Bumpkins and Traitors

In August 1917, several hundred armed men gathered on a ridge above Oklahoma's South Canadian River, beneath a red flag, beside a wagon of roasting ears and barbecued beef. They intended to march on Washington, stop the war, and abolish the draft. Within hours, a posse of storekeepers and bank clerks had scattered them into the hills.

The newspapers called it the Green Corn Rebellion and made it a joke. This is the story they left out. Tracing a century of dispossession, from the Creek and Seminole removals and the destruction of tribal land to the grafters, landlords, and crop-lien merchants who built a cotton economy on tenancy and debt, it follows white tenants, Black sharecroppers, and Creek and Seminole traditionalists into a secret union and an alliance almost without parallel in American history. It recounts the night of severed wires, the manhunt in the blackjacks, the federal trials, the cells of Leavenworth, and the campaign that destroyed the strongest rural socialist movement the country had ever seen.

Vivid, humane, and rigorously researched, this is the untold story of the largest armed rising against America's First World War draft, and of the questions about land, labour, and war that it refused to let die.