More on the Green Corn Rebellion

One hundred years ago today, August 2, 1917, hundreds of men in central Oklahoma -- white, Black and Native American; mostly young, mostly tenant farmers -- took up arms to resist the World War 1 draft.  They chose the old slogan "Rich man's war; poor man's fight."  They gathered on the Sasakwa farm of John Spears, prepared to march on Washington.  Before the next day was over most of them had surrendered to sheriff's posses.  Nigel Sellars, the historian who has done most work on the Green Corn Rebellion, thinks they were willing to fight President Woodrow Wilson, who they called "Big Slick", but unwilling to fight their own neighbors, people whom they knew personally.  Dozens were arrested and many of the leaders served time in Leavenworth Penitentiary for espionage and conspiracy.

Lonnie Spears, son of "Old Man" John Spears, at Leavenworth.

The area along the South Canadian River was a center of radicalism for years before.  Seminole County gave 35% of its votes to the Socialist Party in 1914.  So did Pontotoc County.  Hughes County voted 31% Socialist.  Even in 1916, when Wilson made the issue keeping the US out of the war, 28% of Seminole County voted Socialist.  It was also a region of landless farmers.  Four of five farmers in the three counties were tenants.  And the World War had not made their lives easier.  Cotton prices actually dropped in 1914.

Those high tenancy rates reflect some particularities of eastern Oklahoma, which had been Indian Territory until eleven years earlier.   Consider, for example, the case of Cuffie Harjo, a Seminole Indian participant who pled guilty in the big conspiracy case, US v. Neeley Adams, et. al.   He was sent to Muskogee to serve his sentence, but ended up in the 29th Company, 165th Depot Brigade, of the US Army and being gassed in the fighting in Europe.  Harjo, with his brother-in-law, Josie Marpiyecher, signed a complaint to the Bureau of Indian Affairs earlier that year about "guardians" being assigned to Seminole minors.  These "guardians" were selling off the land of the minors they were allegedly looking out for, ostensibly to cover the costs of their "guardianship."  This was just one way white Oklahoma bankers and attorneys were stealing Native lands in Oklahoma.  (See the recent, frightening book Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann.  Also, Angie Debo's 1936 And Still the Waters Run.

Seminole Allotment Plat, T6N R6E

The Seminole Nation's land -- like Native land all over the US -- was taken out of tribal ownership and individually distributed to members of the tribe listed in the Dawes Rolls, named after Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes who wrote the legislation that created this attempted dissolution of Indian identity.  Accessing them and searching them requires no travel to archives and no special research skills.  We can find Cuffie Harjo (although spelled "Cuffee") and we can find his brother-in-law Josie.  We can find the land he was allotted, Township 6 North, Range 6 East, in sections 3 and 10.  Why then, do why find him a landless farmer in the census?  Why do we find the same for his brother-in-law, Josie Marpiyecher?  Why do we find the same for their co-defendant, Caesar Dindy, a Black Choctaw?  Because the land was stolen.

Price Street in Leavenworth

Or consider another co-defendant, Price Street.  Street, like many African Americans, escaped to Indian Territory from the former Confederacy -- in his case Alabama -- seeking relief from the growing white supremacist hegemony of disfranchisement, Jim Crow, and lynch law.  He married a Black Seminole, Missie Davis. Look again at that plat above for her allotment, just east of Cuffie Harjo's in section 10.  So, if his wife was a landowner, why was Price Street a tenant farmer? Do you really have to ask anymore? Price Street was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary for his part in the rebellion. As a side note, I was sorry to discover that his grandson, Marine PFC Lenard Street, Jr. died in 1968 at Quang Tri.  He was 19 years old and had been in Viet Nam under four months.

Most of the participants in the Green Corn Rebellion were white.  They hadn't stolen the land of their Native and African American neighbors.  That was done by bankers and lawyers.  But they were not great advocates of equality, either.  There are suggestions in the historical record that white rebels refused to listen to Price Street, because he was a Black man.  And that part of Oklahoma became a center of Ku Klux Klan power in the years immediately after the war.  But for a minute in 1917, landless farmers of all races united to oppose militarism and capitalism.  It is worth remembering.