An Okie rebellion forecast Labor Day

An Okie rebellion forecast Labor Day
By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
Published: 9/7/2009 2:29 AM
Last Modified: 9/7/2009 3:56 AM

Ninety-two years ago this summer, one of the most wretchedly poignant episodes in Oklahoma history played out in the tangled hills and bottom land between Ada and Seminole.

Some sharecroppers and tenant farmers got together and decided it was up to them to put the government of the United States in its place. Their chief complaints were against the bankers and landlords who kept them barefoot and broke, and a president who wanted to send their sons to far-off battlefields.

Their plan was simple: Blow up some bridges, cut some telephone and telegraph lines, and march on Washington.

Thousands of similarly dissatisfied citizens, the conspirators figured, would swell their ranks along the way, until by the time they reached the capital President Wilson — "Big Slick," they called him — would have no choice but to resign.

They got as far as Sasakwa.

You may not know where Sasakwa is, but you can be pretty darn sure it is nowhere near Washington, D.C. Most of the revolutionaries took to the blackjack thickets at first sight of armed opposition. The rest surrendered without incident. More than 100 went to jail, some for quite a while.

The whole thing would have been funny had it not been so tragic.

It was called the Green Corn Rebellion because that's what the army of insurrection expected to live off of. About the only thing it accomplished was to wipe out something called the Working Class Union. The leaders of the rebellion belonged to the Working Class Union, which gave authorities an excuse to put it out of business.

The Working Class Union was an offshoot of the Industrial Workers of the World, which didn't take farmers because it couldn't figure out whether they were capitalists or laborers. WCU claimed 20,000 members in Oklahoma but it melted away like an April snow after the dragnet and bad publicity of August 1917.

And good riddance, the better sort of Oklahoman said. The WCU blew up cattle dipping vats — don't ask — and went around scaring the bejabbers out of bankers and county commissioners it didn't like.

It was a radical socialist organization with dangerous ideas, all agreed.

What kind of dangerous socialist ideas, you might ask.

It advocated an eight-hour work day, for one. And child labor laws. A workers compensation system. Old-age pensions.

It wanted relief from a banking system with lending practices just this side of loan-sharking.

It wanted schools that operated more than 90 days out of the year and free textbooks for children who couldn't afford to buy them.

Those were the Working Class Union's radical ideas.

Even people who thought the leaders of this little disaster ought to be shot or hanged admitted the farmers weren't entirely wrong. Living conditions in rural Oklahoma were terrible — worse, it was said, than the slums of New York's Lower East Side.

"These men realize that they are in no better condition than the peons of Mexico and the peasants of Russia," wrote the Tulsa Democrat. "They revolted in the only way they knew."

So this Labor Day, remember a band of half-starved farmers who, in their own misguided way, helped us get a paid holiday to eat hot dogs and drink beer every first Monday of September.
By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer