Considering Scorsese’s film, David Grann’s 2017 book, and the FBI’s complicity in the massacre
This story was originally published at Counter Arts Magazine.
Scorsese’s film is another brutally honest look at how white supremacy won the American West. Not cowboys, but cowards. Powerful psychopaths who cheat, lie, and steal.
David Grann’s 2017 book of the same title is a comprehensive look at the Osage massacre. It also takes a more critical perspective on the FBI and the federal government.
This piece considers the differences between the book and the movie and the FBI’s role in hiding the accurate, staggering death count.
Spoilers ahead! Read this after you see the movie!
The Guardian System
The movie uses a silent film framing device to explain the Osage backstory. Forcibly moved off their land two times, the Osage were given a reservation in Oklahoma by the federal government. Nobody knew it was rich in oil deposits.
Grann cites the testimony of an Osage chief, Bacon Rind,
“[the whites had] bunched us down here in the backwoods, the roughest part of the United States, thinking ‘we will drive these Indians down to where there is a big pile of rocks and put them there in that corner.’” Now that the pile of rocks had turned out to be worth millions of dollars, he said, “everybody wants to get in here and get some of this money.” (88).
Overnight, the tribe was wealthy. Grann describes a scene where oil drillers, like Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood (2007), come to bid on the rights, fighting each other to pay millions of dollars to drill Osage oil.
Reservations are subject to national authority, so the federal government established the headright system. Oil companies paid dividends as a “headright” to Osage members who could prove blood heritage. To access the money, they required a guardian. So, while the money lawfully belonged to the Osage, the guardian system required Osage to get their checks cashed by a white man, someone directly inserted into their finances. Grann explains, “A full-blooded American Indian was invariably appointed a guardian, whereas a mixed-blood person rarely was.” (83)
This racist system created the financial stakes for murder — a bureaucratic seizing of indigenous property.
In the film, this legal system plays out clearest in the life of Henry Roan. A diagnosed “melancholic,” he needs Bill Hale to give him money to buy moonshine. Hale pretends to care for Roan’s safety, but really he’s waiting on a payout from Roan’s life insurance policy.
The oil industry and the federal government resented paying the Osage money for their oil rights. After fear-mongering news articles about Osage spending their money unwisely, Congress instituted even stricter guardianship laws. Osage with guardians could not withdraw more than a few thousand dollars a year, not even for exceptions like medical expenses (87), making a bad situation even worse.
Then, after the Hale conviction, what finally stopped the massacre was another federal law. Federal legislation created and “solved” the problem. In 1932, the Osage petitioned the federal government to change the qualifications for collecting a head right. Grann summarizes, “It barred anyone who was not at least half Osage from inheriting head rights from a member of the tribe.” (242).
While the FBI takes credit for solving the case, this legacy distracts from the federal government’s culpability for these crimes.
FBI’s Legacy
The FBI claims they intervened in Oklahoma after county, state, and private investigators and Congress didn’t stop the conspiracy. But Grann proves the FBI didn’t end the conspiracy either.
In the movie, the tribal chief chastises Congress for making the tribe pay money to fund the federal investigation. It’s quaint to imagine an FBI so new they needed funding, but this is the FBI’s “first” case.
The book presents an agency that doesn’t understand the ramifications of its actions. At first, Hoover sent ramshackle agents to interview suspicious, low-income white men and turn them into criminal informants. Multiple witnesses were killed because the investigation raised Bill Hale’s suspicions.
The FBI cultivated informants like Blackie Thompson and let him commit state-sanctioned crimes to build evidence. This FBI tactic is still popular today. When Thompson broke out of jail, he robbed a bank and killed a local police officer (240).
Hoover almost closed the case at the first sign of controversy. When a local lawyer, A.W. Comstock, was critical of the agency’s recklessness, Hoover started suspecting Comstock of the murders and encouraged investigators to pursue him as a lead (136).
Hoover ignored the apparent pattern of murder despite his agents putting it directly into their reports. This is convincing evidence that the FBI was helping to perpetuate a coverup. From an FBI agent’s report,
“An agent described, in a report, just one of the ways the killers did this: “In connection with the mysterious deaths of a large number of Indians, the perpetrators of the crime would get an Indian intoxicated, have a doctor examine him and pronounce him intoxicated, following which a morphine hypodermic would be injected into the Indian, and after the doctor’s departure the [killers] would inject an enormous amount of morphine under the armpit of the drunken Indian, which would result in his death. The doctor’s certificate would subsequently read ‘death from alcoholic poison.’” (307)
In the film, when Tom White arrives it relieves the tension. But was the FBI heroic?
They only stopped three murderers out of a vast conspiracy of murderers. They had proof and witnesses of other criminal activity, begging the question, why did they stop investigating?
As Grann proves, after the Hale conviction, Hoover promoted the case and made it into the FBI’s origin story. He realized “that the new modes of public relations could expand his bureaucratic power and instill a cult of personality…“ (240).
The FBI’s origin story deliberately did not include Tom White. Hoover never publically thanked White for his contribution, although the Osage tribe did (241). Hoover steered White to offer selective information he could share with the press, “the representatives of the press would have an interest in would be the human interest aspect, so I would like to have you emphasize this angle.” (240). Through his brilliant use of implication, he’s asking White to downplay the conspiracy of lawlessness for oil extraction!
When White asked for files to write a memoir on the case in 1958, Hoover declined. Nor was White allowed to consult on a Hollywood film about the Osage, The FBI Story (1959) with Jimmy Stewart (253).
Grann cites how Hoover would send the story to “sympathetic reporters.” Here’s a headline from a William Randall Hearst syndicate paper.
“NEVER TOLD BEFORE! — How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang” (241)
That headline is similar to the POV of the Scorsese movie.
In the film, the Osage are primarily victims. The FBI convinces white guys to flip, saving the Osage from the deranged murderers.
In reality, J. Edgar Hoover used the Osage just like the Hale family. The FBI built its investigation on years of intel gathered by the Osage and their hired investigators. Hoover came in at the end and took all of the credit. Hoover’s FBI also neglected to investigate others clearly implicated in this conspiracy — the coroner, the doctor, the sheriff, etc. Not so coincidentally, those not investigated were often wealthy and tied to oil companies. By hijacking this narrative, Hoover used the Osage murders to build the agency’s profile and to begin amassing a pool of federal dark money that let him do whatever he wanted.
The Deeper Conspiracy
The book’s final chapters examine new truths Grann discovered in the case, “a deeper, darker, even more terrifying conspiracy.” (258).
Grann attempts to count how many people were killed, consulting federal and tribal archives of oral history, and finds manuscripts of unpublished interviews in Osage collections, newspaper obituaries, census records, and historian researchers. He estimates hundreds of Osage were murdered.
The Osage call these years the “Reign of Terror” (264). Grann describes walking through the Osage graveyard, notices a pronounced increase in headstones from the period. According to the cited Authentic Osage Indian Roll Book, 605 Osage died over sixteen years, from 1907 to 1923 — more than 1.5 times the national rate. (307).
While Bill Hale and his nephews were heinous criminals they were not unique. Collectively, the community murdered hundreds of Osage for their head rights. Hale and his nephews conspired together for the oil money, as did the town. On the book’s last page, Grann concludes, “Indeed, virtually every element of society was complicit in the murderous system.” (316).
I thought Scorsese’s film did a fantastic job of literalizing this. The Klan marches in the town parade, and the Grand Wizard is a city official. Every town official comes together to coach Ernest on lying under oath.
And Scorsese even includes a grander conspiracy. The book mentions Bill Hale: “…often wore a diamond-studded pin from the Masonic lodge…” (30). In the film, they personified this as Hale, a 32nd-degree mason, paddling his nephew.
Grann finds almost no information about the tribal advocate who was assassinated while traveling to Washington. Scorsese dramatizes this by showing the man receiving a note right before his assassination, which raises a fascinating question. How did those Okies in Fairfax hire a hitman in Washington, D.C.?
So …Did You Hate the Movie?
NO! I loved it! I’m not trying to cancel the movie, say it was racist, evil, or I didn’t like it. That would be a dull argument. Who cares if I liked it or not?
A movie costing 200 million dollars cannot be critical of the FBI. Interesting!
Racism is a necessary part of the Osage story. The way Bill Hale and Ernest Burkhart could compartmentalize their lives to both love Osage and plot their extermination is only possible because of white supremacy. They thought they deserved the money, a deeply internalized manifest destiny.
Yet, federal legislation, FBI negligence, and a deep conspiracy of rich oil drillers show that racism wasn’t only in Oklahoma but throughout all of America. The federal government is racist, as is the state government, especially in the context of drilling for oil. Like everything in the 20th century, oil fueled America’s genocidal quest.
Works Cited
The Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann, 2017, Vintage
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