Robert P. Prager Foully Murdered in Collinsville—This Crime Must Not Go Unpunished—
Get the Guilty Men—Let No Guilty Man Escape—The Fair Name of Illinois Has Been Dragged into Disgrace
—Belleville News-Democrat editorial headline, April 5, 1918
When daylight broke in Collinsville and people started moving about on Friday, April 5, 1918, there was little indication of the chaos that had reigned in the city just six hours earlier. Few knew of the lynching upon waking, but word spread like wildfire.1 When businesses opened, those involved in the lynching, witnesses, and others spoke candidly of what they had seen, heard, or done. No effort was made early in the day to conceal anyone’s identity. One observer noted that people were discussing the hanging “as though it had been a picnic.”2
As the lynching had occurred outside the city limits, the Collinsville police would have no part in the investigation. Madison County coroner Roy Lowe arrived from Edwardsville and met with county sheriff Jenkin Jenkins. They spoke with city officials and other witnesses of the events of the prior sixteen hours. By Illinois statute the coroner was compelled to investigate every death. Lowe, at thirty-two years old the county’s youngest-ever coroner, had been elected two years prior and was aggressive and determined to see justice done. Before coming to Collinsville that morning, he had conferred with Madison County state’s attorney Joseph Streuber and then by telephone with Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage. Sheriff Jenkins’s involvement in the investigation seemed minimal, which was good given his close ties with Collinsville’s miners.
Many knew nothing of the incident until reading the first news account in the Collinsville Herald. Publisher J. O. Monroe had been up until 4:00 a.m. finishing the stories for inclusion in the regular weekly edition, published on Fridays. Monroe wrote what he had witnessed and heard, stark and raw with all the dramatic details. And he wanted the story to be accurate, knowing it would be picked up by the “news wires of the world.” Years later Monroe said that this first story was “free from the reactions, the intimidations, the dissembling and the revisions of stories rationalized later.”3 People would rush to buy an extra edition the Herald printed later that evening, which included the day’s events.
The lynching was quickly denounced by State’s Attorney Streuber, who called it a disgrace. “Public acts and utterances disloyal to the American flag are as vicious and atrocious a crime as the acts of persons who form a mob and take human life. One is treason, the other is murder. The penalty is the same for both. This is a moment when loyalty and law alike must be supreme, and loyalty does not require lawlessness.”4
Sheriff Jenkins and Coroner Lowe searched Prager’s shack, and Lowe quickly announced they had found nothing to indicate that the victim was disloyal in any way, nor had he been hoarding powder to blow up the mine. Newspapermen, arriving from St. Louis and places all over the Midwest, then took it upon themselves to conduct their own search of the home and found Prager had hung three American flags on the walls.5 He also had pictures of American battleships and maps, the type of items sought by a military enthusiast but of no value to any spy or agent. At least one report later surfaced that investigators also found Liberty Bonds that Prager purchased, but no official statement was ever made to that effect.6 One letter to Prager said that the U.S. Navy was seeking bakers, the sender apparently unaware that Prager had previously been rejected for service.
The newspapers did note the significant amount of mail Prager received or intended to mail. Most were letters, in both English and German, for matrimonial advertisements found in magazines. One reporter said the letters showed that Prager had a good command of written English and was “quite intelligent.” They painted a picture of a lonely man, desperately seeking someone to become his wife. In one letter he told of living in the extreme northwest, where there were few women, and said he moved back to the central states to find a wife. He said he made $25 a week as a baker, had “means of his own,” and was a man of high character. Prager had received a number of replies to his letters. Along with the letters, the newsmen found two different photographs of Prager with his name written on each, apparently so respondents could keep their prospective suitors straight. Those two photos provide the only known visual depictions of the lynching victim.7
Herald publisher Monroe had a field day with some of the letters. After the other newspapermen had gone over those in English, Monroe took the letters in German for translation. Some letters discuss the initiation of two friends of Prager into some type of organization, presumably a lodge or club. The writer also discusses Prager bringing a St. Louis man some Collinsville “chickens,” presumably girls. The letter implied that Prager should not bring the man such young women and that his coworkers thought someone as old as he should not be with girls that young. The writer said that Prager should bring him “a nice fat hen” next time.8
Monroe said the letters “may have been references to perfectly innocent lodge ceremony or may have been other allusions to hidden practices of the vilest sort.” The editor further stated that if Prager went out with young girls and took them to friends and wrote letters to women he had not met, “it would look as if he might have been immoral possibly to the extent of being in regular business in young womenhood” and “white slave trade.” Monroe’s active imagination regarding Prager’s social life reflected the efforts by the local publishers to sully the victim’s reputation, in an apparent attempt to somehow rationalize the lynching.9 They were alone in their efforts, however, as other newspapers continued to criticize the feeble motivations for the hanging.
Those closest to Prager were shocked to learn of his death. Tears rolled down the cheeks of roommate Battiste Vallissa as he talked to reporters, saying that Prager was loyal to the United States.10 John Pohl, whom Prager had caused to be jailed in St. Louis, even rallied to his defense, as did his wife. “I became sick . . . as I read of his terrible end,” Elizabeth Pohl said. “He always talked of his great love for this country.” Lorenzo Bruno said he had never heard Prager make a disloyal remark.11 His friends at the Odd Fellows lodges, in both St. Louis and Collinsville, said Prager was a loyal American. The St. Louis Harmonie Lodge 353 later passed a resolution condemning the lynching; it said, “No man can stay an Odd Fellow in spirit and in fact unless he is and stays faithful to our country.”12
Illinois governor Frank Lowden issued a statement condemning the lynching and threatened to declare martial law in Collinsville if local police could not preserve order. A day later in Rock Island, the governor spoke at length about the affair. “There is no place in all the world where news of this mob action at Collinsville, in this state—I say it with shame—will be so welcomed as at the court of Berlin,” Lowden said. “Patriotism will not be permitted to be used as a cloak for crime in Illinois if I can help it.”13
In East St. Louis on Friday, pieces of the half-inch manila lynching rope were eagerly sought as souvenirs. Left behind atop Bluff Hill by undertaker Vincent Herr, the rope had been retrieved from the tree and taken to East St. Louis, where police officers and others cut it up for mementos of the affair. One man was reported to have the entire noose portion.14
Collinsville officials were still on edge Friday about the safety of other residents who were suspected of being pro-German. At least three of the people who were named by the mob Thursday night left town on Friday.15 A businessman was told, nonetheless, that three more men were going to be lynched by the mob.16 Mayor Siegel continued to use his vigilance committee to help protect the city. “I have made very thorough preparations to prevent any further trouble. There are armed guards all around and anybody who starts anything won’t last three minutes,” the mayor said. It was reported that twenty-eight German aliens were registered with the Collinsville police, and some of them had also left town. One newspaper noted the high percentage of city residents who were foreign born and could not “speak English intelligently.”17
Of German lineage or not, most Collinsville residents felt that the lynching was wrong, but they kept their opinions to themselves, not wanting to suffer the same fate. Yet many defended the mob’s actions and criticized Prager based on what they had heard about him.18 A. C. Gauen, president of the chamber of commerce, no doubt exaggerated when he said, “It is condemned from one end of town to the other, by 991/2 percent of the people. It was done by a bunch of roughnecks.” He went further to try to displace the blame. “The fact is that it was due to outside influence. It started in Maryville. We don’t have that kind of people here. Notwithstanding that there are many nationalities in Collinsville, there is remarkably little lawlessness. The police records show that.”19
Whether simply coincidence or the result of a greater plan, membership cards printed by the state council of defense began to surface again in Collinsville that Friday. Ostensibly they were applications to join the SCD Collinsville Neighborhood Committee, which had held its impassioned organizing meeting nine days earlier. Those signing the card pledged to “wage war against the military rulers of Germany to make the world safe for democracy and to aid in the successful prosecution of the war.”20 The prior week some residents had said that they felt the cards unnecessary to show their loyalty. But fewer than twelve hours after a mob had lynched Robert Prager, the cards served an additional purpose.
Groups of men with handfuls of loyalty cards swarmed the city, seeking the signatures of those they suspected of being pro-German or those who might cooperate with investigating authorities. The message was clear: Sign the card to show your loyalty—and your agreement not to assist in the investigation of the lynching. Many men were confronted on the streets and in businesses and compelled to sign the cards.
By midday rumors were rampant that arrests would soon be made. And they would have been, if Coroner Lowe had his way. He had heard five names repeatedly mentioned as having played active roles in the crime, at either city hall or the scene of the lynching. By law Lowe still had to conduct an inquest, but he thought the evidence compelling enough that those five should swiftly be taken off the streets. He sought out one of Collinsville’s justices of the peace and asked that warrants be issued for the men.21 But there were two problems with the request. The first was that in Illinois in 1918 justices of the peace could handle only minor criminal and civil cases and were not authorized to be in any way involved in felony proceedings. The second was that the justice approached by Lowe wanted no part in the lynching affair.
Why the justices of the peace didn’t want to get involved became clearer after one of them, Adam Schroeppel, was surrounded by a crowd of men in Fulton’s Y Saloon just after lunchtime and ordered to sign a loyalty card.22 Schroeppel, sixty-eight, was native born and had lived his whole life in Collinsville, where he had raised thirteen children. He was first asked if he had purchased Liberty Bonds or Saving Stamps. Schroeppel said he had not but his children had. The men who surrounded him questioned his loyalty and said he was pro-German. He started to leave when he was held back and forced to sign a loyalty card. Schroeppel said he was “just a plain, ordinary old Dutchman” but loyal to the United States.
By 5:00 p.m. Friday Lowe had empaneled his coroner’s jury, and it had viewed Prager’s body. He also announced that the inquest and interviewing of witnesses would begin Monday at 10:00 a.m. at city hall. The jury would include a retiree and five businessmen, one of whom was a justice of the peace. Another would be J. O. Monroe, one of the newspaper publishers who had witnessed the lynching.
The loyalty cards blanketed the town on Saturday too, some distributed house by house.23 A local council of defense officer denied the cards had any connection with the lynching, but he did note the upswing in the number of them distributed and turned in. Also on Saturday many men inexplicably marched up and down city streets carrying American flags, delivering a silent message of patriotic intimidation.24
There had been threats on the street Friday afternoon that another vigilance committee, this one composed of miners, would spring into action if any of the mob leaders were arrested and “rescue them from the hands of the law.”25 This news, coupled with Lowe getting no cooperation from the justice of the peace, prompted a second warning from Governor Lowden that he would send in the state militia and invoke martial law if any mob tried to “stay justice by intimidation.”26
Assistance from the state would arrive Saturday, April 6, in the form of Assistant Attorney General William Trautmann and Colonel Claude Ryman of the Illinois National Guard. They had reached Edwardsville the prior evening and met with State’s Attorney Streuber and Sheriff Jenkins. By 10:00 a.m. they were in Collinsville, where they met with local officials; they also assessed the situation in Maryville.27 Trautmann, Ryman, Streuber, and Mayor Siegel would confer for an hour that afternoon before deciding that martial law would not be declared unless there was further trouble. Trautmann also conferred with Coroner Roy Lowe and announced that there would be no immediate arrests, at least until after the coroner’s inquest was complete. The arrival of the state officials served to calm the community. The state also assigned undercover men to investigate, a task they would not entrust to local officers.
As the full story of the lynching was told, no agency was as roundly criticized as the Collinsville Police Department. Save for Officer Frost’s initial rescue of Prager, there was little good to say about its efforts. The decision to only follow the mob out of the city limits looked nearly as bad as allowing Prager to be taken from the city hall basement in the first place. Most police officers in that era were political appointees with little professionalism and even less training. The four officers who had been on duty in Collinsville were former coal miners and no doubt knew many of the men in the mob. But the single most important reason for their inaction might have been the common belief at city hall that night that the mob intended only to tar and feather Prager—to have a little fun with him.28 It would be criminal, yes, but decidedly less than murder. “I didn’t think they intended to harm him,” Mayor Siegel said. “But if the police had fired one shot into the crowd, the whole town would have been on top of them and the police would have been hanging around here too.”29
Siegel’s portrayal of the risk to police was overstated. No police weapon was ever drawn, and no one in the mob was believed to be armed. The officers had easy access to enough firepower to quell the insurrection but not enough resolve to use it. Frost later portrayed the mob as so crazed that it would have taken its anger out on others if not Prager. “I never saw men more bloodthirsty,” Frost said. “I saw how enraged they were and feared they would sate their lust on someone, either an officer or some other citizen toward whom they might have felt animosity.”30 Police Chief Tony Staten used the same flawed logic when speaking with a reporter, no doubt to try to lessen the criticism. “In one way, I believe it is a good thing they got Prager. If he had been spirited away by the police I believe the mob would have vented its rage by hanging two or three Collinsville persons who have been suspected of disloyalty.”31
The editor of the Belleville News-Democrat, Fred Kern, would take Staten to task for the comments. “He puts it on the ground that Prager was a kind of vicarious sacrifice,” Kern said in an editorial. “Brave Chief? Big Chief? Mighty Chief?” Kern wrote, “Let them rob and loot the store in order that they let the bank alone. There’s some philosophy for you. It takes a wise head indeed to think that out.”32
Chief Staten got his information about the incident secondhand, for he apparently had never bothered to appear at the police station during the anarchy, and no one had bothered to call him either, although he lived just six blocks away.33 He had been in telephone contact with Frost earlier but apparently played no role, and provided no leadership, in handling the incident that evening. He finally went to city hall after Prager had been taken away but, like his officers, would not go to the lynching scene.
The heavy involvement of coal miners in Prager’s demise also prompted UMW state board member Mose Johnson and Local 1802 president James Fornero to issue a statement that Prager was indeed a spy.34 They claimed that the miners had been investigating the immigrant for some time and he was someone who would harm the mining industry. They said that Prager told others Germany was fighting for a righteous cause and the United States went out of its way to join the war. The union men also spelled out the measures they had taken to have Prager arrested or placed in protective custody.
Mayor Siegel took the time Friday to telegram U.S. senator Lee Overman, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking for tougher federal disloyalty legislation. He told Overman that the lynching of Prager “was the direct result of a widespread feeling in this community that the government will not punish disloyalty and, although I deprecate the existence of this feeling, it is nevertheless not without some foundation.” The mayor said numerous complaints had been made about disloyal persons in the city, but that no action had been taken by the federal government, perhaps due to the inadequacy of current laws.35 The Prager case would become one of the reasons cited for passage of the Sedition Act, which became law in May 1918 and effectively made 1917’s Treason Act even more oppressive.
In discussing the Sedition Bill the following week, Senator Lawrence Sherman, fifty-nine years old and cranky, unloaded on Collinsville, never mind that it was in his home state. He said the hanging was not justification for the Sedition Bill, but that the drunken miners who did the lynching were simply murderers who should themselves hang.36 Sherman said Siegel’s telegram to Overman was a disgrace to Collinsville and “an indication of abject cowardice and stamp[ed] him as a poltroon in office and a renegade in public life.” He charged that the mayor “did not lift his hand” to stop the mob. “Evidently the mob was filled with the patriotism which made St. Louis famous,” he said. “Evidently it came from a brewery or Peoria.” Sherman castigated the Collinsville police for their performance and also warned that elected officials must not kowtow to union labor. “The thing that is necessary is that we elect sheriffs and mayors who will enforce the laws,” Sherman said in the Senate chamber.37
Two miles away at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, there was official silence on the Prager affair. The cabinet had discussed the matter Friday afternoon after the U.S. attorney from East St. Louis alerted Attorney General Thomas Gregory. Cabinet members described it as a “deplorable incident,” and likewise used it to call for passage of the Sedition Bill.38 President Wilson had been concerned enough about vigilante mobs in November 1917 to remark that any man who joined a mob and took the law into his own hands was “not worthy of the free institutions of the United States.” Yet when that very thing happened five months later in Collinsville, Wilson would not utter one word of condemnation. Two former presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, did condemn the mob action, however.39
Condemnation was also swift in coming from the editorial writers of the nation’s newspapers and magazines. Most placed some blame on the lack of stronger disloyalty laws, as did the Adrian (MI) Telegram: “The body of a poor fool hanging on a tree and a dark spot of blood-guilt on the State of Illinois are the first fruits of our imbecile policy toward disloyalists.” Others cited fear of what the German army would do to captured U.S. soldiers. The New York Sun said it was preposterous to blame the lynching on the lack of better sedition laws: “He was lynched because the State of Illinois, the County of Madison, and the Town of Collinsville failed to provide the protection it is their duty to furnish to every citizen, honest or dishonest, well behaved or criminal.” Along those lines, the Albany (NY) Knickerbocker Press said one honest, determined officer is a match for any mob, and “where lynchings happen it is because the officers of the law are whiter-livered curs than the crowd they ought to suppress.”40
A handful of papers, including the Washington Post, took the opposite wartime view: “It is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior part of the country. Enemy propaganda must be stopped, even if a few lynchings may occur.”41 The Post had weighed in earlier when Overman suggested that a myriad of German operatives were at work in America: “The more one ponders Senator Overman’s estimate of 400,000 German spies, the harder it is to grow righteously indignant over the Illinois lynching.”42
The New Republic magazine attacked the 1918 American mind-set, which seemingly turned its back on the lynching of blacks and those in Collinsville who failed to stand up for Prager’s rights, saying the lynching occurred “while the more decent members of the community expostulated mildly or averted their eyes.” For the United States to be regarded as a “clean and honorable nation,” men had to be strong enough to act, the magazine said. “If there were in the community men with any sense of humanity and fair play and courage to take personal risks in the defense of the weak, the silence of the press does them grave injustice.”43
The St. Louis Argus, a weekly “published in the interest of colored people,” also queried why the daily papers were suddenly in an uproar about lynching in an editorial under the heading, “Depends on Whose Ox Is Gored.”44 Editors of the Westliche Post, St. Louis’s German-language daily newspaper, urged calm in the German community but feared where such violence could lead: “The hanging in Collinsville the day before the anniversary of the war should open the eyes of anyone to the disaster which threatens this country when blind racial hate gains the upper hand. . . . What happened yesterday to the [blacks] and happens today to the Germans will happen tomorrow to someone else. The mob, once incited, does not discriminate.”45
Perhaps one of the most impassioned editorials was written by Kern of the Belleville News-Democrat. Kern had fifteen years earlier seen a black man lynched while serving as mayor of that city, twelve miles south of Collinsville.
Mobs are always brutal, always cowardly, always fiendish, never fair, never just, never decent, and seldom sober and never honorable. As a rule they are soaked with whiskey from the soles of their feet to the crowns of their wooden heads. Besides that, patriotism is oftentimes the last resort of scoundrels. They use it to get even with somebody, to vent their spleen, to get their enemies, or to take advantage of those they dislike for some reason or other. They only too often get the wrong fellow. They are the invention of the very devil, and are entirely out of place and keeping on American soil.46
When the story of Prager’s lynching in Illinois was reported in the Collinsville (OK) Star, it was displayed under the headline “Warning.” It no doubt proved inspirational to the men in that region, some of whom were about as intolerant as the coal miners in southern Illinois. The men in Collinsville, Oklahoma, were agitated with a Mennonite Brethren farmer who they felt did not support the war. Not to be outdone by Collinsvillians two states to the east, they took Henry Reimer from a jail cell on April 19 and first made him kiss all forty-eight stars on the flag. A mob of fifty had nearly hung Reimer from a basketball goal until a courageous assistant chief of police grabbed his swinging body after he had passed out. In Oklahoma, as elsewhere, the Mennonites’ war opposition was based purely on religious pacifism, not support of Germany or lack of support for the United States.47
Back in Illinois undertaker Vincent Herr was still waiting on Saturday for Prager’s body to be claimed by family or friends. The wait would be yet another reminder of how alone Prager was in the United States. Herr had found a lapel pin on his jacket from the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. In Prager’s pockets Herr had found a small notebook and a copy of his proclamation to the members of Local 1802. The notebook contained a message to contact a Mrs. McAichion in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in case of an accident.48 Herr had attempted to do so but learned she rejected the telegram, perhaps after reading the nationwide headlines about the Collinsville lynching and wanting no connection to it.
The city’s morbid curiosity of the affair exceeded its desire to provide any eternal resting place for Prager’s body.49 Herr was besieged with requests to see the corpse and obliged by putting it on display Friday for the public, at a time when wakes were typically conducted at a family home. A long line formed along the 300 block of East Main Street as people flocked to view the body. A thirteen-year-old schoolboy joined the line of curious spectators as it slowly moved inside. He had heard to look on the neck for red, white, and blue marks left by the hanging rope but reported seeing no such discoloration.50 The display was mercifully ended after the Harmonie Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) Lodge 353 agreed to pay for Prager’s funeral and sent a carriage from a St. Louis undertaker at noon Sunday, but not before thousands of Collinsville residents had viewed the body.
The events of the preceding seventy-two hours no doubt played a major part in the Holy Cross Lutheran Church deciding to purchase two $100 Liberty Bonds in a congregational vote April 7, so that it might show the strong patriotism of the Germans in its congregation.51 Every church in Collinsville, save for one, allowed Liberty Loan Committee speakers to participate in services and seek individual support for the bond drive. In fact many in the predominantly German congregation at Holy Cross had already made large war bond purchases. Over the course of five bond drives, members would purchase $35,000 in Liberty Bonds.52 What was most unusual—perhaps unheard of—was that the church itself would buy the two bonds, as if it were purchasing a form of protection for its congregation. And the measure was approved one week before the Liberty Loan speaker was even scheduled to make his appeal before them. At a time when Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mennonites, and other Christian church leaders were being scorned or jailed for their opposition to the conflict, Collinsville’s largest Lutheran church voted to directly help fund the war effort.
Trautmann, of the attorney general’s office, would stay in town to provide badly needed assistance to Lowe at the coroner’s inquest, and his first recommendation would jolt the community. Trautmann suggested the inquest be closed to the public so that witnesses would speak freely and the impact of intimidation might be minimized, and Lowe agreed. Trautmann, raised just outside Collinsville on a farm that bordered Consolidated Mine No. 17, knew the area and the people, and he felt it was the best chance of bringing charges. “From all I hear and read, there must have been plenty of men nearby who could not have failed to see the actual act,” Trautmann said. He reminded reporters of the governor’s determination to see prosecution. “The State will spend every dollar it has to bring the guilty ones to justice.”53
The closed inquest didn’t sit well with the crowd of two hundred that had collected on the city hall lawn waiting to get in Monday morning.54 Even Mayor Siegel thought it a bad idea because he believed city residents wanted the facts made public. Others claimed there would be a whitewash by county authorities. Most indignant at being left out of the preceding was UMW board member Mose Johnson, who seemingly tried to incite the various disgruntled groups on the city hall lawn after the decision was announced.55 City police, county deputies, and five deputy coroners provided security.
Closing the inquest would also exclude the press, with the exception of the Herald’s Monroe, who was on the coroner’s jury. Reporters were invited to sit in on the sessions if they agreed to print nothing of the testimony; as a group they declined.56 Allowed to sit in as a courtesy were Mayor Siegel and Postmaster James Simpson, serving as a representative of the federal government. Madison County state’s attorney Streuber was also on hand for Monday’s proceedings. The three days of the inquest provided the apogee in honest testimony about what actually happened the night of April 4 and the first minutes of April 5, and the coroner’s jury was impressed with the candor of most of the witnesses. “Hardly a thing which transpired was kept hidden from the jury,” Monroe said. “There undoubtedly would have been more reservation had there been a crowd present.”57
Seven public officials testified Monday. The inquest then recessed until Wednesday morning due to a Tuesday trial in Edwardsville that required the attendance of both Lowe and Streuber. The police did little to improve their image at the inquest on Monday. When asked why he did not try to learn the names of those in the mob, one officer said he was waiting for orders. Patrolman Frost, twenty-eight, a lifelong resident of the city and a policeman for three years, said he could identify only one man in the mob. Perhaps he recognized some faces, he added, but he didn’t know the men’s names. “Then you don’t know anyone in town,” Trautmann said. Asked why the police did not immediately follow when they learned that Prager had been taken from the basement, Frost said he had to stop and answer a ringing telephone because he thought the caller might be the chief. He also acknowledged several missed opportunities for the officers to get Prager out of town, or at least more convincingly make the mob believe that Prager had been taken away. Asked pointedly by Trautmann if the officers had been content with just following the mob and not helping Prager, Frost said: “No, you’ve got the wrong idea about that. We tried to catch up with them and couldn’t.”58
The second meeting of the Collinsville Neighborhood of the Illinois Council of Defense at the Orpheum Theater was held the night of Tuesday, April 9. Mayor Siegel told the packed house of four hundred that the mob would have gotten to Prager only “over [his] dead body” had he known the immigrant was actually still inside the building.59 The key speaker that evening was Ben Weidel, the grand master of the Missouri Odd Fellows. He spoke of the unfairness of mobs and encouraged going to authorities to report disloyal remarks and then having the courage to testify at trial. Weidel said the focus of most patriotic parades of pro-Germans was wrong, that the U.S. flag was too good to be kissed by disloyalists. And the only hangings, Weidel said, should be in jail yards.
When the inquest resumed Wednesday, it was a time for the suspected mob leaders to tell their story, and no one seemed more forthright than Joe Riegel. Led by a guilty conscience, and certainly not any legal advice, he spoke for more than an hour and calmly laid out the evening as he remembered it. He said that he had no malice toward Prager and thoughtfully worked his way through what was a chaotic night, rubbing his head and puffing on a cigarette. He had a “shamed smile” on his face, but editor Monroe noted that the confession was “without taint of criminal intent.”60 He laid his newsboy cap on the floor and leaned back in the chair as he spoke to the jurors in the city council chambers.
Whether purposely leaving out incriminating details or because he truly did not remember, Riegel said he was not sure who placed the noose on Prager’s neck or the rope over the tree limb. He acknowledged that he was very drunk and tended to do whatever the crowd directed. He carefully thought before providing the names of at least six participants in the actual hanging. “I want to tell you officers all I know, but I don’t want to complicate [sic] anybody in it I’m not sure of.” Monroe said it seemed Riegel may have been in a drunken daze throughout the ordeal: “Listening to him, one was led to believe that if he had been asked to climb the tree he would have done it without question and would have adjusted the noose with the same automatic response. Had he been hypnotized he could not have responded more readily to immediate suggestion of circumstances. Had he not been so frank and honest through it all, one would have called it cold-blooded, so void was it of emotion of any sort.”61
Riegel’s remarkable candor caused Trautmann to warn the witness several times that statements he made could be used against him in court. “Well I don’t care,” Riegel said. “When I got home that night I got to thinking about how I helped kill that fellow who never did anything to me, and who I didn’t even know, and I couldn’t sleep. I want to tell and get it off my mind. I’m ready to take my medicine.”62
The closed inquest, which had caused so much resentment Monday morning, ended up getting such heavy coverage in the newspapers that most observers believed a reporter, or perhaps several, had been able to sneak their way into the ventilation system of city hall and hear all the testimony they wanted.63 Both the St. Louis Star and the Collinsville Herald ran nearly identical accounts of Riegel’s confession.64
As if that were not enough, Riegel gave a full confession to reporter Paul Anderson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Wednesday at city hall before testifying at the inquest. It was essentially the same version that he gave the coroner’s jury, but speaking to the reporter Riegel showed more bravado and levity. His army experience had made him a leader, he believed: “The crowd kind of made me the big man in it and I was kind of swelled up about that.” Riegel said Prager would not have been harmed if he had been found locked in a cell, stating, “It made us sore that the police had sneaked him away.” He also implicated others: “I know lots of them that did pull [on the rope] and I will give their names to the Coroner. If I’ve done any wrong I am willing to take my punishment. If they convict me and send me up it will be alright, but I would rather serve my term in the Army.”65 Riegel’s first confession to Anderson was on the street in the Post’s city and final editions not long after he had concluded his late afternoon session with the coroner’s jury.
“If I had not been drunk, I would not have done what I did. Many of the other men in the mob were drunk too. I do not believe any sober men helped lynch Prager, but many young boys joined in who were not drunk. They got into the crowd and yelled and helped for the fun of the thing. The police could have stopped us if they would have wanted to,” Riegel told Anderson in his first confession.66
It was a great scoop for Anderson, already an experienced and respected reporter at age twenty-four. Distinguished and fearless, his reporting of the East St. Louis riots had earned acclaim from a U.S. House committee that investigated the incident. With neat, center-parted hair and a well-trimmed pyramidal mustache, he would have fit as well in a corporate boardroom or society function as he had in the cramped entryway where he interviewed the lynch-mob leader. A decade later he would win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting work.
After Riegel testified to the coroner’s jury, his embittered wife came looking for him at the police station, hoping to find her estranged husband in jail. Told that he was not under arrest, at least not yet, she went to Union Shoe Repair and gloated over his legal predicament. Riegel tried to placate her and asked her to live with him again, but Emma Riegel would have none of it. “I hope the —— hangs,” she said to others in the shop. “If he doesn’t, I’ll hang him myself.” Since her husband left several months ago, she had worked as a waitress in St. Louis.67 The two had married three years prior, she at sixteen and he at twenty-four; now their two-year-old son was being raised by her mother.
Wesley Beaver, William Brockmeier, Richard Dukes, Enid Elmore, and other suspected mob members and witnesses also testified Wednesday about their actions at city hall; all denied being at the lynching scene. Some other witnesses were less open, denying seeing anyone or that they were anywhere near the mob, city hall, or the lynching scene. Their inability or unwillingness to provide information, although they had been identified by others as being present, made them appear “absolutely ridiculous” to the coroner’s jury, Monroe said. “They would have made a far better impression had they admitted having some little part to do in the mob, but either their judgement or their advice had been too bad for that. Other witnesses tore their attempts at alibis to shreds.”68
Miner’s union state board member Mose Johnson testified before the jury that Prager was disloyal and a spy, but he was unable to produce any evidence to back up his claim. He gave the jury a written statement from the mine manager accusing Prager of asking suspicious questions. He also provided two bulletins sent from the Department of Labor in 1917 warning to be on the lookout for spies. “One man in a mine can kill 600,” Johnson said. “That’s why the miner is afraid of spies.” For all the rumors and allegations that miners had spread about Prager, Johnson could produce no proof that he had done anything illegal or planned to in the future. Nevertheless, Johnson said he was convinced the victim was disloyal.69
The inquest was not without its lighter moments. Frank Hogge testified that he was so intoxicated when the bars closed he could remember little of who or what he saw. He thought the mayor was speaking at some form of political rally in front of city hall that Thursday night. “You know there’s always somebody cutting up around Collinsville with some foolishness,” Hogge said. Gus Palecek spoke of Wesley Beaver being in the mob. He was asked if the happy-go-lucky porter still worked at Fulton’s Y Saloon. “They fired him Sunday,” Palecek said, “but they do that every week.” Beaver testified as to his near blindness. He said he could play cards only by holding them to his face. Someone asked if he played pinochle. “No, no, not pinochle,” Beaver said, smiling and shaking his head.70
By Thursday afternoon the coroner’s jury had heard enough. It deliberated for four hours before deciding that five men should be held over for the grand jury on the charge of murder. They were:
Joe Riegel, twenty-eight, for actions with the mob at city hall, including removing Prager from the building, and for his leadership at the lynching scene;
Wesley Beaver, twenty-six, for actions with the mob at city hall, including removing Prager from the building;
Richard Dukes, twenty-two, for actions with the mob at city hall;
William Brockmeier, forty-one, for actions with the mob at city hall; and
Enid Elmore, twenty-one, for actions with the mob at city hall.
Lowe issued the arrest warrants, and two sheriff’s deputies rounded up the men and took them to the county jail. Beaver was easy to find, as he had been detained in the police chief’s office most of the day. Riegel likewise hung around city hall all day of his own volition, ready to be arrested. Facing a capital murder charge, they would all be held without bond.71
The coroner’s jury had interviewed thirty-three witnesses and was pleased with what it had learned about the lynching, despite the lack of cooperation from a handful. The jurors had heard the names of forty other people involved in the crime and believed it possible that the grand jury would indict another two dozen or more. As a coroner’s jury, it only had the authority to approve warrants for murder. Charges related to mob activity would have to come from the grand jury. Following advice from prosecutors, the jurors applied Illinois’s conspiracy statute, which stated that all participants in the mob could be found guilty of murder, regardless of whether they had assisted in the actual lynching.72
At the same hour Riegel was baring his soul at the inquest, Prager’s funeral service was conducted before an overflow crowd at the William Schumacher Undertaking Company, not far from Prager’s old St. Louis neighborhood. Floral arrangements covered the room. Just before the casket was closed, Odd Fellows officers from Harmonie Lodge 353 pinned a small flag on the breast of his jacket, as Prager had requested.73 The casket was then covered with the Stars and Stripes. The service was described as “probably the strangest ever held in St. Louis,” for Prager was the first German immigrant to be killed in such a manner.
Rev. W. S. Simon delivered a sermon that brought tears to the eyes of most of those in the parlor. “When Prager’s mother will be told of the unlawful death of her son in this land of the free, what do you think will be her feelings? It is true that she is a German and lives in Germany, but whether she is a German, English or French, what of her mother’s heart? Will it not break? Has her son received justice?” The Jesus Evangelical Church minister criticized mob action in the United States: “The spirit which resulted in the death of Prager is as far from democracy as is the Kaiser’s government. It is destructive and not the true spirit of American government. That was a great victory for Germany. It was cruel and barbaric.”74 Prager was buried among other German immigrants in St. Matthew Cemetery in a remote plot purchased by the Odd Fellows, appropriately near St. Louis’s Dutchtown South neighborhood, two miles west of the Mississippi River.
The $197 bill for the funeral would eventually be paid by the State of Illinois, “believing that the authorities of the state in which Prager was lynched would consider it their moral obligation to give him proper burial at their own expense.” Previously the Swedish ambassador had offered to pay reasonable charges, perhaps acting on behalf of the German government, but the state declined the offer.75
Miners Local 1802 wasted no time in having a judicial proceeding of its own, dealing with the immigrant miners who had vouched for Prager’s experience. Union leaders investigated and found nothing to indicate that Prager had ever been a member of any UMW local and had only twenty-eight days’ experience working in a mine, all of that as a laborer at Donk Mine No. 2. The local conducted a trial April 14 for the three members who had signed as references for Prager. Joseph Robino, Paul Schrieber, and John Tonso were all found guilty and fined $50, the maximum penalty short of expulsion from the union—and the ultimate loss of their jobs.76
When the Madison County Grand Jury began hearing witnesses in the Prager case four days later, the proceedings at the courthouse in Edwardsville were actually confidential, as the law intended. As Assistant Attorney General Trautmann and State’s Attorney Streuber brought witnesses before the fifteen-man panel, each from a different township in the county, the grand jury developed its own understanding of what happened. Only one of the incarcerated men would be among the thirty-seven witnesses, but twelve of the witnesses had appeared before the coroner’s jury. On the first day of the grand jury session, some of the called witnesses went to visit the men in the county jail and reported them to be “cheerful and fairly content.”77 Based on what he had heard from Trautmann, Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage was confident of successful prosecution. The case was not about any pro-German sympathies, Brundage said, but concerned a union dispute at the mine. “Absolutely nothing was developed by the investigation to show that Prager was in any way unpatriotic,” the attorney general said. “I am certain of the indictments and I am certain we will obtain convictions.”78
Late in the afternoon of April 25, the grand jury returned indictments for murder against twelve men, including the five already in custody.79 Sheriff’s deputies Vernon Coons and Hannah Jokerst brought the arrest warrants to Collinsville just before noon the following day, when the city was again in the midst of whipping itself into another patriotic frenzy, this time in support of the third Liberty Bond sale. The parade had been planned for the week prior but was postponed due to almost continual rainy conditions. A half-day holiday had been declared, and all businesses, schools, and industries were closed.80 It was reported as the city’s largest parade ever. With seemingly every business, union, school, and group in the parade, more than 6,000 marched, with just 1,000 watching on the sidewalks. An estimated 2,500 of the marchers were miners. Red Cross workers wore nurse uniforms, while knitting-mill employees wore flag helmets. Many of the schoolchildren wore Uncle Sam or nurse costumes, and all of them sang patriotic songs. Nearly everyone waved a flag; stores were sold out of flags and red, white, and blue bunting.
Just before the parade stepped off at 2:15 p.m., the city’s new service flag was raised over Main and Center Streets, the same intersection that twenty-three days prior had been filled with the drunken, singing mob that would take Robert Prager from city hall. On this afternoon the service flag would be raised with 277 stars for each Collinsville man serving his country and 3 circled stars for the men who had died thus far from disease.81 At the intersection three cheers were proposed for the boys serving their country, then for President Wilson, and then for America, with the crowd roaring each time. After the parade people jammed into every available seat at the Orpheum for patriotic speeches and music.
As the festivities died down, deputies started looking for the other seven indicted men. They were:
Charles Cranmer, twenty, for actions at the lynching scene;
James DeMatties, eighteen, for actions at the lynching scene;
Frank Flannery, nineteen, for actions at the lynching scene;
Calvin Gilmore, forty-four, for being part of the mob on the St. Louis Road;
John Hallworth, forty-three, for being with the group of men who removed Prager from his home on Vandalia Street;
Cecil Larremore, seventeen, for actions at the lynching scene; and
George Davis, a man who would never be further identified or even located, for that matter.
None of the indictments was as surprising to the community as Hallworth’s. He was mature and level headed and had walked home along St. Louis Road with Mose Johnson well before Prager was taken from city hall. Hallworth had watched from across the street when Prager was called from his home, but he later encouraged the mob to turn him over to police. Hallworth was a good citizen, active in the Liberty Bond Drives, and by some accounts held the local record for getting the most people to join the Red Cross.82 Hallworth turned himself in at city hall after first confirming the charge by calling Chief Staten.
Taken in their totality, the indictments seemed scattershot. The actions of Beaver and Riegel at city hall were significant, but why were Brockmeier, Dukes, and Elmore the only men charged from a mob of three hundred? Why were Riegel, Cranmer, and Larremore the only men indicted of the perhaps two dozen or more who had their hands on Prager—and the rope—at the hanging tree? Why was Hallworth the only one indicted of dozens who went to the front of Prager’s home, although he reportedly stood on the sidewalk across the street and watched? How were the others involved at all?
The indicted men were first brought to the police station and then taken en masse to Edwardsville. Families came to see them, bringing food and cigarettes. Patrick Flannery, a miner, went into Chief Staten’s office to see his son, Frank. “What is the charge against you son?” he asked. Told it was murder, Flannery looked at his son and said, “That is the worst charge against the law, but I want you to tell the truth. If you lie you have to shift, and maybe you can’t. I want you to tell the truth, even if it hurts me.” The ever-present Mose Johnson was there too, surprised about the charges. Seven of those indicted were coal miners or had previously worked the mines. “This is not a miner’s fight, but I will help give them bond,” Johnson said. “I know by the Eternal Gods that one fellow is not guilty. I went home with him.” But as with the others charged with murder, there would be no bond for any of the men. Defendant George Davis was not located that day and would remain at large until charges against him were eventually dismissed.83
Five of the eleven arrested men were married. Elmore had a wife and a young child, as did Riegel. Brockmeier and Gilmore had wives and four children each. Including Hallworth’s wife and five children, the jailed men would leave behind twenty dependents, at least temporarily.
The grand jury indicted no one for mob violence, although an Illinois statute provided broad powers for dealing with such assemblies in 1918.84 When five or more people assembled with the intent to form a mob bent on doing serious injury, the law set a fine of up to $1,000 and one year in jail upon conviction. The same statute allowed police to justifiably kill or injure even those in a small crowd if it failed to disperse upon command. The governor was authorized to immediately remove from office any county sheriff who allowed a mob to take a prisoner from custody and subsequently be lynched, but there was as yet no provision for removal of a city police chief.
The grand jury also indicted the four Collinsville police officers working that night for omission of duty and nonfeasance. The officers were accused of failing to stop or disperse the mob or make arrests, although they had seen Prager assaulted. Nor did the officers request or command any assistance in an effort to control the mob.85 One of the officers, John Tobnick, had resigned and was working one of his last shifts as a police officer the night of the lynching. Not surprisingly Tobnick would become a miner. Fred Frost, Martin Futcheck, Harry Stephens, and Tobnick were each required to post $1,200 bond but were not jailed. The charge against the police officers carried a maximum fine of $10,000 and removal from office.
Chief Staten defended his officers’ actions and doubted they would be convicted. Staten said he felt much of the criticism directed at Collinsville officials and officers was done to encourage officers elsewhere to suppress violence in their own jurisdictions.86 The officers were allowed to work while on bond because Mayor Siegel felt that to remove the officers while charged would be tantamount to agreeing that they were guilty.87
The eleven men charged with murder were arraigned by Judge John Gilham on May 2, and all pleaded not guilty. As they had been since their arrest, the men were confident and cheerful.88 They talked and joked with a newspaper reporter while waiting to be returned to jail.
Governor Lowden cited the Collinsville affair in continuing his pressure on federal officials to provide more investigators. When the federal agent finally arrived in late April to help state investigators, it was claimed that Lowden had assembled in Illinois “one of the most far-reaching intelligence and espionage organizations to beat down sedition and prevent mob assaults upon pacifists, pro-Germans and Bolsheviks.”89