Justice for All: Dick T. Morgan, Frontier Lawyer and Common Man’s Congressman

with a foreword by Dr. Bob L. Blackburn

Biography / 2 Cities Press, 2025
Distributed by the University of Oklahoma Press

Dick T. Morgan believed in a strong government empowered to do good things for the people.

Justice for All chronicles the career of Dick T. Morgan, an Oklahoma founding father whose public service reflects a passion for fairness that was sorely lacking in Gilded Age America. After arriving in the Unassigned Lands (later, central Oklahoma) with the first wave of non-Indian settlers on April 22, 1889, Morgan developed a reputation as the go-to lawyer for land disputes, built a substantial real estate business, and promoted church-building across Oklahoma Territory. During his tenure in Congress from 1909 until his death in 1920, he helped create institutions that were central to progressivism in the post-frontier period and have shaped modern America, including the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Farm Credit System. 

Morgan’s adeptness in working across the aisle in a perpetually divided Congress serves as a wake-up call to politicians in thrall to ideology and identity politics at the expense of the public welfare. His speeches, publications, correspondence, newspaper interviews, and congressional testimonies reveal him as a public servant whose bedrock principles were rooted in the Republican Party—that is, the party of Lincoln. In both public and private life, Morgan demonstrated a deep allegiance to what one of his role models, President James A. Garfield, defined as the heart and soul of the nation and the basis of a free government: the church, the school, and the home. 

Justice for All owes its existence to Dick T. Morgan’s great-grandsons, David and Kenyon Morgan, who resolved to rescue their ancestor from a century of undeserved obscurity. Traveling, literally and figuratively, in their great-grandfather’s footsteps, the Morgan brothers combined their talents in a journey of discovery that helped this biographer illuminate the Progressive Era through the experiences of a native Hoosier who became one of his adopted state’s most beloved and influential citizens.

What readers and reviewers have to say…

As a native of the Oklahoma Panhandle, an area that was part of Dick Morgan's congressional district, and, like him, having spent much of my life in both the legal and political arenas, I have a special appreciation for the significant and lasting contributions he made to our state and nation. This book chronicles the life of a true Oklahoma hero and the exciting times of the territorial and early statehood days.

Tim Leonard represented northwest Oklahoma in the state senate for nearly a decade, served as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma, and has been a U.S. district judge for the Western District of Oklahoma for more than thirty years.

This book is nectar for anyone who reads and writes about Oklahoma history. It is also a delicious drink for those of us who disdain the Jim Crow era, which belies the spirit of our beautiful state. Dick T. Morgan was a lawyer, a churchman, a statesman, and a gentleman in the truest sense of the word.

Eddie Jackson, an attorney and former bank president, broke the color barrier as the third black student athlete to play basketball for the University of Oklahoma Sooners and the first for the Oklahoma City University Chiefs. He is the author of Oklalusa: The Story of the Black State Movement in Oklahoma Territory.

Of all the actors upon the stage that made up territorial and post-statehood northwest Oklahoma, there are none that come close to matching the accomplishments and the lifetime of service of Dick Thompson Morgan.

Robin Hohweiler is former director of the Plains Indians and Pioneers Museum in Woodward, Oklahoma.