by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Between 1906 and 1917, the Wobblies and the Socialist Party
won converts on a mass scale in Oklahoma. My grandfather
was one of the first. They adopted the religious evangelists’
technique of holding encampments with charismatic speakers,
male and female, usually near small towns (indeed, many
evangelists were themselves converts to socialism). Socialists
were elected as local officials and the lampposts of many
towns were hung with red flags. In 1915 alone 205 mass encampments
were held. The Socialists never won a statewide race in
Oklahoma, but their percentage of the vote increased from
6 percent in 1907 to 16 percent in 1916 voting for Socialist
Party candidate Eugene Debs. In 1914 the Socialist candidate
for governor won 21 percent of the vote and they won six
seats in the Oklahoma legislature, along with a majority
of local offices in many counties. But it was not a peaceful
process.
“There was a lot of shooting?" I asked Daddy.
“You can say that again and not just shooting. Wobblies
cut telephone wires and dynamited pipelines, water mains
and sewers. It was all around here but mainly over in the
eastern part of the state. Them Seminole Indians was in
it, Negroes too. Down in San Antone and the Valley them
Magon brothers from Old Mexico. Boy, the Wobblies sure put
up a fight.”
In speaking of blacks and poor whites and Seminole Indians
rising up together in eastern Oklahoma, I know now that
Daddy was referring to a spontaneous event, separate from
IWW or Socialist Party organizing, the “Green Corn
Rebellion” during the summer of 1917.
In December 1994, when I was poking around in southeastern
Oklahoma trying to understand that rebellion, I met an elderly
Seminole Muskogee Indian woman who said that she had been
only nine years old at the time, but she remembered it,
and that her uncle, who she said had been a leader of the
rebellion and was imprisoned afterwards, had told the heroic
story over and over.
“The full moon of late July, early August it was,
the Moon of the Green Corn. It was not easy to persuade
our poor white and black brothers and sisters to rise up.
We told them that rising up, standing up, whatever the consequences,
would inspire future generations. Our courage, our bravery
would be remembered and copied. That has been the Indian
way for centuries, since the invasions. Fight and tell the
story so that those who come after or their descendants
will rise up once again. It may take a thousand years but
that is how we continue and eventually prevail. As it turned
out, the blacks struck first.”
I asked her to explain the significance of the Green Corn
ceremony to the Muskogees: “That is our most sacred
ceremony, and you could call it our new year, the time of
new beginnings. It occurs whenever the green corn comes,
sometimes as early as late June, or as late as early August.
During that year, 1917, the green corn came late, during
the last week of July and early August. It was on August
3, 1917, at the end of our four-day Green Corn ceremony
that we rose up.”
My father portrayed the Green Corn Rebellion as a great
moment of heroism, a moment of unity, betrayed by the “electric-light
city” Socialists, who scorned it. Of course nothing
about Wobblies and Socialists appeared in my U.S. or Oklahoma
history textbooks (and very little appears in Oklahoma textbooks
even now), so I began to doubt my father’s stories,
especially about the Green Corn Rebellion.
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