CHAPTER 6

William Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion, and Revolutionary Memory

Memory, then, is not only a backward retrival of a vanished event, but also a posting forward, at the remembered instant, to all future moments of corresponding circumstance.1

One of the most poignant episodes of the Great War on the American home front occurred on 2 in southeastern . Indignant about the wartime profiteering of wealthy landlords and incensed by new federal laws, a motley group of radical tenant farmers staged what has become known as the “Green Corn Rebellion”. Believing rumors that a nationwide workers’ uprising was imminent, the would-be revolutionaries, organized under the banner of the Syndicalist Working Class Union (WCU), ambushed the County sheriff, cut down telegraph lines, and burned several railroad bridges. On the following morning, the band of armed rebels gathered on a farmstead in Pontotoc County, raising the red flag and awaiting marching orders. They anticipated shortly joining thousands of other farmers from all over the state in a march on Washington that would topple the government. The coalition of white, black, and Native American farmers waited in vain. Unbeknown to the rebels, the SPA had worked behind the scenes to discourage other WCU chapters from participating, because it was feared that an armed rebellion might give the government yet another pretext to jail leftists indiscriminately. A hastily assembled posse of “patriots” made short shrift of the revolt that was left without reinforcements. When the smoke had cleared, three men lay slain and

1 Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 209. 146 Embattled Home Fronts

450 others were rounded up for taking part in the insurgence. A hundred-and-fifty rebels were eventually convicted, many of whom served out long sentences in the infamous Leavenworth penitentiary. Eighteen years later, Pontotoc County native William Cunningham fictionalized these events in his first novel, The Green Corn Rebellion.2 Thirty-three-year-old Cunningham, a journalist, teacher, and aspiring writer from the , was among those who had followed Sinclair’s election campaign in California with growing enthusiasm. Raised in a household of staunch Eugene V. Debs supporters, Cunningham and his younger sister, Agnes “Sis” Cunningham – the folk protest singer and co-publisher of the small but influential 1960s’ magazine Broadside – had developed a deep commitment to the labor cause early on in life. ’s run for governor, “Sis” Cunningham recollects in her autobiography, inspired them to place their art fully into the service of politics.3 The Green Corn Rebellion was a direct outgrowth of this commitment to political art as well as William Cunningham’s involvement with the Oklahoma’s Writer’s Project, which he headed from 1935 to 1938 and under whose auspices he had previously collected Indian folktales and researched local labor history. Viewed within the political and cultural contexts of the mid-1930s, Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion furthermore betrays its origins in the Popular Front movement that sought, among many other things, to recover or reinvent a distinctly American tradition of political radicalism. Following the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Franco in

2 Published in 1935 by Vanguard in New York, the novel was at best a moderate success. Nevertheless it proved him to be enough of a literary man to receive the appointment as director of the Oklahoma Writer’s Project in the same year. His appointment lasted only until 1938. Due to his radical leftist leanings a controversial figure from the start, Cunningham was replaced by Jim Thompson. Cunningham moved to Washington, where he worked for two years with the Federal Writers Project. Throughout the 1940s, Cunningham gathered stories for the Soviet news agency TASS in New York City. Aside from two nonfiction works, How to Work Your Way Through College (1927) and The Real Book About Daniel Boone (1952), he wrote numerous short stories that appeared in Harper’s and Collier’s. In addition, Cunningham published altogether three novels, The Green Corn Rebellion (1935), Pretty Boy (1936), and Danny (1953), co-authored with his wife, Sarah Brown. William Cunningham died in 1967. 3 Agnes Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, Red Dust and Broadside: A Joint Autobiography (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999), 162.