The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.
—Labor union saying
The volatile labor environment of 1917 and 1918 was not just a hindrance in the coalfields of southern Illinois but a problem to be dealt with nationwide. The booming war economy created a tight job market for nearly every industry, just at the time when many young men were drafted or enlisted in the military.1 Labor unions worked to solidify their gains from President Woodrow Wilson’s Progressive Era and take advantage of a political landscape designed to maintain or increase industrial output for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, inflation continued to skyrocket, and quite often wages didn’t keep up with the cost of living.
In the first six months of the war alone, more than 2,500 significant industrial strikes were reported nationwide.2 While many of those disagreements were simply about higher wages, a greater number of job actions were called to win union recognition for employees or closed-shop agreements. One of those battles for unionization would be fought in Collinsville at the St. Louis Smelting and Refining (SLSR) plant. And for all the chaos wrought by a handful of miners for the UMW and local mine operators, it would pale in comparison to the citywide mayhem to win union recognition at the lead smelting works. That fight would rage almost concurrently with Collinsville’s wildcat coal mine strikes in 1917 and make the city a steaming cauldron of labor militancy.
The Lead Works, as the plant was known to locals, located northeast of the city in 1904 to also be near the abundant coal supply.3 Lead ore was shipped in for smelting into ingots, sheets, and powdered lead for further refinement and industrial use. There was naturally heavy wartime demand for the product. East of Vandalia Street on Cuba Lane, the Lead Works was a vast complex of homes, industrial furnaces, and related buildings. The entryway to the plant on Cuba Lane was lined with stately white post-and-rail fences before reaching the six manager’s homes on either side of the road. The homes were large bungalows, most with wide dormers and hip roofs, befitting Superintendent William Newnam and the other plant managers who lived there. It was nearly a company town when one adds in some smaller homes built farther down the lane for employees and the Harry Schnick Grocery. The residential areas also included a large boardinghouse. Perhaps alluding to the wage levels of its residents, the boardinghouse was sometimes referred to as the Welfare Hotel. It compactly housed about 130 of the workers and their families.4 In the area around the Lead Works, it wasn’t difficult to discern the haves from the have-nots.
After smelter rates were increased, workers at the plant were given raises in April 1917 that paid them from $2.30 to $2.65 per day. Newnam explained, “It is our desire to retain our present efficient force and their contentment and well-being shall be our first consideration.” But these rates were still well below what miners were earning.5
Some effort had been made to make the plant safer, as workers had complained of respiratory problems, and nearby farmers said the lead fumes hurt their crops. Three new smokestacks were constructed in 1917, the largest of which stood at 386 feet.6 The Collinsville Herald proclaimed the improvements signified “the passing of the day when industries were slave drivers and man killers, who brushed aside the human wreckage of their enterprise and called for fresh forms to mangle.”7 It was hoped the stacks would be high enough to prevent more pollution lawsuits too. The plant was also expected to be 25 percent more efficient with the upgrades.
The Lead Works had upward of four hundred employees, but five of them in particular caught the ire of company officials in the summer of 1917. When management learned they were attempting to unionize their coworkers, they were promptly fired. But the efforts at organizing, and the underlying employee discontent, brought more voluntary concessions from SLSR on July 28, including a 10 percent wage hike and a reduction to eight-hour workdays.8 It was said to be the third voluntary pay hike in a year’s time.
On Sunday, July 29, two hundred of the smelter employees met with representatives of the International Mill and Smelter Workers Union at an organizational meeting at city hall.9 A committee had asked Superintendent Newnam for reinstatement of the five organizers, but he refused, calling the men “undesirables.” Meanwhile, more than 125 men had signed the petition seeking recognition of the union as the employees’ bargaining agent.10
The union organizer said the men were not making within fifty cents per day of what they should be earning, even with the recent increases. He said the shortage of labor made it an “opportune moment” to press their concerns.11 UMW state president Frank Farrington also spoke to the benefits of unionism and said the worker’s efforts would be fully supported by the miners’ unions. He too agreed it was the right time to unionize, as the government would not let the Lead Works shut down, even if it wanted to. Farrington denied reports that black workers would not be allowed to join the union and characterized the latest company wage hike as “inconsequential” and a “sop.” Smelter workers conditions in 1917 mirrored those of miners twenty years prior, Farrington said.12
Locked in a stalemate, the employees made their move on August 4, when a large number quietly walked out of the plant at the sound of the noon lunch whistle.13 Newnam and SLSR continued to say that they would not reinstate the five discharged men or recognize the union as bargaining agent. In fact, Newnam refused to meet with anyone who was not a Lead Works employee. The departing workers were paid their wages due when they left that day. But without enough men to operate the facility, Newnam elected to close. The company said working conditions, hours, and wages were appropriate and that it would remain closed until the labor matter had been resolved.
The Collinsville Trades Council, an organization of union groups, said, “The central body of the City and all its branches are backing the striking lead smelter workers.” That backing would include financial support as the five Collinsville-area miners’ locals began signing on to create a strike fund.14 With a 1 percent deduction from each miner’s paycheck, the fund could potentially yield $2,000 a month.
As the strike entered its third week, union organizers advertised the wages paid at St. Joseph Lead Company’s smelting plant in Herculaneum, about fifty miles south in Missouri. The plant was unionized and much better paid. Farther from St. Louis and more rural, theoretically Herculaneum should have had a lower cost of living. But the wage comparisons were telling. Furnace tappers were paid $2.80 per day in Collinsville, $4.55 per day in Herculaneum; furnace helpers received $2.60 in Collinsville, $4.11 in Herculaneum; motormen earned $2.60 in Collinsville, $4.29 in Herculaneum. The wage disparity of about 60 percent made it easy to understand why SLSR had so quickly offered pay hikes in an attempt to avert the strike. “We as a body of men realize that we have been imposed on and have been suffering from the pressure of working under unbearable conditions,” the union ad said.15
The Collinsville Trades Council assisted the strikers by helping pitch a tent city where unmarried strikers could camp outside the plant and be available to serve as pickets when needed.16 The council had arranged credit at stores for the strikers to use for necessities. Mayor John Siegel had tried to get the two parties together again to negotiate but to no avail.
The city council would become further involved when it was asked at a special meeting August 21 to adopt a resolution by the trades council that criticized SLSR for threatening to move the operation to another town. “This company ought not deny to its employees the right to belong to the organization of their craft,” the resolution said.17 Mayor Siegel questioned whether council action was appropriate and suggested that the company be given an opportunity to present its side to the council. Alderman R. C. DeLaney, a weighman at the Donk’s Mine No. 1, said he would rather see the company move than continue to pay low wages.18 Siegel would later say the resolution was passed illegally and was null and void.19
Forty-five-year-old Dr. John Siegel had served as mayor since 1915, having won reelection in April 1917. His medical practice on Main Street was well established in the community, his home just six blocks away on Morrison Avenue. The mayor’s wife, Stella, eleven years his junior, had borne him a son, Vivien, now fourteen.20 As a businessman Siegel was less apt to adopt the union line. The workingman’s favorite in the last mayoral election had been former mayor James Mathews, who had alleged that Siegel did not want the new labor temple built in Collinsville. Siegel denied the charge, adding, “Voters should remember that every man cannot get on the police force, even if they are promised before the election.”21
Siegel would make another attempt to bring the parties together by taking a committee of three strikers to Newnam’s office to negotiate.22 They met for about an hour, and the company agreed it would allow an open shop, which would permit union membership. But it would not consent to dues checkoff or allow a union business agent to collect dues at the plant. Also the company would still not agree to reinstate the five organizers.
There were some last ditch efforts to break the stalemate. One included a September 5 meeting at the home of city physician M. W. Harrison.23 It was announced that the union had requested a 30 percent wage hike, about half the difference between the Collinsville and the Herculaneum salaries. Newnam rejected that percentage but did agree to some increase. The smelter workers backed away from the demand for reinstatement of the five original leaders. The major sticking point was now union recognition, and the workers were not bending on that. Determined to keep a nonunion shop, neither was Newnam. After the meeting a large number of smelter workers convened in the meeting hall above Salel’s Ye Olde Corner Bar on Main Street to discuss their next moves, but they were not holding the cards.
State mediators met with the parties on September 13, but as with the other sessions, to no avail.24 By that time Superintendent Newnam’s decision had been made. While the smelter workers, miners, and city officials fretted that St. Louis Smelting and Refining would move to another town, Newnam had another plan. He would stay and fight.
He would wage that battle in a town where more than half the workingmen were union miners, in a town where there were unions for barbers, bartenders, brewery workers, butchers, carpenters and joiners, cement workers, hod carriers and building laborers, hosiery workers, laborers, musicians, plasterers, railway carmen, retail clerks, sheet metal workers, teamsters, and wood, wire, and metal lathers.25 And if Collinsville did not have a union for a given craft, it was a good bet that a nearby town did. Nearly every family had a union member in the household or at least a close friend who belonged to organized labor.
The Lead Works had peacefully existed in the community for thirteen years, but there had been no prior attempt to unionize—and that changed everything. With the talk about town since the start of the strike, Newnam and SLSR well knew what they were up against. But they would reopen the plant with no union labor. The company’s first step on Monday, September 24, was to quietly seek a federal injunction in Springfield against anyone who would try to interfere with operation of the plant.26 Specifically named in the injunction were national and local officials of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. But the injunction also named state and local miners’ union officials, labor council members, and even two Main Street saloon keepers.
Federal district judge J. Otis Humphrey’s injunction prohibited any activity that might interfere with operation of the smelter, including intimidation or harassment of company employees, prospective employees, or those conducting business with SLSR.
The company announced its intentions on Tuesday and said the plant would restart the next day.27 Federal deputy marshal John Murray arrived Tuesday to serve the injunctions. Because the Lead Works was outside the city limits, police protection should have been provided by Madison County sheriff Jenkin Jenkins. Instead, the sheriff informed Newnam that he would withdraw all his deputies from the area if the plant was restarted with nonunion labor. Jenkins would allow Lee Thompson, the Lead Works security guard, to remain a special deputy and would also deputize Newnam and other executives to make arrests if they felt the need. With that the sheriff and his men left the plant area. Despite the strikers camped just outside SLSR’s door, the message to the company from local law enforcement was effectively, you’re on your own.
The U.S. deputy marshal said he expected to stay the week to see that order was preserved. Thompson, Newnam, and the U.S. marshal did arrest sixteen-year-old Alex Winters for throwing a rock at a car driven by company office employees.28 He was arraigned Wednesday and taken to the county jail in Edwardsville for consideration of the grand jury.
The first day the plant was to restart, September 26, one hundred men applied and were put to work.29 Another three hundred would be needed to fill all positions. But the newly hired men could start eight of the eighteen Scotch hearths, light the refinery, and begin cleaning the blast furnace. Some of the rehired men had originally signed to join the new union, but seven weeks without pay had taken the fight out of them just as surely as it had emptied their wallets.30 Many other experienced smelter workers had left the area and would be difficult to replace, but most of the plant’s positions could be handled by unskilled labor.
The men restarting the plant worked eight-hour shifts, and with a pay increase. But SLSR could not give any more, Newnam said, and he considered it pointless to continue negotiating with the strikers.31 The president of the smelter workers’ union that was not to be, Zenas Lockhart, said the plant would never get enough men to operate. Lockhart, thirty-one years old, had tried to support a wife and four children on the Lead Works wages.
The strategy of local union officials was to try to keep prospective employees away from the Lead Works. Those signing on the first day saw and heard from the pickets, but they weren’t dissuaded. All the men hired on the first day returned for the next, Newnam said, when still more men signed on.32
The lead smelter strike in 1917 was not just a battle to create better-paying, union jobs in Collinsville. A principal concern was the fear of the plant using “imported” workers, which was largely a euphemism for blacks being brought in to take the jobs, as a strikebreaking move. That had been a primary cause of the East St. Louis riots three months earlier, which brought the deaths of at least forty-eight people and the burning of some three hundred homes and other buildings.33 Other estimates claim fatalities were over one hundred, since the deaths of many blacks were not documented. Company agents sent thousands of unskilled blacks from southern states to that city by train, with the promise of good-paying jobs and better treatment. Neither ended up being necessarily true.
In East St. Louis a congressional committee investigating the riots said that the Aluminum Ore Company, the Armour Meat Packing Company, railroads, and other industrialists had “pitted white labor against black.” Only making matters worse was the deep-seated public corruption and indifference in the town of sixty-five thousand residents. The final U.S. congressional report on the East St. Louis riots stated, “Sodom and Gomorrah were model Christian communities in comparison.”34 Collinsville did not have the extensive industry or the wide-open corruption of its neighbor to the west, but its residents still feared blacks being brought in to take jobs in the community.
A number of Collinsville blacks worked at the Lead Works prior to and after the strike. The positions did not pay well, but blacks had no access to the better jobs in the coal mines. If more black workers came in now, would it just be the first step to them getting the coveted coal miner’s jobs? Many white men from Collinsville had also worked at the smelter. Prior to the strike the smelter workers were considered simply men who worked second-tier jobs. After the strike the smelter workers were considered scabs, an anathema to most union men. More repellent yet were the out-of-towners, mostly black, who would take the jobs that the miners and others wanted to see unionized. The men feared Collinsville would end up like East St. Louis.
From atop the bluffs in early July 1917, it was easy for Collinsville folks to look down their noses at the scandalous river town to the west. When the East St. Louis riots had just started, a mob stopped a streetcar operated by two Collinsville men. They could only watch as Albert James, a black employee of the Lead Works, was pulled off the car and nearly beaten to death. “A few dangerous demagogues have led half grown boys and denizens of the half-world in an orgy of blood,” Collinsville Advertiser publisher Gus Schimpff said. “It was the act of a pack of hyenas traveling en masse. But East St. Louis must pay the price, and pay dearly.”35
J. O. Monroe, the young publisher and editor of the Collinsville Herald, weighed in too: “There is scarcely a city in this section which might not have been the scene of similar disorders under similar circumstances. . . . Even Collinsville cannot claim that she might not resort to violence under certain provocation. Every city which shelters a mixed population is subject to the eruptions which develop from the irritations of different bloods.” He went on to note that Collinsville had no “bad” district and that the mayor and police chief did fine work in keeping bad characters out of the city. At the Lead Works a similar service was performed by the special deputy there. “Thompson simply will not permit ‘bad’ negroes around the place,” Monroe said. “Without turning the scornful lip at East St. Louis, Collinsville may be thankful that she has such a law-abiding class of citizens,” the editor myopically wrote.36
The two newspapers in Collinsville, Schimpff’s Advertiser and Monroe’s Collinsville Herald, generally provided reliable information for readers during the era. But the turbulent events of the last months of 1917 and first half of 1918 in Collinsville would test the journalistic integrity of any small-town newspaperman. The story as told in the local newspapers from this point particularly lacks the perspective of SLSR Lead Works management and employees, no doubt owing to pressure from the unions and the community.
Tensions ran high in Collinsville after the Lead Works reopened on September 26. The union men of the city had a parade and rally Sunday morning, September 30, in support of the striking smelter workers. The parade formed after the arrival of two streetcars full of Maryville miners. Kreider’s Military Band led the parade, and one thousand men marched through the downtown streets while thousands more watched. The men carried all variety of banners and flags, one calling for the overthrow of the “Czar of Labor in Collinsville,” referring to the Lead Works’ Newnam.37 Another banner left no room for the indecisive: “You Are Either for Us or against Us.”
The orderly parade concluded at the park behind city hall, where eleven days earlier the city had held an emotional send-off for fifty-five departing soldiers. The president of UMW Local 685 of Lumaghi Mine No. 2, Robert Bertolero, spoke first to the large crowd and told of the union’s commitment to support the smelter workers, who had “quit the smelter to try to force enough in wages to buy bread.” He urged nonviolence, lest the workers turn public opinion and law officials against them. One of the smelter workers’ national union leaders said that in his thirty years of organizing, he had not seen anyone who “assumed as arrogant an attitude as that taken by Supt. Newnam” and likened him to a king or czar.38 He said the right to organize was the biggest issue, but that wages should be about twice what they were at the Lead Works.
Monroe, the Collinsville Herald editor, praised the uptown saloon keepers for voluntarily staying closed during and after the parade and speechmaking, to avoid alcohol influencing the thinking of the frenzied crowd. “They probably forestalled trouble which might have resulted in violence or bloodshed or both. Many a good man loses his sense when inflamed with liquor and oftimes one or two irresponsible drunks can start more trouble than all the good citizens of the town can stop,” Monroe said, quite prophetically this time.39
There had been trouble at the plant and in the surrounding area since the reopening. According to the local papers, nearly all of it was caused by the black employees brought in as strikebreakers. At Evanoff’s Saloon there had been a report of black employees from the Lead Works creating a disturbance and displaying weapons. No one had been arrested, but six bars near the Lead Works were ordered closed indefinitely on Monday to avoid problems.40 City police searched and harassed men going to or coming from the smelter using the interurban streetcar line. One black man, Collinsville resident Frank Thomas, was arrested on the streetcar and sentenced to twenty-one days in the county jail. W. C. Nessen was found with a blackjack and fined $25 and costs. After several days of the police harassment, the Lead Works sent cars to shuttle the strikebreakers from the streetcar stop just outside the western city limits. In this manner the strikebreakers avoided harassment by the Collinsville police and miners on the interurban cars traveling through town.
By the first week of October, the Lead Works had hired two hundred men, enough to fire up two more Scotch hearths.41 Newnam denied that he was bringing in strikebreakers and claimed he was merely hiring former workers who had elected to return. SLSR was also literally gaining ground outside the plant, as a fire destroyed some of the striker’s tents in their encampment at the gates, probably due to nearby burning cornstalks. Lead Works private security agents quickly moved in to occupy the land previously held by the strikers.
For all the interest local police had in the strikebreakers, the U.S. District Court was more concerned with the striking men and their attempts to interfere with plant operations. U.S. marshal John Murray summoned six of them to report to Judge Humphrey in Springfield for violating the injunction against harassment of SLSR.42
The following week the Lead Works had 250 employees, with more coming on board daily. Tension continued to rise between the union men and SLSR’s employees, but the strikebreakers and Newnam appeared to be winning the battle. The area saloons had been allowed to reopen, leading to another fight at Schreiber’s Barrelhouse on Vandalia Street. Sheriff Jenkins ordered saloons in the area closed once again.43 The six men who had earlier been ordered to appear before Judge Humphries in Springfield demanded a jury trial. With a busy docket Humphries deferred hearing the case, reminding them that the injunction was still in effect and to keep their noses clean.
For what it was worth, the Collinsville Trades Council endorsed a resolution stating that SLSR was “harassing and intimidating strikers who have at all times conducted themselves in a most orderly and peaceful manner.” It said the company had “hired gunmen and imported vicious and undesirable characters who go about the community armed, discharging firearms, and threatening the lives of peaceful citizens,” no doubt referring to the private detectives and guards hired by SLSR to provide at least a modicum of protection.44
There were reports that a “riot” had erupted outside the plant when strikers chased some departing workmen, and a few rocks had purportedly been thrown. An out-of-town newspaper said that brickbats had been thrown, but the Collinsville Herald dismissed that report as “lurid.” With the strikers apparently having the upper hand that day, police again were nowhere to be seen.45
Madison County sheriff Jenkin Jenkins had removed his deputies from the area around the plant on September 26, never mind his sworn duty to enforce the law in that part of the county too. Jenkins, age forty-six, was born in South Wales and had become a naturalized citizen.46 He was a coal miner who had taken a “more or less lively interest in local political affairs”; he became a deputy in 1912 and was later elected sheriff. Jenkins and his wife, Edith, had two daughters and two sons, one of whom was a superb baseball player, enough so to draw interest from Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals. Roy Jenkins’s parents had to decline a tryout offer, however, because the twenty-year-old was serving in the U.S. Army’s new Aviation Corps.47 The Jenkins family had previously lived in Collinsville, and within two years Jenkin Jenkins would be out as sheriff and working in a Collinsville mine once again. During the labor unrest of 1917, there was little doubt where his sympathies lay.
Jenkins’s decision to withhold protection from the SLSR plant was not entirely unprecedented in the area. In nearby Granite City, the police chief and the mayor would find themselves indicted for omission of duty and malfeasance for failing to protect a nonunion sewer contractor and his workers from union activists who harassed and beat them also in the fall of 1917.48 In that case a county grand jury ended up handing down thirty indictments. Granite City mayor Marshall Kirkpatrick, a Socialist, had similarly refused to protect company interests in that town during 1913 and 1914 labor strikes. And he was unapologetic for his actions, asserting that most residents approved.49
But the harassment of incoming workers by strikers, police, and other union men was not having the desired effect at the Lead Works, as production continued to ramp up closer to plant capacity. By mid-October the union men changed their strategy in fighting SLSR. Sheriff Jenkins decided he would once again protect the Lead Works. With the Collinsville police no longer able to search or harass incoming workers on the interurban rail lines, Jenkins planned to make sure that happened before they entered the plant. He sent deputies Vernon Coons and Hannah Jokerst to do the job and also swore in three special deputies, Steve Britton, Tom White, and Tom Wilson. Of course the special deputies were miners, except for Wilson, who sold coal mine supplies.
On Jenkins’s order, the men searched everyone entering and leaving the Lead Works for weapons starting October 15.50 Fourteen arrests were made the first day. One man was charged with driving a car carrying five workers around the deputies and into the plant. Coons jumped on the car and was reportedly injured before he could get the man to stop. The driver was charged with assault and fined $50 by a justice of the peace. A black detective from a St. Louis agency, which had been hired by SLSR, was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and also fined $100 by a justice of the peace. Twelve others were taken to the Madison County Jail, eight of them black, and most were checked to make sure they had registered for the draft.
The next day thirteen more men were taken to the county jail on trumped up charges, eleven blacks and two whites. Special deputy White even stopped J. A. Castleman, vice president and general manager of the plant, and searched him for weapons. Castleman submitted to the search under protest and was then allowed to enter the plant.51 A local newspaper reporting on the arrests said, “As most of the names given by these men were probably fictitious, it is hardly necessary to publish them.”52 The SLSR attorney filed writs of habeas corpus for the twenty-five arrested employees still being held in the county jail. Jenkins, after conferring with the state’s attorney, released the men with no charges filed.53
Sheriff Jenkins’s newfound enthusiasm for law enforcement at the Lead Works didn’t particularly please J. Otis Humphrey, the U.S. district judge in Springfield. He once again dispatched Federal Marshal Murray to Collinsville, this time to summon Sheriff Jenkins and his five deputies to court Thursday, October 18, for violating the restraining order.54 Jenkins and three of the deputies boarded a train for Springfield while Special Deputies White and Britton were notified in Joliet, where they were attending a State Federation of Labor meeting.
Judge Humphrey sharply reprimanded Jenkins and his deputies in the Springfield courtroom, saying the plant’s production was critical for the war effort. He told them to do their sworn duty as law enforcement officers and ordered their return to Springfield on October 29, when all the injunction cases would be heard.55
The union men of Collinsville were obsessed with the notion that workers, especially black men, were being brought in to take the Lead Works jobs. Jenkins said that the arrests had been made to protect the city and that the imported men “were of the vilest type, and many of them were criminals and of the lawless element.”56 The sheriff claimed that he was primarily after the agents responsible for bringing the workers in by automobile. “He had feared that the importation of strike breakers, particularly the negroes, would cause trouble.”57 Either from fear of violence and crime or fear of losing this labor battle, there was a sense of foreboding in Collinsville.
It was suggested that the city hire more policemen to prevent trouble. Mayor Siegel said he had tried recently to bring in more officers, but the low salary made it difficult to fill the positions. Miners’ Local 685 president Bertolero, with a fox-guarding-the-henhouse solution, proposed that the striking smelter workers would perhaps be willing to do the job without pay. Siegel declined the suggestion.58
At age thirty-eight Robert Bertolero was a respected man in the community and at Lumaghi Mine No. 2. Born in Italy, he had become a naturalized citizen. In 1917 he and his wife, Minnie, and their eleven-year-old son, Robert Jr., lived on Burroughs Avenue near School Superintendent C. H. Dorris. Robert Jr. would follow his father’s career in mining at Lumaghi Mine No. 2 six years later. Shortly after getting his first mining job, Robert Bertolero Jr. was crushed between two pit cars, and the seventeen-year-old reportedly died cradled in his father’s arms.59 (The year 1923 would be a particularly treacherous at Lumaghi Mine No. 2, as four miners in all would die there.)
By the week of October 22, less than a month after the reopening, Newnam announced that the Lead Works had 360 employees, all it could use at the moment, and that other men were available if needed. For all their efforts the strikers and their union brethren had been unable to stop the flow of workers needed to operate the smelter. Having been unable to stanch the tide of workers, at least one union man would try to cut off the flow of the commodity that first brought the smelter to Collinsville: coal.
UMW Local 826 president William Brockmeier of Lumaghi No. 3 notified the mine superintendent not to make any more coal deliveries to the Lead Works.60 The superintendent passed the request up the line, as mine owner Joseph Lumaghi was away on a hunting trip. Newnam, of SLSR, learned of the request and said such action would also be in violation of the federal injunction. The contract between SLSR and Lumaghi stipulated that coal had to be delivered whenever the mine operated. It was thus implied that Lumaghi Mine No. 3 would not have to deliver coal if the mine was closed by strike. Despite Brockmeier’s threat, the coal continued to flow to the Lead Works. Other miners’ local officers let it be known that Brockmeier did not speak for their unions.61
Jenkins, his five deputies, and twelve other men who had been charged with contempt got their days in court from October 29 through November 1 in Springfield. And generally it did not go well for them. Judge Humphrey was unmoved by Jenkins’s plea that he was just trying to keep the peace. The sheriff and his deputies all were found guilty of being in contempt of the federal court injunction. Jenkins was fined $1,000—no small sum in 1917—and court costs, while the deputies were each fined $100 and costs.62 Humphrey ordered them held at the McLean County Jail until they could pay up. Their attorneys promised an appeal, and Humphrey allowed bond for the men, which was quickly paid by “prominent citizens of Edwardsville.”63
The other defendants didn’t fare much better; nine of the twelve men were found guilty that week.64 Two men, including would-be lead workers’ union president Zenas Lockhardt, were sentenced to ninety days in jail; another would get sixty days. Sentence was yet to be determined for six of the men. Three were found not guilty. Confident in their cases, all the men had requested jury trials. But early in the proceedings, they asked that the jury be dismissed, figuring they were better off taking their chances with Judge Humphrey. In eight of the nine guilty judgments, the bench or jury took the word of the black men who had been harassed over that of the white defendants, a newspaper noted.65 Fifteen other cases were still to be tried by Judge Humphrey.
There was outrage at the convictions in Collinsville, where UMW State Board member Mose Johnson said the union had paid at least some of the defense costs. He forecast a “storm of protest among union men all over the state,” but it never arrived.66 Some people also called for the removal of Judge Humphrey and the U.S. attorney. J. O. Monroe, the Collinsville Herald editor, criticized the judgments too.67 He drew an analogy to East St. Louis’s riots, saying that a congressional committee had faulted officials there for not searching men on the streets for weapons.
Jenkins’s legal problems also spilled over into civil court, where the vice president of the Lead Works had filed suit against him for his false arrest and search without cause.68 Up to fifteen others were expected to join in the lawsuit.
The union men lashed out at those they felt had a hand in their losses in court and at the Lead Works. Herald editor Monroe, thin of build but not lacking confidence, felt compelled to write a column defending his newspaper: “The Herald is a union shop, its editor and owner is a union printer, carrying a union card. He joined of his own volition when a mere youth while working in an unorganized town where there was no incentive except to show his regard for the principles of unionism.” In fact Monroe owed no apology to the union men—far from it. The Herald, like the competing Advertiser, had failed to report on nearly all the harassment of St. Louis Smelting and Refining and its employees done by the union men and the Collinsville police and Madison County sheriff’s deputies. Nevertheless, Monroe wrote, “Every man and every cause will have space for a fair hearing.”69
The former Lead Works employees, now out of work for more than two months, weren’t giving up the fight, however. They passed out various circulars letting the public know the strike was still on and identifying “scabs” in Collinsville.70 There were reports that a committee of miners was calling on the Lead Works employees at their homes, asking them to quit.71 Local stores were asked not to extend any extra service to Lead Works employees or their families. Under pressure most Collinsville stores agreed to stop offering credit and making home deliveries to Lead Works employees.72 The nonunion workers could make only in-store purchases and only with cash. A local insurance man who moved into a home owned by a Lead Works employee was asked by union men to move out, and he did so two days later.73 One of the UMW locals ordered one of its members who rented to a Lead Works employee to have “the boarding scab sent away.”74
Highland Brewing agreed with the Strike Committee’s request to stop selling beer to the saloon of Mrs. John Berta, which was frequented by Lead Works employees.75 She had gotten a temporary supply of Hyde Park beer and was now seeking beer from the Heim Brewery in East St. Louis. The company had agreed to supply her, but its union drivers would not deliver to the establishment.76
At the Lead Works Newnam denied that these actions in the community were having any great effect on morale and said his workforce was full, with four hundred men on board.77 The smelter also reopened its white lead plant, which had been closed since March.78 And, adding insult to injury, the plant announced that all employees would be getting Christmas bonuses and that eighty Christmas baskets had been given to employees’ children.79
Not everything had been going in St. Louis Smelting and Refining’s favor. Lawsuits had been filed by twenty-one nearby farmers, alleging that their crops had been damaged by pollutants from the plant, despite the new, higher smokestacks. SLSR asked for a change of venue, citing the unionism of the area and the harassment it had suffered.80 SLSR also cited a statement by Sheriff Jenkins, who opined that the pollution had destroyed enough crops to have fed the U.S. Army for six months. But the request for a different venue was denied.81
Smelter workers continued to cause disturbances in Collinsville, at least according to city police and local newspapers. A drunken Lead Works guard, discharged from his position, reportedly came to the uptown saloons and boasted of being a scab herder. After getting into an argument with two union men, he flourished a knife and was severely beaten by a number of union men. He was charged with assault and weapons charges.82 Another smelter employee, a Spaniard, was charged with carrying a knife while drunk.83 A black Lead Works employee was charged after a confrontation in which he reportedly cut a miner with a knife on an interurban car.84 Another black smelter employee was charged with using “obscene and profane language” with one of the strikers and also for obstructing an officer. Four other Lead Works employees, one black and three Mexican, were arrested on a stalled interurban for being intoxicated, becoming “familiar” with a female rider, and threatening other passengers.85 The local newspapers also diligently reported that six former Lead Works employees, all black and from Collinsville, had been charged with robbing forty employees of Federal Lead in Alton.86
All those incidents got prominent play in local newspapers. In none of the cases was a striker or other union member arrested or found at fault; all the trouble continued to be blamed on the smelter workers. In fact there is no indication that any strikers, miners, or other union men were ever arrested by local authorities for the duration of the labor disturbance at the Lead Works.
Federal authorities were still paying attention on November 24, however, when a large group of union men intimidated and forced smelter workers off a streetcar. The workers, mostly black and at least one Mexican, were followed off the car by some of the union supporters. A Lead Works employee was beaten, and another cut one of his attackers.87 No arrests were made by local authorities, but union men Tom Smith, Robert Smith, and William Barton were later charged by U.S. marshals with violating the federal injunction. Tom Smith was sentenced to four months in jail, his brother Robert to one month. Barton got off with a warning from Judge Humphrey.88
The latest attack on the interurban line was perhaps the last straw before St. Louis Smelting and Refining finally appealed to the Illinois State Utilities Commission on December 14, charging the East St. Louis and Suburban Railway with not protecting its passengers.89 The commission had the power to force the company to increase security. At least two hearings were held in January 1918 on the complaint, and SLSR was prepared to have more than one hundred witnesses testify to the ongoing harassment and intimidation of smelter employees on the streetcars.
Collinsville’s coal miners had largely given up on the battle to unionize the Lead Works by January 1918, when the UMW locals discontinued their 1 percent wage deduction to support the SLSR strike.90 Their moral support for the union cause would continue, but no longer their financial assistance.
Just as interest in the lead smelter strike was waning, Collinsville’s union men became involved in another labor dustup, this one involving five female operators at the Central Union Bell Telephone Company. After one woman felt that she was treated unkindly at work November 13, she and four others walked off the job.91 When cooler heads prevailed the next day and the women wanted to return to work, they were told they would have to reapply for their positions.92 What had started as a minor squabble turned into another three-month fight for union recognition and better wages. Two phone companies served Collinsville in 1917, Bell and Kinloch. Phones on one system typically could not connect with phones on another. Not entirely unrelated was the fact that the Kinloch Company voluntarily hiked wages just after the Bell walkout.
By late December the Collinsville Trades Council and union electrical workers were distributing a circular calling the Bell Company unfair and asking people to remove their Bell phone service.93 The flyer said the women were seeking a “living wage,” better work conditions, and reinstatement of the operators.
By late January the unions in the city had bonded together to force the phone-company issue. They published a list of eight “unfair” businesses that had not removed their Bell telephones; fifty had agreed to do so.94 Both newspapers agreed to remove the Bell phones, but that did not stop the Herald’s J. O. Monroe from writing a column on the difficulty of running a business with just one of the phone companies. He noted that even the UMW offices in Springfield only had Bell phones.
The pressure on local businesses was enough to force the Bell Company to settle, reinstating the women who had resigned and granting a pay hike.95 Among those negotiating the settlement was the ubiquitous miners’ union state board member Mose Johnson. It was not a big win for unionism in Collinsville but certainly better than the beating the union cause had taken in the Lead Works affair.
Perhaps buoyed by the success of the Bell operators but certainly feeling the effects of wartime inflation, teachers at the 230-student Collinsville Township High School threatened to strike in March 1918. Fearing that graduation could be interrupted, the cash-strapped school board agreed to pay an additional $11 per month to the CTHS teachers.96 A $5-per-week increase had previously been given to grade school teachers, who taught 1,412 students at five other city schools.97 A local columnist compared teachers’ salaries with those of miners in the region and found that the miners, most often with little schooling, could earn up to four times as much as the college-educated teachers.98
The labor unrest of 1917 and 1918 beat down Missouri and Illinois just as it did the rest of the nation. The Illinois National Guard had to be deployed in 1917 to quell streetcar operator strikes in Bloomington and Springfield, in addition to the race/labor riots in East St. Louis.99 Although union matters had reached a tenuous calm in Collinsville by early April 1918, a number of strikes were either in progress or pending in St. Louis. Labor officials from that city had gone to Washington to speak with Secretary of Labor William Wilson about strikes involving chemical and garment workers, cabinetmakers, and employees of two hardware companies, a biscuit company, and a large grocer.100 Eight other strikes were pending, which could leave an additional 7,700 out of work. The union men hoped more could be done to end the wartime disputes.
Five strikes, which had kept some 13,500 people out of work, had recently been settled in St. Louis.101 Among those were strikes held by streetcar men and department store clerks, who won union recognition. And employees at munitions maker Wagner Electric and tobacco company Liggett and Myers were now also allowed to unionize.