Unveiling Oklahoma’s Green Corn Rebellion: A Fight For Justice

It's a bit of lesser-known Oklahoma history, but yeah, we (collectively) once plotted to march on Washington to overthrow the US Government in a wild protest of war.

It was during a particularly sweltering Oklahoma summer back in 1917. The US Gov had just started to draft Americans for WWI when a diverse group of tenant farmers, socialists, Native Americans, and African Americans decided they weren't going to have it.

It was called The Green Corn Rebellion.

If it doesn't sound familiar, it's because nobody taught this chapter of Oklahoma history in schools. Whether it's politics at play, or it was just long forgotten, we may never know.

Picture this, Eastern Oklahoma in 1917 is poor and even more rural than it is now. It's populated by farmers who didn’t own the lands they worked for the few wealthy landowners who took every penny they could.

When I first read that, I thought of share-cropping. It was a very popular and widespread practice at the time, and the norm after the American Civil War. Work the land, have a place to call home, and split the profits of the crops.

What was happening in Eastern Oklahoma at the time was not share-cropping, at least not to the benefit of everyone involved. It reads more like indentured servitude. Always having just enough to not starve throughout the year, but never enough to move on into a better situation.

As the State of Oklahoma was still in its first decade of organization, the government often looked the other way. The farmers and families thereof did what rural people do now: gossip constantly with each other, so there was a common attitude toward the whole situation.

Most were unhappy with how things were going, working like a dog yet never managing to just get by, so when the federal draft for World War I rolled around, it was the straw that broke the donkey's back.

These Oklahomans weren’t about to fight and die in Europe for a system that had already chewed them up and spat them out.

It was time for a new revolution.

Sort of...

Under a socialist banner, the blue-collar people of Eastern Oklahoma formed the Working Class Union. They organized meetings in barns and all through the backwoods of the state, secretly plotting to resist the draft by marching east, gathering support, and fueling themselves and the revolution on, you guessed it, green corn plucked from the fields as they went.

The revolution didn’t get far.

In fact, it never made it out of Seminole or Pontotoc County before being snuffed out by local authorities.

I know, a buildup to nothing. Like when my uncle told me he went to Woodstock in 1969, but only made it as far as Altus.

A few shots were fired, people were arrested, and the headlines mocked the whole thing as a hillbilly farce. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll see what really happened. People who were fed up with being silenced organized the only way they knew how, and were shut down in the same manner as all unions were threatened in that day.

Naturally, the government called them traitors and cowards to the end because they wouldn't go fight a war between a bunch of inbred European monarchs.

History has mostly ignored the whole ordeal. But in truth, the Green Corn Rebels were expressing the reddest of American patriotism in fighting a system that said they would fight and die for a country they're not a part of.

It was also a spotlight on class inequality in Oklahoma and the absurdity of war profiteering in what would eventually be the Military Industrial Complex.

They may have been disorganized, naive, and idealistic, but they had guts and, in their own way, were trying to live out the very principles America claimed to be fighting for overseas.

Obviously there's a lot more to the tales of the Green Corn Rebellion online, and depending on the website you're one - of which there are only a few telling the tale - the impact it had on society varies, as those who tell history rarely portray it without a slight to one side or the other.