An article (see below) in the Everett Northwest Worker of August 23rd challenges the usual portrayal of recent rebellion in southeastern Oklahoma as being merely a riot caused by “slackers” bent on evading the draft. The rebellion was swiftly crushed and and the rebels rounded up.
From the San Bernardino News of August 14, 1917:
Here is the first actual photograph received of the “draft rebellion” in southeast Oklahoma, where hundreds of Indians, negroes and white tenant farmers took to the hills and wilds in an effort to evade army service. Picture shows eight draft rioters just brought in from the scene of a battle near Holdenville. Note carefully the types of men among the prisoners-the men who are leading this organized effort to defy the military army of Uncle Sam. Note, too, the ready rifles in hands of the possemen.
Detail 1:
Detail 2:
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From The Northwest Worker of August 23, 1917:
THE SMOULDERING VOLCANO OVER
WHICH THE GOVERNMENT SITS
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Tenant farmer, Levi Thomas Stewart, his wife Beulah Stewart and children, who testified at before the Commission on Industrial Relations in Dallas, Texas on March 17, 1915.
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OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla., Aug. 10.-“Every bank in this state is an arsenal. All the clerks are being taught to and are expecting to use the guns in their vaults.” This was stated to me by an eminent lawyer sitting calmly in an office here in the state capital.
“This issue is between the tenant farmers and the bankers and landlords. This draft resistance is just an excuse for the preliminary outbreak of what may prove to be a revolution.” This time it was a Judge who was speaking, a judge who as a delegate to the Baltimore Convention of the democratic party that nominated Woodrow Wilson.
“Since three months ago, I estimate that sixty thousand modern high powdered rifles have been purchased by the farmers in this state. A few drayloads have been captured, but they’re on the trail too late.” This was said by a former minister who has been touring the state with a Chautauqua company.
Here you have the elements of a situation that only waits for a show of force by the United States Government to break into flame. The “riots” in Seminole, Pontotoc and Pottawatomie counties resulted in the arrest of a few old men and young boys, mainly non-resisters. One or two old grudges were settled in the process. These “riots” were mere surface indications of what is going to happen if Uncle Sam does not use all his tact. What is true in Oklahoma is true of Texas, Colorado, Arkansas and Kansas.
In the state penitentiary at McAlester, in the death cell, which is only thirty inches wide and less than seven feet long, sits “Good Eye Huck,” otherwise Hon. Albert Huckleberry a one-eyed tenant farmer who was for two years county commissioner of Seminole County. During this term of office he uncovered grafts, swindlings, and thievery on the part of the democratic machine politicians who held the county officers hitherto. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had disappeared. “He sees more with his good eye than anybody else with both” is the common saying that gave him his nickname. Huckleberry got evidence sufficient to convict, after a long hard battle. The governor refused at first to have the accounts of the county audited. After he was won over, the state auditor pleaded that there were not sufficient funds. But Huckleberry, armed with a petition signed by 800 voters of the county, forced the investigation and audit which resulted in penitentiary terms being awarded a whole ring of grafters in Seminole County. They appealed, and [got?] out on bond.
The start of the trouble in these counties began with the swearing in of deputy sheriffs and sending them out to arrest the boys who did not show up for registration and examination. Where these boys were not found, their parents and neighbors were arrested, and old grudges were satisfied by hauling along of many a Socialist agitator who had exposed the unparalleled rottenness and corruption in Democratic Oklahoma-on the ground that they were “friendly to the draft resisters.” One of the Oklahoma daily papers makes great capital out of the discovery of one of the common Socialist pennants, “Workers of the World Unite,” which it proclaims is the “only one known to be in the state-in the house of one of those arrested for suspected friendliness with the draft resisters.
Thus the natural opposition to the enforcement of the draft law in the state which was overwhelmingly Socialist in feeling, but which is being taken advantage of by bankers and landlords and chambers of commerce to suppress and dispose of the strong movement which was on the verge of ridding the tenant farmers of Oklahoma of the worse and they are overplaying their hands.
“The Working Class Union,” of which so much is being written and said, was organized in this state two years ago, long before the draft was ever thought of. It is an organization of tenant farmers for mutual relief. It was formed to meet a special need. The Socialist Party cannot function between elections. The I. W. W. is not open to tenant farmers-only to wage laborers. Hence came the Working Class Union, composed of tenant farmers, starting in Van Buren, Ark., has spread all over Arkansas, Oklahoma, and north Texas, and has some strength in Kansas and Nebraska and all the other agricultural states where tenancy is common.
MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED BANKS IN THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA HAVE BEEN COMPELLED BY SUITS ENGINEERED BY THE W. C. U. TO PAY BACK USURIOUS INTEREST EXTORTED FROM TENANT FARMERS.
LANDLORDS ALL OVER THE STATE HAVE BEEN COMPELLED BY THIS UNION OF TENANT FARMERS TO RAISE THE RATES AND LOWER THE RENTS.
Hence the animosity between the “respectable citizens” and the W. C. U. The plea of “resistance to the draft” is a pretext.
For example: For two years the W. C. U. has been meeting once a week in a certain locality. The officials know this. Acting on the strength of the present upheaval, they surround the schoolhouse or the grove or the springs where the meeting is held and take every one prisoner on the ground that he is “opposing the draft.” When the actual reason is that he has been protecting himself against outrageous extortion.
The real purpose of the organization has been to reach the tenant farmers to act together. They meet to decide on a price for their labor and the proper rent they should pay for the farm. When a tenant farmer was found scabbing they lashed him a few times, burnt his crops and scared him in other ways, until he “saw the light.” If a landlord raise the rent, they saw to it that no one would rent his place.
Hence the landlords are opposed to the W. C. U.
In this state the legal rate of interest is 10 per cent. But usury among the bankers is so common that a comptroller of the currency recently denounced them as thieves and robbers. Many of them charge-and extort-24 per cent and 40 per cent. Some have been known to demand 100 per cent for one month.
One tenant farmer came to a bank to borrow sufficient money to cover the funeral expenses of his daughter. The bank compelled him to sign a note for 180.00, payable in one year. Eighty per cent interest. One bank in Muskogee county was compelled to give back a farmer’s mule, which it had seized in payment of usurious debt.
In McIntosh County, a prominent Socialist lawyer presented to the bank a bill for $300. Usurious interest he had extorted from a client. The banker laughed at him. When the lawyer had left, the banker went over to see the real state man hitched up his buggy, drove out to the farmer’s place, and told him that he would have to either clear off the farm in ten days or call off that suit. It was late in the season, an to leave the farm then would have meant the loss of a whole year’s work, together with all his credit. Besides, this, if a tenant farmer is blacklisted by one bank, he cannot get land anywhere else in that state. So the farmer told the lawyer to call off the suit. It was cheaper then to pay the usury and than to lose his year’s labor.
“The landlord holds the tenant, farmer while the banker robs him” is the way a minister put it to me.
The W. C. T. U. fights this and hence the bankers oppose the W. C. U.
The United States Industrial Relations commission proclaimed the land conditions in Texas and Oklahoma to be a disgrace to the nation, to be unparalleled in any civilized country. But nothing has been done since that report was rendered. Instead of redress being offered, the Texas land oligarchy, consisting of Secretary Houston, Post Master General Burleson, Attorney General Gregory and Col. E. M. House, dominates the policies of the administration, both domestic and foreign; and no relief can be hoped for so long as they are in control.
[Photograph added.]
From The Fort Wayne Sentinel of Aug 8, 1917:
This racist cartoon was commissioned and displayed without apology by the Sentinel.
The Daily Sentinel commissioned “Bob” Satterfield, the well known cartoonist, who has been doing some on0the-spot sketches of the country and incidents in southeast Oklahoma’s “draft rebellion.” Here’s the first step of Satterfield’s work. He shows a typical sheriff of the old Indian country; a few of the negro rioters who are seeking to evade army service, with armed possemen guarding them; a night silhouette of flivvers commandeered by the sheriff for the chase; and a drawing indicating the kind of rough hill country in which the slackers are intrenched. There’ll be more sketches tomorrow if Satterfield doesn’t meet the fate of the innocent by-stander.
The Northwest Worker
(Everett, Washington)
-Aug 23, 1917
Note: page 1 gives pub date as Thur Aug 24
which is an error since Thursday was
the 23rd in 1917. Paper pub’d weekly,
on Thursdays. Pages 2-4 have correct date. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085770/1917-08-24/ed-1/seq-1/
