Those were the sweetless, wheatless, meatless, heatless, and perfectly brainless days when your fathers broke Beethoven’s records, boycotted Wagner’s music, burned German books, painted German Lutheran churches and Goethe’s monument in Chicago the color of Shell filling stations today; strung up a Mennonite preacher in Collinsville, Oklahoma, by his neck until he fainted, repeated the process until he fainted again, and graciously relented; hanged another to the limb of a tree in Collinsville, Illinois, until he was dead.
—Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken
June 3, 1918, was more sobering than most Mondays for the people of Madison County. A one-day strike by the interurban workers didn’t help matters. Governor Frank Lowden expressed his disappointment in the Prager trial verdict. “Patriotism was the guise worn by the perpetrators of this crime. The jury seemed to think that it could show its own loyalty by condoning the crime. . . . The result is a lamentable failure of justice,” the governor said. “If juries will not convict in cases like this, the local authorities must prevent them from occurring. If in any community they fail in the discharge of this plain duty, nothing remains but to declare martial law in such community.”1 Lowden was concerned enough about the verdict that he asked his assigned Justice Department Bureau of Investigation agent to return immediately to Springfield, in fear that the acquittals would spur other vigilante activity around the state.2
State’s Attorney Joseph Streuber had decided by Monday morning that he would not prosecute the four policemen. He had seen that county residents were in no mood to convict men in the lynch mob and presumed that the odds of the Collinsville officers being held accountable for their nonfeasance were even worse. He also dropped charges against George Davis, the defendant who had never been located or further implicated.3
Streuber would not criticize the jurors’ decision, although he felt the evidence showed that four defendants had participated in the lynching and the seven others were implicated. “Neither I nor any other person has the right to say that the jury betrayed their oaths. We may differ as to the conclusions they reached,” the state’s attorney said. “I have faith in the loyalty and patriotism of the people of Madison County. I have faith in their obedience to, and respect for, the law.”4
The American criminal justice system still has flaws in the twenty-first century, but it had many more in 1918. Any of a number of courtroom actions in the trial, from the repeated comments in front of the jury questioning Prager’s loyalty to the band playing patriotic music outside the trial, could have been grounds for mistrial in today’s legal system. And prosecutors and defense attorneys alike probably would have sought separate trials for the defendants, improving the chances of at least a few convictions. But none of that would happen during the Prager trial.
Reaction to the verdict generally brought condemnation of the Madison County legal system, scorn that previously had been reserved for the city of Collinsville and the lynch mob. The New York Times said, “The new unwritten law appears to be that any group of men may execute justice, or what they consider justice, in any case growing out of the war.”5
The Chicago Daily Tribune took defense attorneys to task for implying that the legal system had not dealt with a disloyal Prager, so it was appropriate for the mob to act. “The lynching of Prager was reprehensible enough in itself, but the effort to excuse it as an act of ‘popular justice’ is worse.”6
“We must save our own soul as a nation,” the St. Louis Star said. “We cannot let ourselves go in such a way as was done in the Prager outrage and hold up our heads as civilized people. We are battling for right and humanity and should exhibit those qualities ourselves or be open to the charge of hypocrisy. We cannot successfully battle the Hun if we are to become the Hun ourselves.”7
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch took note of the posttrial finger-pointing: “It does not matter how the blame is distributed for the failure of justice in the Collinsville lynching case. There is enough to go around.” It called out one defense ploy in particular. “Everyone who retains a sense of decency deplores the base use which the defendants and their attorneys made of ‘patriotism’ in the trial of the case. . . . There remains the outstanding shameful fact that a man was murdered in Collinsville, without pretense of concealment, by men who are known, and they have not been punished and there is no prospect that they will be. Law has fallen down in Collinsville.”8
“Justice has been defeated. Democracy was put on trial in the great State of Illinois and lost its case; democracy has been condemned, convicted and sentenced,” said the St. Louis Labor newspaper. “Mob rule, lynch law, and defiance of law, order and justice have been sanctioned.”9
Editors in the smaller communities near Collinsville gave mixed reviews, most attacking the jury decision. “From the verdict of the jury it is evident that Prager committed suicide, as he was found hanging from a tree and no one seems to have had any part therein,” said the Edwardsville Democrat.10
The Highland Leader noted the difficulty of obtaining convictions in lynching cases and said, “The prosecutors did their duty and have no occasion to be chagrined at the result. Nor should the learned counsel for the defense get chesty; the eleven lynchers would have been acquitted even if they had relied on the court to appoint their attorney. The lesson the whole thing teaches is that for the time-being, disloyalty classes with such crimes as rape, incest and horse stealing and that a fellow had better let his light so shine that he can’t even be suspicioned of any such guilt.”11
Again the most cutting insights may have been provided by Fred Kern, the feisty editor of the Belleville News-Democrat. “The defense consumed its time in condoning the crime, and lifting the lynching aloft into the ethereal realm of the performance of important public duty,” Kern said. “The verdict is at variance with the law and the evidence and the instructions of the judge. It is fair warning however, to all people who have a taint of pro-Germanism in their souls, to put the soft pedal on, or to lie low or, better yet, to get right. . . . The lynchers were given a clean bill of health at Edwardsville and may now go out and lynch some more.”12
A. W. Schimpff, the publisher of the Advertiser, called the verdict an “immense relief” in his column and pointed out that the size of the mob made it difficult to single out the actions of any one man. Schimpff called the incident “regrettable” but laid much of the blame on Prager, given his foolish and pro-German views. He also dredged up Prager’s prison time and said he was a “white slaver.” Schimpff said the lynching had made Americans aware of the dangers of taking the law into their own hands. “Too bad that Collinsville happened to be the place where the crisis should be reached, but it is remarkable that more cases of the kind did not take place in this land.”13
“His unfortunate fate should be and has been a warning to others who are even more rabid in their disloyalty,” Schimpff said. “Previous to the Prager case there were a number of pro-Germans in this City, who on all occasions indicated their hatred for this country and their affection or fear of the Beast of Berlin by open expressions of approval of the most dastardly acts of Prussianism. . . . But there is no more of that in Collinsville, and there is but little of it in surrounding communities. Perhaps after all there are two views of the matter and history will not be so burdened with revenge as to bear too harshly on those who took part.”14
Schimpff would save his strongest criticism for J. O. Monroe, the young man who had purchased the Collinsville Herald less than a year before and greatly improved the newspaper. Monroe took the newsman’s role seriously and aggressively covered the Prager affair with extra editions and full-page stories. Schimpff, a former miner, cowered more at pressure from union men and families and gave the trial much less play in his newspaper. Without naming Monroe or the Herald, he slammed the competition’s prolific coverage of the whole affair, comparing its purveyors to the biblical Pharisees.
They bawled for revenge and would have continued a condition that would have kept the community in turmoil. The wisest course was to allow the matter to drop into obscurity as soon as possible. Prager was hanged and perhaps met his just desserts. Nothing was to be gained by an effort to railroad another dozen men to the gallows. Nothing was to be gained by raising a hue and cry and by sensational publicity to keep stirring the pot of public feeling.
There has been published in connection with the case column after column of rot that was the veriest bumcombe. Callow youths in the newspaper game have seen a chance for personal gain in the event, and the nimble nickel has been sought with yellow extras. Not to be wondered at when it came from the metropolitan papers, which are absolutely callous of feeling when gain is in sight, but a bird that will befoul its own nest is rather a despicable vulture. . . . They have lost the respect and confidence of the public. They have indulged in a wild orgy of sensationalism and the fiddler must be settled with.15
In his column after the trial, Monroe defended the Herald’s coverage, saying that most of the defendants were interested in the news and were supplied copies of the Herald by friends and relatives. The mother of Charles Cranmer, ill in bed, sent for extra editions of the Herald each time they were printed, Monroe said. “Publicity never hurts an honest or innocent man, as is proved by the result of the Prager trial. It is only the guilty who have anything to fear from publicity.”16
The weekly Herald had printed four extras on days when there was testimony and argument in the trial, providing perhaps ten times more coverage than the Advertiser. If Monroe was perhaps a little verbose in his reporting, Schimpff and the Advertiser underreported and minimized the story of international interest playing out in their own backyard. But at twenty-seven Monroe was already a veteran newsman, having worked at United Press, the forerunner of United Press International, in Springfield and the newspaper in Jacksonville, Illinois. When he had bought the Herald from two Collinsville businessmen thirteen months earlier, circulation was just over 400. A year later his weekly circulation was 1,300.17
In his column Monroe pointed out weaknesses in the state’s case and noted the common feeling in the community that most of the accused were but witnesses to the crime. Having sat on the coroner’s jury, Monroe said most of the charges were based on Riegel’s confession. He too hammered the point of Prager being immoral and disloyal, as if these alleged defects were both fact more than hopeful imagination.
Collinsville was in a hurry to put the story behind it, to dismiss a wretched night as if it had never happened. And with no relatives or friends walking city streets, Robert Prager had little to prompt any remembrance of him. Monroe related a conversation that was a harbinger of the city’s attitude about the lynching for generations to come. After reading a bulletin in front of the Herald office that charges had been dismissed against the four police officers, a resident told Monroe: “It’s all over now, let’s forget it.”18 Then the community did just that.
Many of Collinsville’s residents of German lineage were appalled and frightened by what had happened, but they would not publicly speak of it. Nor would the businessmen who depended on the miners and union men as customers. Those who had privately questioned America’s need to enter the war, whether they were Socialists or just leery of industrial profiteers, also had no choice but to remain silent and let the matter drop. And it certainly wasn’t the proudest moment for the policemen and their families.
Naturally, those with family or friends who had been acquitted also wanted the matter to fade away. As with any other wayward relative or ignominious family event, it would not be discussed, even at the household dinner table.
Those scores of men and boys who had some hand in the affair but were never charged also wanted it forgotten. It was enough just being implicated in the whole mess by whisper and innuendo. That quiet purgatory extended to some young boys, out too late to be up to any good, who tagged along with the mob. They were boys perhaps too young to have a full grasp of what they were doing—yet old enough to grasp the rope and help raise Robert Prager from the ground. The presence of the young boys in the mob had been cited by too many witnesses to ignore. They would live to carry the shame much longer than the old men.
Regret would also burden the men with the mob who knew better, men who could not take their eyes away but failed to utter one word in protest or raise one finger to stop it. Voltaire said, “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do,” and the witnesses too had no desire to dredge up memories of the night when they could have done more.
A U.S. assistant attorney general from the War Emergency Division on April 18 sent Attorney General Thomas Gregory a memo urging the White House make a statement “for the purpose of reassuring the people, quieting their apprehensions, and preventing so far as possible the spread of mob violence, evidence of which is now appearing in all parts of the country.”19 Still Wilson remained quiet on the subject, only saying on April 22 that he was “very deeply concerned” about the treatment of people with different opinions.20
Not until July 26, nearly four months after the hanging of Robert Prager, would the president finally speak out about mob action in the United States and subsequent lynchings.21 Some believed the timing of Wilson’s proclamation was driven by Germany’s use of the Prager lynching for propaganda purposes in Mexico, South America, and Europe. But the president’s timing was probably motivated by a significant increase in the lynching deaths of blacks in southern states; there had been at least thirty just since Prager’s lynching. Recent incidents included the late May lynching of eleven blacks in Georgia, allegedly in retaliation for the slaying of a white farmer, and the June lynching of a black woman and her six children in Texas to avenge the reported killing of another white man.22 In his statement Wilson did not name Collinsville or Prager, or any racial tumult, but spoke solely about the scourge of lynching:
There have been many lynchings, and every one of them has been a blow at the heart of ordered law and humane justice. No man who loves America . . . can justify mob action while the courts of justice are open and the governments of the States and the Nation are able to do their duty. . . . Germany has outlawed herself among the nations because she has disregarded the sacred obligations of law and made lynchers of her armies. Lynchers emulate her disgraceful example. . . . How shall we commend democracy to the acceptance of other peoples if we disgrace our own by proving that it is, after all, no protection to the weak?23
Wilson further urged governors, law enforcement officers, and citizens to end “this disgraceful evil,” stating, “It cannot live where the community does not countenance it.”24
The German press took Wilson to task for what it called his timid—and delayed—reaction to the Prager lynching. “Not a man less will be lynched because Wilson has spoken and, as was the case before, not a lyncher will be sentenced by any court of law. Such a democracy is neither internally sound nor morally strong,” said a Cologne newspaper.25 A Munich newspaper referred to the criminal proceeding as a “mock trial.”26
The lynching was apparently not reported in German newspapers until May. When it was, one editor attacked the hypocrisy of “the absolutely most free state of the earth.” The Hannover newspaper criticized the American government, which allowed the seemingly continual lynchings of blacks, and said, “It is not surprising that a sacrifice has already been made to the rough fury of the illiterate and irritated mob.” For all the statements about American refinement and keeping the world safe for democracy, the newspaper said, the United States had failed in both respects. “However difficult it may be for German good nature, we must accustom ourselves to the thought that the Yankee has still an enormous portion of roughness, cruelty and dissoluteness in his blood, which he inherited from the old days, and that a nation which will submit the stain of Collinsville to remain cannot be considered as a nation of culture until the crime has been made good.”27 The Cologne newspaper said that Wilson’s comments had been but “crocodile tears” and were driven only by the fear of Germany capitalizing on the lynchings.28
It would be mid-June before the German government filed an official complaint about the lynching. Through the Swiss legation, the German government asked for safeguards against similar actions against any German citizens in the States. The Germans contended that the U.S. government was responsible because it “permitted German hatred to be fanned among the American people.”29 It disagreed with the notion that the federal government could not be held accountable for the action, or lack thereof, in state courts.
At no point would President Wilson or his wartime propaganda chief, George Creel of the Committee on Public Information, accept any responsibility for the hysteria they had helped cultivate in 1917 and 1918. They had condemned vigilante action but never seemed to make any connection of it with their federal propaganda programs and the paranoia, persecution, and violence they helped propagate in communities across the nation. Congress, never a fan of Creel’s operation, unceremoniously disbanded the CPI on June 30, 1919, without so much as funding the proper closure of the agency.30
For all the hysteria foisted on the naive American populace in 1917 and 1918, no bona fide spies or saboteurs would be convicted under the Espionage Act during U.S. involvement in World War I. But the law did prove a valuable weapon for suppressing the opinions of those who may have opposed the war for philosophical, political, or religious reasons. By the end of the war, there were about 6,300 warranted arrests, of whom some 2,300 found themselves in jail.31 They were mostly Socialists and Wobblies, many of whom would have their property permanently taken by the government. The Espionage Act remains federal law, but the Sedition Act amendment, which so severely stifled American civil liberties, was repealed in 1921.
Collinsville’s tolerance for dissenting opinion didn’t improve after the lynching; perhaps it got worse. Pastor P. G. Spangler, who had seen Prager from the interurban car the night he was lynched, came under fire for initially not allowing Liberty Stamp representatives to speak during his First Baptist Church service. It didn’t help that he had objected to military service and offered only to serve in the Salvation Army or the YMCA.32 He was interviewed by members of the local state council of defense and admitted he may have been “bull-headed,” but he continued to hold the belief, like many men of the cloth, that any war was not God’s will.33
Spangler’s troubles weren’t nearly as bad as those of John Szillat. He was the city’s First Ward alderman and ran a saloon on East Main Street. Szillat was arrested by federal agents and charged with disloyalty in late July after apparently being reported by a neighbor or customer as saying something to the effect of: “This is a rich man’s war. If you live in Germany you fight for the Kaiser. If you live in America you have to fight for Wall Street.”34 He also was alleged to have said that America had no business getting into the war, in spite of the Lusitania sinking. The U.S. attorney’s office in Springfield said that Szillat’s saloon was a “clearing house for Socialist propaganda of the lowest type.”35
Szillat was German by birth, but the fifty-one-year-old had become a naturalized citizen twenty-eight years earlier. When he was arrested, Szillat claimed to be Lithuanian. He was allowed bond and denied the charges, promising to resign as alderman if he was convicted. J. O. Monroe of the Herald said that he would not presume Szillat guilty but criticized the continuing unpatriotic talk in the community:
The surprising thing, it strikes us, is not that there should be here and there a person who cherishes love for German brutality, for some folks are born brutes, but what surprises us is that in this community, where one man was hung on mere suspicion of pro-Germanism, is any man would be lacking in ordinary prudence and common sense as to continue mouthing defense of Germany. It would seem to us that any man with an ounce of sense would know by this time that not only will the government arrest, convict and punish traitors but that the community itself will not tolerate any propaganda. Any man who continues to prate the arguments, which were permissible two or three years ago, can only be taken for a loose-lipped ignoramus, an ordinary damphool.36
The final disposition of the Szillat case is unknown, but most such charges ended up being nolle prosequi, with the defendant unmistakably getting the message that friends and neighbors and the federal government were watching and listening closely.
*
Factory whistles blowing in St. Louis just before 3:00 a.m. were the first indication that there was good news, that the armistice had finally been signed on November 11, 1918. As the noise drifted into Collinsville, people knew it was cause for celebration. As residents woke from their sleep, they went outside with every possible noisemaker, from guns to pots and pans.37 Two men walked about uptown, blasting their coronets as they went. C. H. Dorris made his walk to Webster School to ring the bell. Neither the Chester Knitting Mills nor any of the mines would operate that day, for everyone believed the eleventh-hour agreement worthy of the day off.
It would be difficult to assess how many Americans in 1917 and 1918 truly favored U.S. involvement in the Great War. They undoubtedly supported their soldiers who were being sent abroad. But superpatriotism and vigilante action prevented most people from openly speaking their opinions on overall American involvement—particularly in places like Collinsville, where a mob had murdered a man merely upon rumor and gotten away with it. Open support and public flag-waving didn’t necessarily mean that a person genuinely agreed with the nation’s involvement. The war’s unpopularity was widely believed to be the cause of Republicans winning most elected offices in Madison County and Illinois in the November 1918 elections.38 At the national level, Woodrow Wilson’s Democrats would lose majority control in the Senate and Republicans would increase their advantage in the House.
Wilson’s unpopularity and his failure to involve Republicans in peace negotiations ultimately led to U.S. Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. The United States also did not participate in the new League of Nations. Wilson strongly advocated for the league as key to preventing future international conflict, enough so that the president would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, but the United States would not partake. In the end the league proved nearly impotent in preventing the aggression that led to World War II.
Lingering regret over American entanglement in World War I and resentment over the subsequent bank and industrial profits played a large part in the United States’ isolationist attitude of the 1930s. Twenty years after the war, in 1937, a Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of Americans thought U.S. intervention in the Great War was, in fact, a Great Mistake.39 That sentiment laid the groundwork for just 7 percent of Americans wanting the nation to get involved militarily in 1940, even after Germany’s invasion of France, when Adolph Hitler’s intentions were unmistakably clear.40
Collinsville’s financial support of the Great War improved with the third and fourth Liberty Bond drives. But the intimidating atmosphere in the city no doubt drove up sales to those who feared being called pro-German; such people may have effectively bought the bonds merely as a form of protection. In that respect how much of the community genuinely supported the war effort cannot be determined. After failing to meet its quota for the first two drives, the city more than doubled its expected sales on the third bond drive, which coincidently began the day after the Prager lynching and topped $340,000.41 It helped too when the miners’ unions got more involved after the first two bond drives.
Collinsville ended up 20 percent above quota on the fourth bond sale that closed in October 1918, but when sales stalled the local Liberty Bond Committee briefly considered listing in the newspaper all those who had purchased bonds.42 A banner ad on the front page of the Herald warned, “If you haven’t bought or if you bought so little that you’ll be ashamed to have the public know about it, you have until Saturday night to redeem yourself.”43 The list would have given a desirable pat on the back to those who had stepped up, but it also could have provided a literal punch list for those in the community bent on harassing suspected pro-Germans or slackers. As it appeared the committee would meet quota late in the drive, it mercifully backed off the idea of publishing any names.
By the time of the 1919 Victory Bond drive to pay off the remaining war debt, Collinsville had once again lost interest, or the suspected pro-Germans no longer felt the need for protection. Faced with a quota of $325,000, individual buyers in the community stepped up for only $100,000 worth of bonds. The city met quota only after the two local banks bought the remaining $225,000 worth.44
Hundreds of Collinsville men were drafted into service for the Great War. By August of 1918, the troop trains would also include three of the acquitted defendants, Richard Dukes Jr., Enid Elmore, and Joe Riegel. Madison County would end up registering over 29,000 for the draft, more than 3,700 of whom were inducted and accepted into service.45 An additional 453 men, and one woman, signed up for the navy, which was all volunteer at the time.46 Collinsville ended up sending about 700 drafted and enlisted men to fight in World War I.47 Illinois contributed more than 300,000 of the total 4.7 million enlisted and drafted men who served.48
The United States lost over 116,000 men in the Great War, but less than half of those were battle deaths.49 Still, critics noted the high number of combat losses, although whole American armies were engaged in battle for only six months. Veterans’ officials had by 1930 raised the toll to 460,000, citing later disease and injury deaths, including those caused by chemical warfare.50
The Collinsville community would not grieve its first battlefield death until Corporal August Karwelat Jr., twenty-four, died July 18, 1918, in the Second Battle of the Marne in France.51 That battle was one of the final actions in the German spring offensive determined to take advantage before American men and matèriel flooded European battlefields. A few weeks later, the first Collinsville man was wounded in battle in France. He was Cecil Johnson, the son of United Mine Workers board member Mose Johnson.52
The Great War claimed the lives of seventeen Collinsville-area men, most dying of pneumonia or influenza.53 Two of the battle deaths occurred in November, just days before the armistice. Three of the soldiers died of influenza in the training camps during one cruel week in October 1918, when seven people back in Collinsville also succumbed to the virus.54 In all, forty-four Collinsville-area deaths would be attributed to influenza from approximately one thousand cases reported.55 The epidemic caused a two-month delay for the grand opening of the magnificent new Miner’s Institute and theater building because authorities correctly prohibited large congregating groups in order to stop the spread of disease. The October 1918 outbreak also claimed Madison County’s young coroner, Roy Lowe, thirty-three, who was believed to have been infected while handling bodies of the deceased.
In the 1919 city elections, Collinsville’s miners tightened their grip on city government by electing James Darmody mayor on the ticket of their newly created Labor Party.56 The new party name was certainly more palatable than Socialist during the Red Scare era, and its miner candidates would also win two of five aldermanic seats. Mayor John Siegel had run for a third two-year term but was easily defeated by Darmody, who had been an officer in two miners’ locals. Also beaten in the election was Alderman Tim Kane, a blacksmith and the only other elected official, besides Siegel, who had stood up and tried desperately to placate the mob one year earlier in front of city hall.
The left-leaning political point of view continued in Collinsville, with Progressive presidential candidate Robert La Follette carrying the township in the 1924 election.57 He garnered just 17 percent of the vote nationally but 51 percent in Collinsville Township, tallying more votes than Democrats and Republicans combined. Incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge won that presidential election handily.
The coal miners in Collinsville, however, would go the way of King Coal and gradually fade from power. The year 1918 was the high-water mark for the coal industry in Illinois, which had over ninety thousand miners. Cleaner-burning natural gas slowly grew in popularity and the soft, high-sulfur coal found in the southern Illinois mines became even less desirable. As St. Louis and its industry grew, the city captured the reputation for having the nation’s filthiest air, and the readily available southern Illinois coal was largely to blame. After another particularly onerous November day of cut-with-a-knife air pollution in 1939—appropriately dubbed Black Tuesday—St. Louis officials banned the use of Illinois coal.58
Even with the wartime coal needs of 1945, Illinois mines produced just sixty-three million tons, about 30 percent less than 1918.59 And the number of miners statewide dropped to about thirty thousand. Increased mechanization of the mines had further reduced the number of miners to about ten thousand by 1960, when the state was still producing forty-five million tons annually.60
The Collinsville mines became more costly to operate after the Great War, as operations extended farther from the main shafts. Just one of the big mines was operating in Collinsville by 1937, employing 378 men.61 Seven smaller co-op mines operated with 317 men, but the total output was a fraction of what it had been. When Collinsville’s last coal mine closed in 1964, it was also the last one operating in Madison County. There are few visible reminders today of Collinsville’s coal mining past . . . a barren lot here, a sealed air shaft there, a few vacant grassy areas remediated to stop acid mine drainage. A few areas have been affected by mine subsidence, causing foundation damage to buildings constructed over abandoned coal seams.
But then the mines had always been a blessing, and a curse, for Collinsville. When the shafts were fully operating, primarily in winter, they produced excellent wages. But when the mines were idle, the miners had little money left to spend, and the economic impact rippled throughout the city.62
As local coal production faded, so did the repressive grip of the coal miner’s unions in the Collinsville area. The United Mine Workers of America solidified its power base nationally after the election of John L. Lewis as president in 1920, and the southern Illinois miners’ penchant for administering their own justice would play out to the extreme when twenty strikebreakers and three union men were killed in the Herrin Massacre in 1922. But the UMW fell into disfavor with Illinois miners because of wage concessions, and Collinsville’s locals affiliated with the upstart Progressive Miners of America in 1932. Violence continued elsewhere in Illinois while the two rival unions battled for control, but the Collinsville area miners’ would be less and less a factor in that struggle.
Blacks were never able to secure the better-paying jobs as coal miners in the Collinsville area, though they continued to constitute a great part of the workforce at the St. Louis Smelting and Refining plant.63 The Lead Works became less profitable when the lead mines in St. Francis, Missouri, were exhausted and it had to buy ore on the open market. When workers once again tried to organize for higher wages and shorter hours, this time as the Progressive Lead Workers in November 1933, the plant was closed for good.64 Critical production equipment was shipped off to a facility in South America. The stately manager’s homes still remain on what was once Cuba Lane. And some seventy years after the smelter’s closing, the EPA ordered the replacement of grass and topsoil in a subdivision that had been built over the site, noting still unacceptably high levels of lead in the ground.
Collinsville was not unlike most towns across the United States during the Great War; all were fed a steady diet of government propaganda and fearmongering. What set it apart was its high percentage of immigrants and the incessant bullying by its coal miners’ unions. Fused with patriotic paranoia, they brought out the worst in Collinsville, making it the only American town during World War I where a German immigrant died at the end of a lynching rope. Across the nation other voluntary associations served in authority roles similar to those of the coal miners in Collinsville, but nowhere else were the results so tragic. “The American home front was not a lawless frontier, a police state or a great big meeting of the Elks Club,” one Great War historian wrote. “But it looked a little like all of these.”65
With the perceived need to involve ordinary citizens in keeping the nation secure, perhaps the murder was inevitable. “War always degrades the human mind, especially the mind of the civilian,” School Superintendent C. H. Dorris said prophetically, just weeks before the lynching. “The tendency is not so evident with those who do the actual fighting. Soldiers usually speak generously of their foes and quickly forgive those with whom they have measured swords. Not so with those who stay at home. We are apt to be blinded with intolerance and hate.”66
*
Robert Prager was buried in a remote location at St. Matthew Cemetery in St. Louis just after the lynching, but in October 1919 his remains were moved to a better grave site by the same Odd Fellows Lodge that had claimed his body. Harmonie Lodge 353 invited Collinsville Odd Fellows Lodge 43 to attend the service some eighteen months after the lynching. Hundreds gathered as lodge members moved the remains closer to the cemetery entrance, where a fine monument had been erected. “The American flag was insulted and soiled by the men who pretended to be Americans,” one speaker said at services that day. “There must have been something wrong with the minds of the people to have allowed such a disgrace.”67
If no one else cared to remember, the Odd Fellows of St. Louis would not forget Robert Prager. Harmonie Lodge 353 was long gone in 2006, but a member of Lodge 5, also of St. Louis, took note when Prager’s old gravestone had become worn and faded after eighty-seven years, and the group replaced it with a new marker. It had the same inscription as the old monument, his fate simply noted as “The Victim of a Mob.”68
Madison County heard from Prager’s father, Karl Heinrich Prager, in a lawsuit filed in 1923 claiming that Robert Prager was his only means of support and asking the county for compensation. The suit was based on a 1918 Illinois Statute that provided for payment of up to $5,000, drawing from the concept of the time that local governments bore some financial responsibility for mob violence. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Springfield but dismissed three years later when the St. Louis attorney representing Karl Prager did not appear in court.69
The old city hall still stands in Collinsville, but Prager’s little shack is long gone, as is the hanging tree, felled in 1962 to clear the way for utility lines. Perhaps appropriately the tree’s approximate location is marked by a sign for the expanded St. John Cemetery.
For generations one of the persistent whispers in Collinsville was that a disproportionate number of the men responsible for the Prager lynching had met their fate violently or prematurely, that they had gotten what was coming to them. It was civic schadenfreude for a shamed community. But investigation doesn’t necessarily bear out the hearsay. Two of the eleven acquitted men died young, but most lived relatively long lives for the era. It could well be that the murmur of the violent, early deaths spoke to the scores of men, and perhaps boys, who had been involved in the lynching affair but were never officially charged or named.
No one knows what drove saloon porter Wesley Beaver, at age twenty-seven, to place a pistol to his right temple and pull the trigger seven months after the trial. He had remained the same happy-go-lucky soul after Prager’s murder and never expressed a word of remorse for his involvement in the affair. The morning of January 11, 1919, he told a businessman, “A lot of people think I’m crazy, but I’ll have a laugh coming someday.”70 He was discovered that evening in the meeting room above Martin Fulton’s Y Saloon with the proprietor’s back-bar .38 revolver at his feet. Beaver was involved in one final clamorous procession, his funeral parade to the cemetery led by the Collinsville Concert Band, as he had requested to his many friends.
Enid Elmore, twenty-one years old at the time of the lynching, died of influenza at age twenty-six in Kentucky, where he worked as a butcher.71 William Brockmeier, forty-one at the time of the lynching, had been an itinerant miner and worked the Collinsville area mines for about two years prior to the lynching. Weeks after the acquittal, he was arrested for failing to pay child support for his family back in Brazil, Indiana, perhaps because he was incarcerated.72 He had moved on to a mine in Danville, Illinois, some eleven years later when he was killed at the age of fifty-three in a mine ceiling collapse.73 He was the only charged man known to have died a traumatic death besides Wesley Beaver.
Most of the acquitted men stayed in the Collinsville area, but only one would stay in coal mining, John Hallworth; the others mostly worked out their lives in other blue-collar jobs. Charles Cranmer ended up selling shoes at a department store. Richard Dukes Jr., the biggest and perhaps toughest of the bunch, rarely worked and ended up battling the bottle more than anything else for the rest of his life. He was arrested in 1931 along with the sister of southern Illinois gangsters Bernie and Carl Shelton following a gangland slaying of three men in East St. Louis but was never charged with any crime.74 For the most part, the men lived quietly, without much talk of the lynching.
The one exception might have been Cecil Larremore, at seventeen years old estranged from his parents and the youngest man charged in the case. He remained very much in the public eye because he and his wife ran a series of restaurants and bars in the uptown area. He was a pleasant and popular man, apparently well liked in the community. Larremore ran for office in a Collinsville Township election once and later worked for the City of Collinsville as parks supervisor. Still, there were those who would not eat in his restaurants because of his involvement in the lynching. Some reported that Larremore was unrepentant about the Prager affair when the matter happened to come up.
A community leader in Collinsville, Bill Jokerst, had adopted the habit in the 1980s of speaking to some Collinsville High School history classes about the Prager lynching.75 He told the story much as it had been told to him sitting on his father’s knee as a young boy. But sharing that particular story didn’t sit well with one of Larremore’s descendants, who once called and admonished Jokerst for bringing up the topic some seventy years later. It was something that shouldn’t be discussed, she said. Collinsville High School’s American history teachers now lecture on the Prager incident in their classes each year.
The leader of the lynching effort, Joe Riegel, joined the army for two years on July 31, 1918. He was trained, but the armistice would be signed before he could be shipped out, and he was discharged on December 7, 1918. Riegel was still wearing his army uniform December 18 when he appeared before a clerk in Collinsville to get a marriage license with Ruth Kolb of East St. Louis, never mind the fact that he was still married to his first wife, Emma. The next day the eighteen-year-old Kolb returned the license after she learned more of the history of her betrothed, who was ten years her senior. Riegel explained the matter to a newspaper reporter simply as a joke.76
Nine months later Riegel signed up for another one-year army stint and ended up extending it another three years when he was assigned to duty in Koblenz, Germany.77 He was discharged September 1, 1923, at Camp Vail, New Jersey. Despite his total of seven years and four months served in the army, he would never be promoted above the rank of private.
There is no known record that Riegel ever ventured as far west as Collinsville again after his discharge from the army. By 1926 he had apparently settled down and married a woman in Cleveland, Ohio, and helped in raising her three children.78 He died there in 1947 after working jobs mostly at freight and trucking companies. Riegel was fifty-seven at the time of his death, and after 1918 he apparently had little or no contact with his son, Fred, from the 1915 marriage in Illinois.79 The child was raised by Riegel’s parents in their Collinsville home.
J. O. Monroe went on to build the Collinsville Herald into a fine family-owned community newspaper. He also served many years as an Illinois state senator. Five years after the lynching, he once again got a chance to stand up to mob action and intimidation after a large Ku Klux Klan rally near Monk’s Mound in May 1923, and this time there was no hesitation on his part.80 Awakened by the blaring horns of a midnight Klan parade around Main and Clay Streets, Monroe wrote down the license numbers of all the cars he could see and outed those in the procession in the next edition of his newspaper. He did not recoil from heavy criticism for identifying the members of the clandestine group. “Presumably the Klan is something to be spoken of in a whisper and not out loud,” he said in his column.81 And after a lifetime of publishing and Democratic politics, Monroe’s views on the Prager affair changed completely.
One week after the men were acquitted in 1918, Monroe wrote his column under the heading “The Whole City Is Glad.” He went on to relate the opinion that many in the city held at the time.
Outside a few persons who may still harbor Germanic inclinations, the whole City is glad that the 11 men indicted for the hanging of Robert P. Prager were acquitted. . . . The community is well-convinced that he was disloyal. The City does not miss him. The lesson of his death has had a wholesome effect on the Germanists of Collinsville and the rest of the nation. In this day and time when human life is being sacrificed by the thousands for principle, Prager’s death may be regarded as a cheap price to pay for the silencing of Germanic tongues.82
After raising five children and retiring from politics and publishing, Monroe in 1962 wrote the memoirs of his long career and reflected on the Prager affair. Forty-four years later, with the mature clarity only given an old man, he revisited the biggest story he had ever covered:
Looking back on the whole horrible thing, it seems a nightmare. It began with gossip, fear and hate for the alien. It grew with idleness, rabble-rousing talk and excessive misguided patriotism, and the temper of drunkenness. It was made possible by the surprise and carelessness of the police, and unfortunate miss-guesses on what to do with the man.
When the crowd first got to the victim, no one really thought of hanging. Tar and feathers were intended. The tar was not found. A rope was. By now there were over 200 yelling men, flushed with beer, hot from marching over a mile, confused, and muddled with mob psychology.83 Nowhere appeared a sober, clear-headed man to say “no,” and make it stick. And so came violence, death, tragedy and shame.84