The Green Corn Rebellion

Corporate-Capitalist-Magazine’s (Smithsonian) account of “The Green Corn Rebellion.”

Link:https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/socialist-revolution-oklahoma-crushed-green-corn-rebellion-180973073/
When the Socialist Revolution Came to Oklahoma—and Was Crushed
Inside the little-known story of the Green Corn Rebellion, which blazed through the Sooner State

“….
……..In early August 1917, several hundred rebels gathered here by the farm of John Spears, who had hoisted the red flag of socialist revolution. Socialists are about as common as Satanists in rural Oklahoma today, and regarded in much the same light, but in the early 20th century, poor farmers flocked to the anti-capitalist creed. Most of the men on Spears Mountain, and at other rebel gathering places, were members of the Working Class Union (WCU), a secret socialist organization that vowed to destroy capitalism as well as resist the military draft for World War I. The rebels planned to rout the forces of law and order in Oklahoma, and then march to Washington, D.C., where they would stop the war, overthrow the government and implement a socialist commonwealth. The rebel leaders had assured their followers that two million working men would rise up with them, forming an unstoppable army. On the long march east, they would feed themselves with green (yet to ripen) corn taken from the fields. Hence the rebellion’s name.

Eberle now drives to a rise overlooking the shallow, sandy South Canadian River. “Uncle Dunny dynamited a railroad bridge right there, or burned it down, I’ve heard it both ways,” he says. “His name was Antony Eberle. The other uncle was Albert Eberle. We called him Chuzzy. He went to prison because they hung someone using a rope that had his initials on it. At least that’s the story I’ve always heard.”
Dunny and Chuzzy wouldn’t talk to Ted about the rebellion after they came out of prison, and neither would Ted’s father. But others said Dunny and Chuzzy were “backed into it” by violent threats from a few outside agitators. Ted wants to believe this, but he doubts it’s true.

“They had razor-sharp knives, and they were quick and mean,” he says. “Uncle Dunny killed a man in Arkansas, and did ten years in prison, and came here when it was still outlaw territory. It’s hard to imagine anyone forcing Dunny—or Chuzzy—into doing something he didn’t want to do.”

It’s extraordinary that this violent socialist rebellion against the U.S. government—the only one of its kind—has been largely erased from collective memory. Despite its failure, it wrecks long-standing arguments for “American exceptionalism,” as Alexis de Tocqueville called it—the notion that the United States is uniquely immune to radical class-based uprisings. But what’s most striking about the Green Corn Rebellion is the ambition of these half-starved backcountry farmers, the combination of boldness and delusion that propelled them to take on the government and the capitalist economic system. Armed with Winchesters, shotguns and squirrel-guns, riding on horses and mules, or walking on foot, they were confident of victory.

* * *

It might surprise many who call themselves socialists today, including members of Congress, that the heartland of American socialism was once rural Oklahoma. In 1915, there were more registered Socialist Party members in Oklahoma than in New York, which had seven times the population and a much stronger tradition of left-wing politics. Oklahoma socialists built a statewide movement, but won the most converts in the southeastern counties, where a small elite of predominantly white landowners had established a cotton fiefdom in the old Indian Territory. They rented out most of their land to tenant farmers, black and white, who had migrated to Oklahoma from Texas, Arkansas and the Deep South, dreaming of opportunity on a new frontier.

One reason that socialism thrived there was the appalling exploitation of these tenant farmers. In addition to being rack-rented, with the lease payable in cotton and corn, they were charged outrageous rates of interest by banks and merchants for the credit they needed to put another crop in the ground. Twenty percent interest was the baseline, 200 percent was not uncommon, and the highest compounded rates reached 2,000 percent. Buyers offered rock-bottom prices for cotton, and tenant farmers had no choice but to sell, and mortgage the next year’s crop, to keep going. Adding to these burdens were the poor soil and periodic ravages of the pestilential boll weevil. No matter how hard they worked, or how thrifty they were, tenant farmers were trapped in perpetual debt and abject poverty.

In 1907, the German-born socialist organizer and editor Oscar Ameringer met these ragged, emaciated men and women. He had been organizing dockworkers in New Orleans when he agreed to come to Oklahoma and spread the budding socialist movement. What he found in the southeastern cotton counties was “humanity at its lowest possible level of degradation.” Tenant farmers were living in crude shacks infested with bedbugs and other parasites. They were suffering the diseases of malnutrition, and toiling in the fields for up to 18 hours a day. Though the American Socialist Party, following Marxist orthodoxy, disdained farmers as petty capitalists and argued that agriculture should be collectivized, Ameringer and other socialist leaders in Oklahoma viewed “agricultural laborers” as members of the working class, and argued that anyone who works the soil has the right to own land. That was Marxist heresy—but it won over tens of thousands of debt-ridden small farmers.

Socialist Party organizers, who typically shun religion, exploited the evangelical Christianity of the Oklahoma countryside. They portrayed Jesus Christ as a socialist hero—a carpenter who threw the money-changers out of the temple and said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. The gospel of socialism spread through Oklahoma at weeklong summer camp meetings that attracted thousands and had the atmosphere of holiness revivals. Religious songs were given socialist lyrics. “Onward Christian Soldiers,” for example, became “Onward, Friends of Freedom,” and began “Toilers of the nation, thinkers of the time….” Speakers told of the evils of capitalism, the great beast whose lair was Wall Street, and the imminent arrival of a paradise on earth called the Cooperative Commonwealth, in which everyone would have enough to be comfortable and happy. Here at last the tenant farmers’ degradation was explained to them—the cause was the system, not their own shortcomings…..see link…”