I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.
—George Washington, letter to Rev. Francis Vanderkemp, 1788
It is difficult to overstate the impact of German immigration on the United States as it entered the twentieth century. Germans would end up constituting the largest part of the massive influx of new immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1850 and 1909, nearly 5 million Germans became naturalized Americans, nearly 1.5 million more than the next largest European group.1 With their strong ties to the old country, they raised their children in accordance with German culture, often with German being the primary language of the household.
The favorable descriptions of America that early German immigrants sent back to the old country also had an impact on future waves of immigrants; in both the 1910 and the 1920 censuses, the greatest number of foreign-born U.S. residents reported were Germans, despite heavy immigration by Russians, Italians, and Irish.2 In 1910 foreign-born Germans made up a full 26 percent of the total white population in the United States.3
German cultural influence could be found everywhere in American society. One need only consider the cultural impact of composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig von Beethoven, and Richard Wagner or of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The German influence in everyday life extended beyond sauerkraut and schnitzel to things as thoroughly American as hamburgers and frankfurters, reportedly developed in Hamburg and Frankfurt, Germany. Concepts ranging from kindergarten to Christmas trees were all introduced by the new immigrants. German culture was well received in the United States and before the onset of the Great War in 1914; indeed the Germans were probably the most esteemed immigrant group.4 They were higher thinkers, clean, hard-working, and responsible—what was not to like?
Earlier German immigrants were well entrenched in the St. Louis region and included many business and factory owners. German Americans famously dominated the beer-brewing industry in cities like St. Louis. Many others settled to farm the more-rural areas of Illinois and Missouri.
But most of the new immigrants ended up in midwestern cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, which already had high concentrations of German residents. In St. Louis, the sixth-largest city in the nation, 24 percent of inhabitants were foreign born in 1910, but the number would decrease to 17 percent by 1920 as the immigrants moved out to suburban and rural areas.5 Thanks largely to Chicago, Illinois would become home to more German- and Austrian-born residents than any other state.6
Gathered in urban neighborhoods of like nationality, immigrant groups could keep some connection to the old country. Germans formed hundreds of social and political organizations, ranging from the Liederkranz choral groups, to the Turnvereine, or Turner organizations, which were gymnastic and athletic clubs. In St. Louis alone there were six thousand Turner members; branches of the organization were also established in the nearby Illinois towns of Belleville and Columbia, both south of Collinsville.7
The clubs provided for a more cohesive German community, where members could maintain some cultural identity and tradition, but these benefits probably came at the expense of assimilation into American society. One newspaper described the conflicting allegiances of German immigrants in the phrase, “Germania Our Mother; Columbia Our Bride,” seizing on the adage that a man did not have to forsake his mother to embrace his new wife. Perhaps so, another writer noted, so long as the mother and the bride weren’t feuding.8
That wasn’t the case after World War I started in July 1914, when the neutral United States gradually went all in for the Entente nations. The sinking of the Lusitania nearly one year later didn’t help matters. The German societies that had formed to help maintain German culture provided a basis for other groups to become politically active in fighting Prohibition and later for American neutrality. In 1904 a branch of the Deutsch-Amerikanischer National Bund (DANB; National German-American Alliance) was formed in St. Louis and included Illinois residents from Alton in the north to Belleville in the south. With dues of $1 per year, it would boast twenty-two thousand members before the Great War.9
The Bund’s first challenge was to fight local-option dry laws in Missouri, which made it illegal to drink on Sunday. Perhaps more than any other immigrant group, the Germans took the dry Sundays as a direct attack on a culture that vigorously embraced its bier.10 As with other workers who put in six days a week, German immigrants chafed at the Sunday prohibition, which made it impossible to drink with family and friends at local clubs, saloons, or Biergärten on their one day off.
The other great cause of the Bund alliances was to advocate for continued neutrality in World War I. In May 1915, when 128 American passengers died on the Lusitania, along with them sank any real chance of America staying out of the European fray. The local DANB shutdown in 1917 essentially coincided with the end of free speech for Germans—and most other Americans—for the duration of the Great War.11
The response of most German immigrants or those with German sympathies, whether in St. Louis or Collinsville or nationwide, was to keep their opinions to themselves. If they had any feelings for the Fatherland, they were best expressed only at home. Public displays of any allegiance to the homeland, and sometimes German tradition and culture, fell away. In Glen Carbon, eight miles north of Collinsville, even the Liederkranz group disbanded, as one newspaper explained, “having decided last week there was not much to sing about in the German language nowadays.”12 The group gave the $10 in its treasury to the American Red Cross.
Churches that had predominantly German membership were targeted in many communities in southern Illinois; some were disbanded. A number of Lutheran parochial schools and churches were vandalized; some had “Kaiser School” or “Kaiser Church” painted on them.13 Other Lutheran churches had men and boys listening outside, straining to overhear any phrase that might be twisted into something unpatriotic. Students from the schools were harassed and beaten by other children. Ministers and teachers were sometimes followed, and their every move was watched with suspicion. There was no documented violence against the Holy Cross Lutheran, Jerusalem Lutheran, or St. John Evangelical churches in Collinsville during this period. But like many public schools nationwide, those in Collinsville no longer offered German-language classes in the fall of 1918.14 The twenty-five enrolled students would have to learn the language elsewhere. Holy Cross Lutheran would soon follow suit at its parochial school.15
When America began ramping up for war, the perpetual whipping boy of immigration was brought front and center by federal officials. Most of the fury was naturally directed at Germans and Austrians, but other immigrant groups who had found a home in America in recent years were also targeted. While the United States was still neutral, German agents had reportedly sabotaged some goods for shipment to the Allies and tried to stir labor troubles.16 The plots were quickly discovered, and some German officials were deported. In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson spoke of those “born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. . . . Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out.”17 World War I’s iteration of xenophobia was just getting under way.
Increasingly it was argued that the country no longer had a place for hyphenated Americans—no Irish Americans, German Americans, or Polish Americans. Only “true” Americans would do, and every immigrant needed to toe the American line. Former president Teddy Roosevelt would later say, “Every man ought to love his country . . . but he is only entitled to one country. If he claims loyalty to two countries, he is necessarily a traitor to at least one country. We can have no 50-50 allegiance in this country.”18 One conservative group, the National Security League, coined the phrase “100 percent Americanism” to promote the idea of immigrants wiping clear their old world identities.19
For their part the recent European immigrants were in a state of international limbo, neither necessarily wanting to fight America’s war nor wishing to return to their homeland. “They were strangers in a strange land,” historian David Kennedy observes, “awkwardly suspended between the world they had left behind and a world where they were not yet fully at home.”20
Congress passed the 1917 Immigration Act in February, overriding a veto by President Wilson, and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants and severely barred immigration from many Asian countries. An $8 tax was also required of each new immigrant.
In 1918 most of the immigrants working in Illinois coal mines were English, but the second-largest immigrant group was Italian.21 Collinsville became home to many of them, with a number of Italians settling just east of the city, where rolling hills would bring proper sunlight to their grapevines for “dago red” wine making.
When the United States entered the Great War, Germans and anything Germanic became the primary targets of the hysteria. Hamburgers became liberty sandwiches; sauerkraut became liberty cabbage. St. Louis schools discontinued German classes. In St. Louis Berlin Avenue became Pershing Street (for General John Pershing). Kaiser Avenue and Von Versen became Gresham and Enright respectively, in honor of two of the first three Americans killed in France.22 Classical German symphony and opera were looked on with disdain. Later in 1917 St. Louis police would bar an Austrian musician from performing. And in the hallmark move of all intolerance and xenophobia, German books were burned in many communities.23 Many German-print newspapers closed. Given the lofty place that German culture held before the war, the fall was precipitous. One historian called it “the most spectacular reversal of judgement in the history of American nativism.”24
There was widespread paranoia that German spies were harbored in the United States, seemingly lurking behind every bush, in places ranging from New York City to St. Louis to Collinsville. “The Hun within our gates masquerades in many disguises,” Theodore Roosevelt said in 1917.25 “He is our dangerous enemy; and he should be hunted down without mercy.” In his declaration of war speech to the joint session of Congress, Wilson noted that millions of people born in Germany or with German sympathy lived in the United States. He said most were loyal to their new home, but that “if there should be disloyalty, it [would] be dealt with with a firm hand of repression.”26
Ads were placed in local newspapers to warn of the threat. “Every German or Austrian in the United States, unless known by years of association to be absolutely loyal, should be treated as a potential spy,” said an item in Collinsville’s Advertiser. “Energy and alertness may save the life of your son, your husband or your brother.” It cautioned that news was being sent to Berlin and lies were being spread about early peace or the morale of the U.S. military. Readers were told to contact the Collinsville police or the Department of Justice whenever “any suspicious act or disloyal word comes to [their] notice.”27
It was the job of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information (CPI) to foment the groundswell of public support that Wilson wanted behind the war effort. CPI publicity delivered an inescapable message from coast to coast: real Americans supported the war effort, and traitors did not. The CPI message no doubt helped sway many who were unsure about U.S. involvement in the European war. But it also helped develop an ironic patriotic hysteria that would set personal liberties on their ear in the United States, all while U.S. troops were being sent abroad to save democracy in Europe.28 Thus in 1917 began an American dark age for democracy, a low point that would not be overcome for years after the war’s end.
Just two months after the U.S. declaration of war, the Espionage Act gave the federal government the primary tool it would use to suppress those who opposed the war.29 It provided for fines up to $10,000 and twenty years in prison for anything that obstructed military operations during wartime. It also provided for the postmaster general to deny mail services to those who might communicate an antiwar message. In an era of very limited mass communication, the mail restriction left little way for opposition groups to communicate with their members.
There were opponents to the Act in Congress, but they were few and far between. A New York Socialist was one of them. “There is nothing more oppressive in the world than a democracy gone mad, than a democracy which has surrendered rights to an individual,” Representative Meyer London said. “Let men speak freely. Do not drive them into the cellar of conspiracy. Do not turn people into hypocrites and cowards. Let us not, while we talk of fighting for liberty abroad, sacrifice and crush our liberties here.”30
The law was liberally interpreted by federal courts to mean that any statement or sign that might discourage a man from submitting to the draft or enlisting in the armed services effectively obstructed the military. That essentially meant that any person or group who opposed the war was fair game for arrest. It became open season on Socialists and others who opposed the war on philosophical, political, or religious grounds. Jehovah’s Witnesses leaders were jailed. Teachers found themselves under fire if their lectures didn’t sound patriotic enough. Another prime target was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The Wobblies, as the union was also called, held radical socialist views. Wobblies and Socialists were seemingly linked in headlines to any anonymous or unexplained threat or uprising during the war. Those two groups would suffer some of the greatest political oppression doled out in the history of the United States.
The federal government’s effort to put everyone on the lookout for spies was primarily orchestrated through distributed Committee on Public Information materials. In addition to the State Councils of Defense and Neighborhood Councils of Defense, a myriad of other groups cropped up to defend the homeland from the perceived interloping spies and saboteurs. The largest of these was the American Protective League, which by June 1917 already had units operating in six hundred cities.31 Membership was primarily made up of leading men of the community who paid seventy-five cents or $1 for the authority to say they were working with the U.S. Department of Justice on investigations, using the title of the Secret Service.32 Some were originally issued “Secret Service Division” badges. Despite concerns by Wilson and others in the administration, they were allowed to continue their Patriotic Police efforts for the duration of the war, eventually growing to 250,000 members nationwide.
Other vigilance groups included the All-Allied Anti-German League, the American Anti-Anarchy Association, the Boy Spies of America, the Sedition Slammers, and the Terrible Threateners.33 The Anti-Yellow Dog League, all one thousand units, was open to boys over ten years old, and members were encouraged to listen for unpatriotic talk wherever they went and report anything suspicious to authorities.34
President Wilson spoke of “vicious spies and conspirators” who “sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce,” and throughout the war he encouraged continued vigilance. Picking up on that theme, one newspaper editorialized: “You do not require any official authority to do this and the only badge needed is your patriotic fervor.”35
Attorney General Thomas Gregory in the summer of 1917 already bragged of having “several hundred thousand” private citizens spying on neighbors and coworkers. At about the same time, he privately acknowledged at a cabinet meeting that talk of German spies was little more than hysteria.36 Gregory said the programs generated about 1,500 complaints per day to the Department of Justice, but just 5 percent of those cases might justify prosecution for unpatriotic talk.37
Whipped into a paranoid, flag-waving frenzy, many claimed that the Espionage Act was not strong enough. People could make an unpatriotic statement or say something negative about the president or the government and there remained no federal statute to use to arrest the miscreant. Increasingly acts of violence had been directed at those who disapproved of the war, and it was said that people felt they had to take the law into their own hands because the government would not act.
The Sedition Act debated in the spring of 1918 and enacted in May was an even more draconian set of laws. It was actually an amendment to the prior year’s Espionage Act, and it doubled the fines of the prior statute and made it illegal to utter false statements about the military or bond sales or incite disloyalty or deter enlistments.38 Also banned were “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, the constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy,” or anything to bring those into “into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute.” Yet another provision banned anything that interfered with war production. There was little resistance to the legislation as it was debated, although one senator termed the bill “a peculiar sort of mental hysteria.”39
The CPI in Washington was not alone in inflaming fanatical patriots. Some of the worst rhetoric about war opponents came out of the capital from administration officials and congressmen. Attorney General Gregory, speaking of dissenters said, “May God have mercy upon them for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging Government.”40
In the communities east of St. Louis, both patriotism and imaginations ran high, in contrast to any actual German spy activity. Locals suspected a German plot when a steam yacht of the Alton Naval Militia exploded in the Alton Harbor.41 A man accused of having pro-German allegiances was released by a deputy U.S. marshal after the man pledged to keep the flag flying outside his home at all times; that gesture seemed to satisfy the locals.42 No threat was too implausible. Guards were posted twenty-four hours a day around a Belleville flour mill, lest German spies have an opportunity to poison the flour.43 There had been gratuitous reports from East St. Louis of spies mixing ground glass in the flour at one mill to injure U.S. soldiers.44 Staunton school officials had the Secret Service interrogate a boy and his father after the boy refused to salute the flag at school.45 He was allowed to return after he promised to pay proper respect in the future. An East St. Louis man of German descent was arrested at his boardinghouse after he got into a parlor discussion about the war and said he wished he had one of the new airplanes with bombs so that he might “drop a few on the White House.” Three fellow boarders signed the criminal complaint against him.46
By far the greatest number of victims of wartime persecution were those who did little more than express some support for Germany or lack of full support for U.S. efforts. As far as organized groups, none suffered as badly as Socialists and IWW members. Both groups openly expressed the commonly held view that U.S. involvement was a rich man’s affair being fought by common men. But thanks to the tough talk from government officials and the polished efforts of CPI propaganda, most Americans did not want to hear that message in 1917 and 1918.
One of the first major patriotic hysteria incidents against Socialists was an attack on a Peace Parade in Boston in July 1917.47 Civilians and soldiers beat those in the parade and twice ransacked the Socialists’ office. Ironically, one of the signs destroyed read: “First War Victims—Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Speech.” Perhaps no single Socialist was persecuted more than Eugene Debs, the party’s leader. After a 1918 antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, he was arrested, tried, and imprisoned until 1921.48
Attorney General Gregory left wide discretion to the local district U.S. attorneys as to how vigorously they would prosecute sedition and treason cases. Antiwar speakers were prosecuted in some districts and left alone in others. By war’s end nearly half of the prosecutions took place in just thirteen of the eighty-seven federal districts.49 Most of those thirteen districts were in the western states where the IWW was active. Nationwide 1,956 cases were brought with a 45 percent conviction rate. Many of the cases had been as minor as expressing skepticism about the nation’s leaders or complaining about the draft. In Illinois a McLean County woman was charged after she dared criticize the near-constant solicitation of money for the Red Cross.50
Perhaps the most egregious example of erroneous arrest involved a midwesterner who traveled to Florida, where he found the weather to be unseasonably cold for that time of year. Upon returning from a very chilly fishing trip, he was overheard to say: “Damn such a country as this.”51 He was reported, arrested, and charged with violating the Espionage Act and had to obtain the services of a lawyer to be released from jail.
In the eastern Missouri federal district, which covered the St. Louis area, the U.S. prosecutor appeared to let many of the cases die quietly. In the first year of the Treason Act, the district attorney obtained seventy indictments and got just eight convictions. But fifty-two complaints were nolle prosequi, with the local federal attorney advising the court that he would not proceed further with the case.52
Prosecutions in Illinois varied greatly too between the Northern District, which handled Chicago, and the Southern District, due to the numerous IWW cases in Chicago. Most of the 315 cases brought in the southern Illinois district court at Springfield were minor and more likely to have involved a flippant statement made by a first- or second-generation German immigrant. Only 17 of the 43 cases actually prosecuted in the Southern District resulted in convictions; most were simply dismissed. A guilty plea typically resulted in a $100 to $500 fine or three to four months in jail, with juries tending to be more heavy-handed than judges. There were 9 cases prosecuted from Madison County. The most severe local sentence went to a Granite City man who said that Germany and Hungary “were all right” and that he liked the kaiser and would fight for him. His candor to the jury would earn him two years in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.53
A unique case from Madison County involved a farmer who complained of the new airplanes from the recently completed Scott Airfield, which started training pilots in September 1917 in adjacent St. Clair County. Henry Moehle believed the planes overhead were scaring his dairy cows and livestock, and in 1918 he threatened to shoot down any aircraft over his property. Eleven days later a warrant was issued for his arrest for violating the Espionage Act by “threatening to injure war material.” Moehle, the native-born son of a German immigrant, was fined $500.54
Just being accused of violating the Espionage or Sedition Acts caused much suffering. While the majority of suspects were simply interrogated and released, others were indicted and sent to trial. Many would be held in jail or sentenced to prison time. Friends and acquaintances might shun the accused. Some suspects would lose their jobs; most all would lose at least some wages. And there was the cost of a legal defense, no problem for the rich, but crippling for the poor or working class. Trials were often a farce.55 Many courts operated on a presumption of guilt rather than innocence. “To be an alien, radical or labor agitator is to go to jail,” one congressman said.56
In the spring of 1918, at least some local courts and law officers were not inclined to give Germans aliens or German sympathizers any protection under the law, the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause be damned. In Madison County Judge J. F. Gilham set aside a decision that awarded a $250 payment for a personal injury case after he learned the complainant was a German alien.57 In East St. Louis police would not allow a Romanian immigrant to file charges against three men who beat him at the Aluminum Ore Company plant because he reportedly made disloyal statements.58
Infractions by the U.S. government against civil liberties became so common that a new organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), began tracking them in 1917. It found 214 cases where the federal government prosecuted on espionage, treason, or draft-obstruction charges and 13 cases where people were prosecuted under state or local laws.59 It was noted that each case might include numerous defendants. The NCLB also collected its information from newspaper clippings and noted the great disparity between what it had found and the numbers offered by the U.S. attorney general, which indicated that the federal prosecutions were greatly underreported in the press. The NCLB cited 23 cases where officials interfered with peaceful assembly, 47 cases of improper search and seizure, and 30 cases where teachers, professors, or other workers were dismissed for their political beliefs. The NCLB would reorganize in 1920 under the name it carries today, the American Civil Liberties Union.
Those suspected of disloyalty who were not arrested by federal authorities may have been better off at the hands of the government considering the treatment they received from delirious local patriots. From the start of U.S. involvement in the war, thousands of Americans and aliens were harassed in their local communities by nationalistic zealots. It would be impossible to count the number of incidents or victims; most were likely never reported to either police or local newspapers. As with the tracking of federal persecutions, the NCLB attempted to list incidents of mob violence from the beginning of the Great War until its end. These incidents too were greatly underreported since only major newspaper clippings were used to collect information. From the start of the war in 1917 through the first four months of 1918, the NCLB reported just 125 mob incidents.60 The list did not include a number of incidents in southern Illinois, nor did it note any riots, including those in East St. Louis. Many of the reported incidents involved multiple victims.
The list also did not include instances where smaller groups intimidated or exacted their justice for the cause. Most of those incidents were likewise never reported to police. As with the other cases of harassment, words were often twisted or fabricated to make the suspect appear even more heinous.61 These confrontations could happen in workplaces, stores, on public streets, or, perhaps most frequently, in saloons. Most often the mobs were composed of men. Women were sometimes involved, however, and in least two incidents led the attack. In another case fifty drafted men hired a black man to lash the back of a farmer whom they had already tarred and feathered.62
German immigrants and people with German names naturally drew the most scrutiny. The cited infraction could have been nearly any comment or action that might be construed as un-American. Unpatriotic “utterances” or negative comments about the country’s leaders or military were sufficient. So was any comment that might be considered as supporting the Germans. A person’s opposition to the draft or Liberty Bond sales or even the Red Cross or YMCA could be enough. Perhaps the person gave to those causes but hadn’t given enough. Failing to stand for the national anthem would work. Likewise if someone was a Socialist, a member of IWW, a pacifist, a Mennonite, a Jehovah’s Witness, or favored an early peace accord. With mobs, as with drunks in a saloon, there was no due process and limited rational thought. The allegation might have been true—or far from it. By the time a mob had formed and decided to take action, guilt or innocence became irrelevant. A sixty-eight-year-old man in Louisiana was beaten for not buying Liberty Bonds, for example, although he was later found to have purchased $5,000 worth.63
Punishment might have been as simple as being forced to kiss the flag or swear allegiance to the president or the country. But it was always under the threat of beating, doses administered as needed. Some victims were thrown into bodies of water, others “dunked” to the point of near-drowning. Some were painted yellow, to ironically show their cowardice, in retribution administered by a mob of people. Houses and businesses were painted yellow. Victims were driven from town; heads were shaved. A Utah man was thrown into a dough bin, where he nearly suffocated; another in Pennsylvania was forced to walk on the street with a dog chain around his neck.64 All victims were intimidated, including a ninety-year-old bedridden man in Kansas who was forced to kiss the flag.65 The mobs may have thought their actions amusing, but in the end they just provided some of the most ignominious examples of how civil liberties were defiled in the era.
Tar and feathering, or some variant thereof, was often prescribed. One prisoner was even tarred and feathered within the walls of a New Mexico prison, presumably with assistance from prison staff in obtaining the necessary materials.66 Many were horsewhipped, at least one victim in Nevada with an iron cat-o’-nine-tails.67 In San Francisco a man was induced to leave town, after a rope was tied around his neck as an extra incentive, by the ironically named Knights of Liberty.68 Three other men were in the process of being lynched when they were rescued. Two more were threatened with lynching. Robert Prager, in Collinsville, was the only German immigrant lynched during World War I. Rev. W. T. Sims, a black preacher in York, South Carolina, was lynched on August 23, 1917, for voicing his opposition to the draft, but race no doubt was a factor.69
One pattern was clear: mob violence ramped up markedly in the spring of 1918, particularly in March and April.70 The National Civil Liberties Bureau documented 17 incidents in March, 51 in April. The incidents in April would constitute more than 40 percent of the 125 it reported for the year.71
Another group that tracked mob violence was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Lynching and mob killings of blacks were depressingly common in the era, with sixty-one reported in 1917 and the first four months of 1918, excluding those from the East St. Louis riots.72 All the mob actions, save one, were below the Mason-Dixon Line. No reason could be given for some of the killings, other than insolence or perhaps to reinforce the South’s social pecking order. Southern mobs had no second thoughts about taking the legal process into their own hands, particularly if the alleged crime had been committed against a woman. Of the sixty-one lynchings and mob killings of blacks in that period, forty-nine involved alleged crimes, but most victims would not see a fair trial in a court of law. Two of the victims were killed after being found guilty.
The mobs hung forty-one blacks; drowned, shot and killed, or beat to death sixteen others; and dispatched four by burning. The December 1917 burning at the stake of Lation Scott in Dyersburg, Tennessee, followed his admission that he had bound and gagged a white woman but not otherwise harmed her. Extended torture with hot irons preceded the immolation while thousands of men, women, and children watched just after church on a Sunday afternoon in the town square. Children were lifted onto shoulders so they might have a better view. Others watched from nearby rooftops and second-story windows. Scott was somehow still partially conscious when the fire was finally lit about his mutilated body. The whole process took three and a half hours, much longer than the lynching in Dyersburg nine months earlier of a black man accused of shooting a police officer. Many prominent citizens of Dyersburg thought the torture and burning of Scott a disgrace to the community and said he should have been given a “decent lynching.” The NAACP magazine explained, “By this is meant a quick, quiet hanging, with no display or torture.”73
There had been limited anti-German violence in the Collinsville area early on. Just days after the U.S. declaration of war in 1917, interurban car conductor Joel Zumald got into an argument with other employees at an East St. Louis and Suburban Railway car shed in Maryville. A newspaper gleefully reported, under the headline “A Lesson in Patriotism,” that Zumald had his left eye made into the colors of the American flag by an interurban motorman. “It was also reported that had not bystanders interfered, the job of decorating would have been more thorough. Too bad!” the newspaper stated.74
In Granite City a man of German extraction reportedly made derogatory comments to another man who had two sons in the army. He responded by hitting the pro-German in the jaw and sending him through a plate-glass window, severing a tendon in his left wrist. “Peter King was not arrested. He was applauded,” a newspaper reported. “No more attacks on the flag are expected in Granite City.”75
On January 20 one of the first 1918 incidents in southern Illinois occurred in Glen Carbon, a village just eight miles north of Collinsville. On that Sunday night in a saloon, six locals reportedly refused to sing or take off their hats when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played. Newspapers reported that their choice of music was “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.” This, of course, did not sit well with a dozen or more local boys. Fists flew and barroom chairs were thrown, and when the dust settled, there were a number of blackened eyes but no one was arrested. The pro-German boys fled for their homes, and it was reported that “the patriots were victorious.”76
About sixty miles north of Collinsville, a series of patriotic demonstrations took place in February in Macoupin and Montgomery Counties, another area rich in coal mines and coal miners. Over 350 men celebrated Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, in Staunton by tar and feathering two men and forcing 100 others to kiss the flag or otherwise show their patriotism.77
The purge continued the next day in Staunton and had the effect of igniting a patriotic firestorm across Macoupin and Montgomery Counties. A mob of about two hundred on February 17 went after three labor organizers in Hillsboro, two of whom had also reportedly registered as conscientious objectors to the draft. The vigilantes made preparations for another tar and feather party and went in search of the trio, but they were frustrated when they were unable to find them.78 Due to an erroneous tip, the mob went to the farm of Henry Donaldson in pursuit of the three men around 1:00 a.m. Donaldson’s son, Clifford, who had no connection with the labor organizers and did not understand why the mob was at his door, fired warning shots.79 At least three men were shot in the ensuing melee, twenty-year-old Clifford Donaldson among them; he died three days later. Donaldson had joined the navy in St. Louis the day before he was shot, and his name would absurdly be listed as a navy casualty of World War I. Dismayed at not finding the labor organizers at the Donaldson home, the mob went to the men’s unoccupied apartment and brought all the trio’s belongings out into the street, where they were burned “in the name of freedom.”80
In Collinsville on February 23, a group of men got into an argument with Jake Kremmer Sr. and questioned his loyalty.81 A flag was produced, and Kremmer was made to kiss it; like most of those accosted, he had little choice in the matter. Two nights later patriotic passions were again inflamed in Maryville after twenty-six men were sent off that day to Camp Taylor and another loyalty program was conducted in Edwardsville at the Wildey Theater.82 Someone suggested that a loyalty parade would be a good thing for Maryville. Braced with a twenty-one-foot-wide flag and marchers full of beer, the procession made its way to at least three local saloons. One draftee who was encountered, Robert Kunze, expressed what some thought were disloyal sentiments. Kunze went into a saloon to avoid a fight, but the entourage followed. Inside they found Theodore Schuster, who had been to an army camp but was discharged when it was learned that he was a German alien. The crowd also thought Schuster displayed a disloyal attitude, and the flag was brought forward for him to kiss, which he knelt and did.
Maryville mayor Fred Neubauer, the saloon owner, stepped up to defend Schuster, and he was asked to kiss the flag too, which he did “good naturedly.”83 But the miners in the parade were not done with Schuster, and they asked the mine managers to dismiss the German alien for fear he would sabotage Donk Mine No. 2 at Maryville. Without a job Schuster left town two days later. Miner’s Local 1802 president James Fornero thought the demonstration a good thing. “Maryville is all right. It is a loyal community and the few people who are not outspoken for Uncle Sam are keeping mighty quiet,” Fornero said. “The boys only rounded up three, but the idea is to have everybody loyal. We’re for Uncle Sam all the way through.”84
The local press offered no rebuke of the miners, far from it. J. O. Monroe of the Collinsville Herald again expressed dismay that anyone would make a disloyal comment and suggested taking things to the next level. The column, titled “A Little Tar Might Help,” cited typical complaints heard from the antiwar crowd, such as high corporate profits and postwar taxes, and Monroe said none of the talk should be tolerated.85
Now we’re not worried about anybody being convinced by this sort of argument handed out as it was by this blabbering babbler, but just for his own benefit and to show him that the people are fighting for something and are not to be mocked by idlers of his sort, we suggest that a tarring party such as the several which took place in Macoupin County recently might be efficacious at least in stilling his silly tongue. Perhaps the information that such a thing might happen to him will be sufficient to quiet him. If not, we’re satisfied we know a lot of folks who would be glad to join the party. And there’ll be a lot of tar and feathers when the ceremonies begin.86
The uptick in violence against Germans and others in downstate Illinois did not go unnoticed in Springfield, the state capital. On February 25 Governor Frank Lowden declared: “Mob rule will not be tolerated in any part of the state, even though such mob rule acts in the name of loyalty to the Government. . . . Those who take the law into their own hands at such a time are helping not our own cause, but that of the enemy.”87
Two days later Lowden shifted his focus to the federal government. Like many Americans he, at least privately, bought into the premise that people were taking the law into their own hands because the federal government was not doing enough to squelch treasonous activity. On February 28 he sent a telegram to Attorney General Thomas Gregory in Washington and asked that a special representative be detailed to him at Springfield, so he could work directly with state officials investigating treasonous and seditious acts. Lowden wanted more than was being done by the various U.S. district attorneys in the state. “A situation is developing out here which gives me great alarm,” Lowden said. “Persons outrageously seditious have been reported to Federal authorities who have taken position that they are powerless to act. This has resulted in deep indignation in these communities, followed by some instances of mob action.”88
Lowden explained that he had just investigated in one county and noted, “The most patriotic and orderly people in that county are fearful that nothing can prevent violence unless prosecution is at once instituted against a few notorious offenders.” He said that if he had to declare martial law it would be “playing into the hands of those who are opposing the war. Could you not detail me some representative of your Department in whose discretion you have full confidence and who would assist me in seeing that these objectionable persons are brought to justice? Nothing would so allay the popular excitement I have described as if I were able to say to the people of the State that a representative of yours was on the ground cooperating with me and that all complaints of treasonable or seditious conduct would be promptly investigated.”89 Lowden would later dispatch Lieutenant Governor John Oglesby to Washington, carrying the same plea for federal assistance.90 But the governor would not get his U.S. Department of Justice representative in Springfield until April 25, after much of the vigilante fury in Illinois had already been spent.91
The miners surely were not done with their work of intimidating Germans in the Collinsville area. Pleasant Ridge Evangelical Lutheran Church was situated in a farming area west of Maryville and north of Collinsville and Donk Mine No. 1. The minister at the church, Rev. Hans von Gemmingen, heard from several people that he could be the next victim of the mob of miners because he was an enemy alien. Gemmingen, forty-four years old, had been with the small church for six years and had no known disputes with townspeople. Now he, his wife, and their children felt very threatened.
He sought help from Sheriff Jenkin Jenkins on February 28.92 Two deputies investigated and found no reason to believe that the minister or his family was in danger. The assurances, such as they were from Jenkins’s men, did little to assuage the pastor’s concerns. The next day Gemmingen and a neighbor went to Springfield and sought protection from Governor Lowden. With no state highway patrol yet, Lowden sent Colonel Claude Ryman of the Illinois National Guard to investigate. Ryman met with Jenkins and one of his deputies and found “no alarming condition,” but he tried to verify that Jenkins and his men would do all they could to protect the minister and his family.
The main complaint against the minister was his failure to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. There were reports that the minister would not relinquish his German citizenship because doing so would preclude any inheritance to which his family would be entitled. Gemmingen had spent the first twenty years of his life in Germany, including a mandatory one-year stint in the German military.93 Such information put the minister atop the local patriots’ hit list. Sheriff Jenkins also decided it an opportune time to publicly divulge that federal officials had recently searched Gemmingen’s home and property for a wireless radio, but nothing had been found. All such radios were to be dismantled by government order, but someone had reported that a wireless device was still operating north of Collinsville. Shortly after the federal search of the Gemmingen home and property, it was rumored that the radio use had suddenly stopped.
Gemmingen would be subjected to one more investigation, this one conducted by the ubiquitous UMW board member Mose Johnson. He said that he felt compelled to investigate the matter on behalf of the miners and took umbrage at the minister’s plea for protection from the governor. “I deemed it my duty to make a thorough investigation in the Village of Maryville and I find there has been no demonstration of any unpatriotic remarks. . . . Therefore for the loyal citizens of Maryville and Pleasant Ridge, I can see no reason to appeal to the Governor or any other source for protection,” Johnson said, “unless being guilty of some unpatriotic remark or action that is unfriendly to our country.” In his statement Johnson questioned Gemmingen’s failure to renounce his German citizenship. “Which is dearest to this country,” Johnson asked, “the wealth that his children would inherit or our sons we freely give to this country?”94
Ten weeks later Gemmingen would give his last sermon at the Pleasant Ridge Lutheran Church before fleeing the local threats and intimidation.95
On March 8 J. O. Monroe backed away from his inflammatory statements of the prior week—sort of. In his column the editor-publisher said that some of the fairer sex, members of the Red Cross, thought his suggestion of tar and feathers for some in the community “might lead to very unwise action on the part of hot headed persons.” As an alternative perhaps more men could take up knitting. The women showed Monroe a soldier’s sweater that had been knitted by R. Guy Kneedler, president of the Red Cross and city council attorney. Tongue firmly planted in cheek, the editor played along: “And it is a handsome piece of workmanship as far as we can judge.” But he reissued the warning to those who spoke in a disloyal manner: “For if Uncle Sam gets hold of them they might long for a smear of tar and a rub of feathers in preference.”96
The hunt continued in northern Madison County for IWW supporters on March 16, when a group of men in New Douglas went in search of Joseph Mitchell. It was said that he had spoken in favor of the Wobblies. With reinforcements also coming from Staunton and Sorento, Mitchell reportedly called for his son to take him out of town by automobile post haste. A newspaper said that his son drove, “forgetting the speed laws and burning gasoline at a lively rate to get the parent to a place of safety.”97
Over-the-top patriotism flared again a week later, this time ninety miles southeast of Collinsville. In the Franklin County coal-mining town of Christopher, four men were tarred and feathered on March 22, including a Polish Catholic priest, for allegedly saying, “God is with the Kaiser” and “the Kaiser will win the war.”98 The priest denied the accusation. Charges against the others were unknown.
Three days after the Christopher affair, a mob composed of about 1,500 coal miners ran rampant in nearby DuQuoin all day and conducted its own kangaroo court for four men accused of disloyalty.99 The mob formed to celebrate the rumored capture of Germany’s Crown Prince Wilhelm. The capture rumor ended up being untrue, but the authority of the mob was without question. It ordered all storekeepers in town to hang out a flag and close their doors for the celebration.100
All the accused men were made to kiss the flag for the crowd. One of them was said to have pulled a gun on a mine superintendent and state that Germany would win the war. When he pleaded guilty, he was promptly knocked to the ground. A restaurateur was convicted after he had recently aroused the displeasure of the visiting Jackie Band.101 At least some members of the band, from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, felt that the man had not fed them properly, which in 1918 DuQuoin was considered suspicious. For his culinary transgressions, the restaurant owner was tarred and feathered by the mob.
The same day a mob in the mining town of Benton in nearby Franklin County took issue with Mrs. Frances Pergen, a Bohemian, who reportedly said at the local post office that she hoped every American soldier sent to France would be killed and that the United States would starve to death if Germany didn’t win the war.102 Her statements were challenged by Henry Baker. The two ended up in some form of physical altercation, a scene that would have been memorable to witness, given that Baker had but one leg. Both were arrested by police and brought before a justice of the peace, who fined each of them $210. Word spread in Benton of the tussle and subsequent arrests. While Pergen was unable to find a lawyer willing to take her case, citizens anted up and paid Baker’s fine.
The crowd of five hundred, many of them women, gave Pergen the “loyalty treatment,” which in her case included being ridden out of town on a rail. That process involved the object of derision being lifted onto a fence rail or similar lumber and paraded around, in this case, up and down Main Street, and eventually out of town, while being forced to carry a flag in each hand and shout her approval of President Wilson and the United States.103
The mob actions in and near Franklin County did not amuse federal attorney Charles Karch, of the Southern District in East St. Louis. As despicable as they were, Karch knew the outcomes could have been worse. “The reason these did not end up in murder is more due to accident than to intention and design,” he remarked.104 Karch summoned more than fifty women to appear in federal court in Cairo after the Benton incident, but he acknowledged that it would be difficult to obtain convictions in any of the cases.105
Karch’s office also became involved in the community of Steeleville, about sixty miles south of Collinsville, when the town board passed an ordinance prohibiting German from being spoken within its confines.106 No violence was reported, but a group of citizens called on a church pastor and informed him of the new law. The majority of his congregants were Germans who did not speak or understand English, and they were required to attend another church or worship at home. The suspect church was also ordered to display an American flag outside. The U.S. attorney was reported to have explained that the local law was illegal and against the wishes of the federal government.
One might ask, where were the police during the World War I–era mob incidents? The best answer would probably be in the crowd, not necessarily leading the mob but certainly not making any significant move to restrain it. In a few instances police officers did intervene, but by and large the policemen of that era were neither professional nor ethical enough to perform their sworn duties. Two of those among the mob who were shot and injured by the Hillsboro farmer whose home was under siege were police officers.107 Police actions in the East St. Louis riots of 1917 could more often be described as participating and watching rather than intervening. At least three East St. Louis policemen and one former policeman were indicted after the riots there.108 Even without the war hysteria, police in the era were heavy-handed, and most complaints of brutality fell on deaf ears. A Milwaukee newspaper probably spoke of conditions in much of the nation when it said that mobs were “riding roughshod over law and order to punish instances of alleged disloyalty.”109
Two men in Oklahoma were shot and killed by persons investigating their reported disloyalty in the spring of 1918. In the first case an allegedly disloyal Bulgarian was shot by a policeman after the victim reportedly fired first. The officer was acquitted, and the judge for the case gave a patriotic talk and warned pro-Germans not to speak against the United States. The second case also turned into a debate over patriotism rather than the facts of the shooting, when a member of a local council of defense shot a restaurant waiter. He too was acquitted.110
In the tumultuous spring of 1918, southern Illinois would infamously become a national leader in mob violence in the United States. The series of mob incidents that occurred in Franklin, Macoupin, Madison, and Perry Counties would have at least one important shared characteristic: In all of them, coal mining was a major part of the local economy and along with that came subservience to UMW coal miners.
The mob actions in early 1918 could not be tied to any specific events on European battlefields. The Bolshevik Revolution had taken the Russians out of the fight with the Germans, and Italy had been nearly vanquished. This allowed Germany to consolidate forces and try to make all the gains it could on the western front before massive numbers of U.S. troops and massive amounts of U.S. matèriel flooded the field. The Germans mounted their offensive March 21 with 207 divisions compared to the Allies 173. In their assault on British lines between Arras and La Fere, the Germans had driven the Entente troops back as much as forty miles. But the word that hit the St. Louis–area newspapers didn’t seem much different from what had been reported in prior months. Besides, the lion’s share of U.S. troops were nowhere near the front and wouldn’t be until later in 1918.
The first of April 1918 brought more of the same mob activity on the national level, but it started as a quiet week locally. On April 2 in LaSalle, Illinois, some two hundred miles north of Collinsville, a doctor was made to kiss the flag and “dunked” in a canal while the stores of two businessmen were painted yellow.111 The physician’s alleged crime was calling Secretary of War Newton Baker a “fathead.”112 On the same day, a man in Emerson, Nebraska was tarred and feathered for not giving to the Red Cross.113 On April 3 the windows of the Deutscher Herold were painted yellow by a mob in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A man in Sulphur, Oklahoma, had his head shaved on April 4 by a mob for allegedly being pro-German. He got off easier that day than a man in Boyce, Louisiana, who received one hundred lashes administered by prominent citizens, along with a coat of tar and feathers while he was made to shout, “To hell with the Kaiser,” and, “Hurrah for Wilson.”114