The War, the Wobblies, and the Green Corn Rebellion
Though inspired by true events, this is a work of fiction. It’s hard to overstate the public hysteria in the United States, and in Oklahoma in particular, during the First World War. I can only try to show how America’s entry into the war would have affected someone like Alafair. She lived in the exact middle of an enormous country and, to her, Europe could have been another planet for the effect it had on her daily life. It would have been difficult for her to comprehend the reasons the country was at war. I played with time a bit in this story by adding a week between the Bisbee deportation on July 12, and the first draft lottery, which actually occurred on July 20. The anti-draft uprising, later known as the Green Corn Rebellion, took place on August 4, 1917.
World War I
Most Americans had no desire to get involved in the European war when it began in 1914. There were as many Americans with German ties as there were with English and French ties, and the reasons the Europeans were trying to kill one another was poorly understood by most. When Germany broke its pledge to limit submarine warfare and began sinking American ships in an effort to break the British naval blockade, the U.S. severed diplomatic relations. Then, in January 1917, the British deciphered a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, offering United States territory to Mexico if it would join the German cause and attack the U.S. border. The interception of the Zimmermann Note effectively changed American public opinion overnight. Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.
But not everyone in the country was behind the war, to say the least.
The Unions
The Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) is a socialist labor union formed in Chicago in 1905. The union advocated strikes and work slowdowns in order to achieve their goals of improved working conditions, a living wage, pensions, and child-labor regulation. The I.W.W., along with the U.S. Socialist Party, opposed both the U.S. entry into World War I and involuntary conscription, for which members were violently persecuted. I.W.W. members are known as Wobblies, though nobody knows exactly why.
The Working Class Union (W.C.U.) was a radical union which was formed when the national leadership of the I.W.W. rejected membership for farmers and other self-employed people because they were not true wageworkers. Unlike the I.W.W. and the Socialist Party, the W.C.U. did not object to the idea of violence to gain its ends.
The Green Corn Rebellion
In August of 1917, shortly after Congress passed the Selective Service Act, an armed rebellion led by tenant farmers took place in east-central Oklahoma. On August 2, the Seminole County sheriff and three deputies set out to investigate a reported gathering of radical activists in an area known for its W.C.U. sympathies, but were ambushed and fled for their lives. That evening, the W.C.U. called a secret meeting on a hill outside of Sasakwa, where they made plans to march on Washington D.C., arrest President Wilson, reform the economy, and put an end to the war. They expected to link up with thousands of other farmers and workers on the way, creating a massive army. However, their plans were betrayed to the law by an informer in their ranks, and a large posse of men mobilized in Wewoka and headed for the rebel camp. When the armed citizens burst into the camp, the rebels dispersed, guerrilla-style. For the next week, hundreds of suspected insurgents were rounded up and arrested. Posses engaged in several bloody battles with hold-outs, and the organized rebellion was completely put down within a week. Nearly five hundred men were arrested, but fewer than two hundred were indicted, and one hundred fifty convicted of sedition.
The anti-draft rebellion caused a brutal backlash. On November 9, vigilantes calling themselves the Knights of Liberty “liberated” seventeen Wobblies from jail in Tulsa, whipped them, covered them with hot tar and feathers, and drove them out of the city. Many socialist leaders all over the United States were sent to prison, and some were not released until they were pardoned by President Harding in 1921. The American Socialist Party denied any involvement in the Green Corn Rebellion, but was blamed for the uprising anyway. The rebellion damaged the American socialist movement and contributed to the decline of the Working Class Union and the I.W.W., as well as contributing to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma and the first national Red Scare in the 1920s.
There are several stories about why the uprising came to be called the Green Corn Rebellion. One of the more likely is that it took place shortly after the Creek Nation’s annual Green Corn Ceremony of late July or early August.
The Bisbee Deportation
In the spring of 1917, the I.W.W. sent organizers to unionize miners in Bisbee, Arizona. The mining companies rejected all union demands for better wages and working conditions, so in early July a strike was called and over three thousand men walked out. The county sheriff, in conjunction with the mining companies, formed a posse of over twenty-two hundred men, and at dawn on the morning of July 12, rousted two thousand purported strikers from their beds at gunpoint. Twelve hundred miners who would not renounce unionization were loaded onto twenty-three cattle cars and deported, without water and in ninety-degree heat, two hundred miles to Hermanas, New Mexico, and dumped. An I.W.W. lawyer met the train in Hermanas and secured the release of several men. The local officials in Hermanas didn’t quite know what to do with the rest. Many destitute strikers were taken back to Columbus, New Mexico, and housed by the Army in a tent camp for months.