The Green Corn Rebellion was an armed uprising that took place in rural Oklahoma on August 2 and 3, 1917. The uprising was a reaction by radicalized European-American, tenant farmers, Seminoles, Muscogee Creeks and African-Americans to an attempt to enforce the Selective Draft Act of 1917 and was so-called due to the purported plans of the rebels to march across the country, eating "green corn" on the way for sustenance. Betrayed by an informer in their midst, the country rebels met with a well-armed posse of townsmen, with whom shots were exchanged and three people killed. In the aftermath of the incident, scores of arrests were made and the Socialist Party of America, formerly strong in the region was decimated in the public eye for allegedly having attempted to foment revolution. The incident was also used as a pretext for national reprisals against the Industrial Workers of the World.
Famous quotes containing the words green, corn and/or rebellion:
“As the shade went up
And the ambulance came crashing through the dust
Of the new day, the moon and the sun and the stars,
And the iceberg slowly sank
In the volcano and the sea ran far away
Yellow over the hot sand, green as the green trees.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“... a tin-horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)