath of office which made him the State's youngest Governor. An interested on-looker was Robert Marion La Follette 3rd, aged 4, the new Governor's son, who is already being coached to follow the family tradition in politics.
—Minnesota also has the first and only Farmer-Labor U. S. Senator, Dentist Henrik Shipstead.