Remembering the Green Corn Insurrection
Right here is the account of a forgotten march on Washington that never made it to the federal city. It charges barely a footnote even in regional histories, despite the indisputable reality that the Marxist novelist William Cunningham fictionalized it in 1935.
The year is 1917. The reveal is Oklahoma, hotbed of early 20th-century American radicalism. Higher than half the reveal’s nearly 200,000 farms are operated by tenants, who’re in perpetual hock to landlords, merchants, and banks. They owe money owed no sincere man will pay.
The reveal’s Socialist Event polls as excessive as 35 p.c in some counties. Essentially the most agitated farmers gravitate to the Working Class Union (WCU), a secret society headquartered at Hobo Hole in Van Buren, Arkansas, and led by a charismatic homeopath, Dr. Wells LeFevre.
The WCU attracts each and each white and dusky tenants. “Rube” Munson, erstwhile zinc miner, now a consuming preacher of Christian socialism, emerges as first amongst equals; given to florid language and sweeping allegories, he’s almost illiterate.
The WCU doesn’t entangle itself in theoretical debates. Karl Marx, dilating on “the idiocy of rural lifestyles,” is no longer mighty read in Pontotoc County. These Oklahomans don’t pine for the collectivization of agriculture or the dictatorship of the proletariat or any of that nonsense; they’re males of action, no longer ideas. And these actions can trespass upon lawlessness.
As an example, when an epidemic of bovine “Texas fever” broke out in 1915, the federal govt and the reveal agriculture division ordered cattle to be dipped in vats containing pesticides. Fearing that the dip also can execute their cattle, WCU nightriders dynamited the vats and burned the barns of county commissioners who had cooperated with reveal and federal authorities. It looked sooner than submitting a lawsuit.
Two years later, there is tiny enthusiasm in the Sooner Insist for U.S. entry into the First World War. (Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore, grandfather of novelist Gore Vidal, is one amongst the battle celebration’s cruelest critics.) There is even less strengthen for conscription, which is in a neighborhood to capture husbands and sons from farms and households.
Rube Munson tours the WCU’s strongholds, warning other folks that their boys are about to be seized by the governmentand sent in but any other country as cannon fodder. He and his comrade Homer Spence (a dirtbag with an ogle for young ladies) hint that a immense rebellion is brewing that will rid the country of the president and waste the battle. WCU locals assemble caches of guns and dynamite. Spence lies that two million insurrectionists are ready to march.
The seditious Sooners intend to throw a monkey wrench into the battle machine. They notion to fetch at the farm of “Old Man” Spears, a neighborhood Socialist and son of a Accomplice earlier, the put they’ll delivery a protracted march eastward, subsisting on inexperienced corn and picking up rebellion-minded farmers as they lunge. When this agrarian military arrives in Washington, they’ll depose “Kaiser Wilson” and call the boys dwelling.
As historian Nigel Sellars relates, on July 27, 1917, Old Man Spears raises a pair of handmade flags: one American, one crimson. Over the subsequent few days Green Corn rebels fabricate their technique to the Spears reveal. Some raise attempting firearms or squirrel guns; others are equipped simplest with sticks or clubs.
Note spreads expeditiously. The males of Seminole County put up themselves into posses to defend their homes and property against the rebels, whose purpose of overthrowing President Wilson to give protection to their sons from the draft has no longer been clearly communicated. Sporadic gunfire breaks out; three rebels die in the uprising’s simplest fatal shootout.
The ideal posse heads straight for Old Man Spears’s farm. Green Corn sentries problem them and ship notice inspire to the camp. But the rebels are rattled; they’d anticipated to contend with an military of paid troopers. As an different, as contemporary Socialist Bertha Hale White wrote, “The rebels knew these males—they had been the postmaster, the storekeeper, the druggist—folks they’d identified for years and against whom they’d no interior most grudges. To boot they can no longer fireplace upon their friends and neighbors—so that they threw down their palms and quietly submitted to arrest.”
The Green Corn Insurrection wilted in the warmth of August and the warmth of friendship.
Four hundred fifty-eight Green Corn rebels had been arrested. The U.S. Criminal expert for the Eastern District of Oklahoma wished them all done. But landlords and merchants forced the authorities to delivery the males, lest the tenant farming device crumple. Eighty-six males would wait on time in federal or reveal penitentiary. Higher than 15 cases that many Oklahoma boys (1,354) would die in the First World War.
Are there classes to be drawn? Maybe. Neighbors have claims upon our loyalty, so the reveal prefers uprooted mercenaries to fabricate its dirty work. And powerless folks, when pushed too some distance, answer desperately, violently, quixotically…humanly.
Bill Kauffman is the creator of 11 books, amongst them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette and Ain’t My The United States.