Review: The Lowdown, “Tulsa Turnaround” | Season 1, Episode 7

One of my favorite non-fiction books of recent years is Sam Anderson’s Boom Town, a combination cultural history and free-ranging essay collection, with the cumbersome subtitle “The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, And The Dream of Becoming A World-Class Metropolis.” There’s not a lot in Boom Town about Tulsa, aside from Anderson documenting the various times that Oklahoma City’s power-brokers have worked overtime to keep Tulsa from becoming a true rival. But the book is still very relevant to The Lowdown, in that it’s really about the multiple acts of stubborn will and devious manipulation that brought the state of Oklahoma into existence in the first place—and that maybe, not too far below the surface, remains restlessly at work.

We get a big, sour taste of this in the opening of this week’s episode, “Tulsa Turnaround.” In two sequences, skillfully intercut, we see Pastor Mark delivering a highly disturbing sermon about white pride in one part of Osage County, while in another part Donald Washberg is playing master of ceremonies at a schoolkids’ reenactment of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run. The connection isn’t subtle. While Donald is offering up the sanitized, Founders Day pageant version of white American rapacity—declaring, in a cheery voice, that Oklahoma’s settlers believed “every man woman and child deserves the right to own land”—Pastor Mark is arguing that God made white people superior and therefore wants only whites to be in power.