Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, _Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie_

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   Extracts from Red Dirt

RED DIAPER BABY?
Chapter One from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's RED DIRT: GROWING UP OKIE

...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
huge week-long 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 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..'

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 US 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.

When I moved to California and was swept up in the sixties as a
student, I gained a new pride in my Wobbly/Socialist heritage, but
nearly forgot the Green Corn Rebellion until it reappeared in my
field of vision in the mid-1970s while I was working on the book _The
Great Sioux Nation_, which grew out of the 1973 Lakota uprising at
Wounded Knee. A Muskogee medicine man from Oklahoma, the late Philip
Deere, told me a story in 1974 that sounded familiar. At first he did
not name the event but described his memory of it and what he was
told growing up. He would have been about the same age as my father
in 1917, ten or eleven years old. Philip recalled the rebellion as
Indian-conceived and led.

I searched for published information, trying to verify Philip's
version, but found very little indeed that even mentioned the Green
Corn Rebellion. Finally, I found the typescript of a 1959
undergraduate Harvard University history thesis by John Womack, Jr.,
himself from Oklahoma, the biographer of Mexican revolutionary leader
Emiliano Zapata, and now a senior professor of history at Harvard.

By 1890, before the Native American republics of Indian Territory
were dissolved by the 1898 Curtis Act that violated treaties with the
Native nations and forced their communal holdings into individual
allotments, white tenants had already come to outnumber the Indians
two to one in Indian Territory. Breaking the law, violence and
corruption were thus the rule, not the exception, in that region,
setting the stage for an agrarian rebellion.

And times were hard. Over 60 percent of mortgaged farms were lost to
foreclosure during the two years before the Green Corn Rebellion.
More than half the farms were worked by tenants. The rates were even
higher in the Southeastern counties where the rebellion took place
(Pottawatomi, Seminole, Hughes and Pontotoc counties). Only a fifth
of the farms in that region were worked by their owners, and half of
those were under heavy mortgages that carried usurious interest rates
of 20 to 200 percent.

Farming in Oklahoma was commercial, with tenants as wage laborers and
cotton the king; cotton production doubled between 1909 and 1919,
making Oklahoma the fourth-largest cotton producer among the states
and firmly establishing a cash-and-credit economy. The other major
industries were oil production and coal mining, which spawned boom
towns and attracted large populations of transient workers.

When the government began to draft soldiers for the First World War,
the white, black and red farmers in southeastern Oklahoma decided to
resist conscription. Their strategy was to come together and seal off
an area from outside interference, persuade their neighbors to join,
and then march all the way to Washington D.C., picking up recruits
along the way. There they would overthrow President Wilson, stop the
war, and reform the domestic economy to 'restore to the working
classes the full product of their labor.' In preparation for the
great march they burned bridges across the Canadian River to keep
their liberated area isolated. They cut telephone and telegraph wires
so the besieged could not call for help. They planned to confiscate
property in the towns and on the surrounding farms. Anyone who
opposed them was to be conscripted in the same way that the federal
government conscripted its troops. They agreed that any local
authorities who tried to stop them would be met with gunfire, and
poisoned food and well water. They believed they would be joined by
the working people's armies of other states and that the IWW and the
four Railroad Brotherhoods would support them for a victorious march
on Washington, where they would then take control (since most of the
US military would already be in Europe or fighting Pancho Villa in
Mexico).

I learned from Professor Womack's account that a group of
African-Americans set off the rebellion. In early August 1917, a
sheriff and his deputy were fired on by some thirty black rebels.
Hundreds of poor whites and Muskogee Indians were involved. The
rebels were well organized. They divided themselves into details,
some to recruit all who had not yet joined the rebellion, others to
burn barns, another to blow up the Texaco pipeline, several groups to
destroy railroad bridges and cut telephone and telegraph wires, and
others to tear down fences and free farm animals to trample cotton
fields. After a long summer day of destruction the 500 or so rebels
congregated in their new liberated zone to feast, celebrate and rest.

However, the reaction of local townspeople against the rebels was
fierce. They organized huge posses to hunt them down. When faced with
angry, armed citizens, the rebels dispersed, guerilla-style. During
the following days, more wires were cut and bridges hit, while more
and more rebels were captured. Pitched battles took place, and
hundreds were arrested.

US entrance into the European war in 1917 produced a wave of
patriotism and a brutal backlash against the antiwar Wobblies and
Socialists in Oklahoma. The Socialists blamed the repression in
Oklahoma on the Green Corn rebels. Fiery crosses burned all over the
state, and the ranks and resources of the Ku Klux Klan burgeoned. The
Klan seized political power in Texas and Arkansas and came close in
Oklahoma. My grandfather was one of their victims.

When a core group of native white Americans, the very foot soldiers
of empire, began turning socialist and anti-imperialist, even inching
away from white supremacy, the government and other centers of power
acted swiftly, viciously and relentlessly to crush the movement. A
wave of propaganda accompanied the repression. The D.W. Griffith film
extolling the KKK, _The Birth of a Nation_, had already appeared in
1915. After the victories of the Russian and Mexican revolutions, Red
Scare propaganda flooded newspapers and magazines, and formed the
main text of sermons. The landless agrarians of Oklahoma were left
with a recollection of hard times and hatred for big government and
for the rich and powerful, but also with the memory of a failed
movement.

And repression: Oklahoma was kept under careful surveillance long
before the McCarthy era. As reported by George Milburn in 1946:

"It is a criminal offense, for example, in Oklahoma, to have a copy
of Karl Marx's _Das Kapital_ in one's library, and anyone suspected
of possessing seditious literature is liable to search, seizure, and
arrest. Indeed, certain scholarly citizens have been prosecuted
criminally and faced with penitentiary sentences, because sober
political treatises, regarded as classics elsewhere, in Oklahoma are
even more illicit than a bottle of bootleg booze."...

[The full text of the extract is available at
<http://www.reddirtsite.com/extracts.html>.]   *****
--
Yoshie

* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>