"It will be your own fault if you do not frame the best constitution ever written," William Jennings Bryan admonished the delegates who met in Guthrie in 1906 to draft Oklahoma's constitution. The members of the Constitutional Convention had invited Bryan to address them in person, but Bryan's schedule prevented him from attending; instead, he wrote a letter listing the items he hoped they would include. Statehood, however, proceeds from the writing of a state's constitution, and that process begins in the U.S. Congress.
