Bloody Williamson Read online

  This is a BORZOI BOOK, published by ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  L. C. catalog card number: 52–6408

  Copyright 1952 by PAUL M. ANGLE

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Manufactured in the United States of America and distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 23, 1952

  REPRINTED TWELVE TIMES

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5277-8

  v3.1

  Socialism, communism, and other doctrines have played no part in the violence and murder which have brought such ill fame to this “queen of Egypt.” The issues are strictly American, and the wrongs done are the native products of the United States.

  William L. Chenery in The Century,

  December 1924.

  FOREWORD

  MY INTEREST in the subject of this book started with the Herrin Massacre. At that time I was a college graduate of two weeks’ standing, and certain that there were at least two sides to every question, even when mass murder was involved. In the Herrin Massacre my father, a Republican of the McKinley school, could see only one side. We had some sharp arguments, and I think he must have questioned the wisdom of permitting his eldest son to be exposed to the “education” he himself had been denied.

  Three years later I took a position in Springfield, Illinois, where I lived until 1945. There Herrin and Williamson County were frequent subjects of conversation. From former residents of southern Illinois, from state officials, from militia officers, from lawyers who had prosecuted or defended gangsters, from judges who had presided at their trials, I heard stories that were always fantastic and often incredible.

  Then I came to know Williamson County at first hand, and to feel at home on the quiet, tree-shaded streets of Herrin and Marion, so different from the bare black camps of other coalfields. I came to take it as a matter of course that I should spend an hour, one evening, talking with a Marion businessman about the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the relative merits of the various editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica—subjects about which his information far exceeded mine. “I keep goin’ back to the ninth edition time after time,” he said in the edgeless drawl that reminds one of Egypt’s proximity to the South, “because of the high authority of the articles.” He mentioned Huxley and Darwin, and in philosophy Leibnitz and Schopenhauer. “And who was that monism fellow?” he asked. “I can’t think of his name.” I took two wild shots: “Kant? Fichte?” He shook his head, and we talked of other matters. “I’ve got it,” he said as we parted. “Hegel!”

  On another evening, in Herrin, the talk ran to fine printing, to an obscure pamphlet of Sir Thomas Browne’s that my host had not been able to find, to London antiquarian booksellers, to the maps in William Camden’s Britannia, which lay open before us.

  I do not mean to imply that such interests are the rule in Williamson County. Neither are they the rule in Chicago or New York or Boston. I do contend that in friendliness and hospitality the people of this region are unsurpassed. Walk along the street in any town in Egypt—the proud name of the southernmost quarter of Illinois—and most of the pedestrians you pass will smile and wish you good morning. Walk a block or two farther, and a car will pull to the curb and stop. The driver, who has never seen you before, will ask whether he can’t take you where you are going. One afternoon, as I was walking toward the square in Marion, a car stopped and the driver rolled down the window. “Ask that old fellow over there,” he said, pointing to an elderly man, poorly dressed, who was leaning against a building, “if he’s going anywhere. I’m going to Carterville, and I’ll be glad to take him along.” No, the old man replied, he wasn’t going anywhere—and then he asked me, with grave courtesy, to thank the gentleman in the car. As I passed him after I had conveyed the message he nodded in gratitude.

  This contrast between the people of Williamson County as I know them and their record of violence and lawlessness is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. Another is the experience I had when I undertook, some years ago, to write a short paragraph on the Herrin Massacre for the Dictionary of American History. I could find no accounts of that event on which I could rely, so I spent many hours quarrying what I took to be the essential facts. (I now know that that article, of only 150 words, contains at least two inaccuracies.) My third reason is the superficiality, not to say shoddiness, of almost everything that I have seen in print on this subject. I decided that if there was enough interest in “Bloody Williamson” to justify magazine articles and feature stories every few months, there should be a place for one book based on careful research and written with as much objectivity as a fallible human could achieve.

  My fourth and most compelling reason is my conviction that the story of “Bloody Williamson” is much more than a record of lawlessness in one small Illinois county. That county, as I have pointed out, is strongly “American” in population and background; I fear that it is no less “American” in those phases of its history which are my concern.

  We Americans—and now I apply the term to the people who have occupied the present United States since the first English settlements in North America—have never been slow to resort to violence, sometimes in passion, sometimes in the conviction that legal processes were either inadequate or too slow in their operations; sometimes simply because the law interfered with what we wanted to do. The resort to violence may take the form of a Boston Tea Party or a Whiskey Rebellion and become a matter of national pride; it may assume the shape of a Civil War draft riot or a reprisal crusade of the Molly Maguires and go down in obloquy; it may manifest itself in Frank and Jesse James or the Hatfields and McCoys and become a legend; it may materialize at Cripple Creek or the Haymarket, and appear as a blaze of tragic glory to some and a dark stain to others. It may erupt in the latest lynching or the Cicero race riot of 1951. Its forms are as diverse as the emotions of our people, and its power to break through conventional barriers, and to thrive on itself, has been demonstrated in every part of the country at every period in our history.

  Williamson County, Illinois, I believe, offers an almost unrivaled setting for a study of this phenomenon. There one can identify a wide variety of its causes—family hatreds, labor strife, religious bigotry, nativistic narrowness, a desire for money and to hell with the rules; one can observe its recurrences over more than half a century; and, because of the setting’s limited geographical extent, one can see what went on with a degree of clarity impossible on a larger stage. With the possible exception of Harlan County, Kentucky, I know of no other American locality possessed of these attributes.

  Some of my Williamson County friends will criticize me for writing this book. They are sensitive about their county’s history, and doubtless the more so because they know their own innate decency and friendliness, and realize that odium was brought upon them either by a small minority, or by a majority acting abnormally for short periods. They contend that what Williamson County is known for is misrepresentative, and they resent, understandably, the books and articles that treat of its past, as this book does, in terms of crime and violence.

  Others of my southern Illinois friends—a majority, I believe—will agree with my contention that no segment of the American past is immune to investigation, and that the story of “Bloody Williamson,” so long the province of the sensationalist, needs a thoroughgoing recital more than most.

  I have put the free time of five years into this book. As it stands, after repeated revisions, it is as good a book as I am capable of writing. (That is not to say, of course, that it is as good a book as could be written.) Its weaknesses stem fr
om my deficiencies as historian and writer; it owes its merits to many besides myself. I wish I could name all who have been helpful, but if I were to do so, the list would exceed any reader’s patience. Nothing, however, could excuse me for not thanking publicly those who have read my entire manuscript, and improved it greatly, in style and accuracy, by their criticisms: Willard L. King, Chicago lawyer, author, and grammarian; Margaret Scriven, librarian of the Chicago Historical Society; Virginia Marmaduke of the editorial staff of the Chicago Sun-Times; Earl Schenck Miers, author and publisher; and E. W. Puttkammer of the University of Chicago Law School. To others—Elizabeth P. Brush of Rockford, Illinois; R. H. Sherwood of Indianapolis; Dr. Chauncey C. Maher of Chicago; and Dean Robert B. Browne of the University of Illinois—I am equally grateful for help with certain phases of the story. As a research assistant, Julian S. Rammelkamp placed me permanently in his debt. One tends to take the services of librarians for granted, but Winifred Ver Noy of the University of Chicago Library, David C. Mearns of the Library of Congress, and Louis M. Nourse of the St. Louis Public Library took more trouble in my behalf than I had a right to expect.

  I hope all those whom I have not named will accept my assurance that I am well aware of my obligation.

  PAUL M. ANGLE

  Chicago

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Maps

  1. MASSACRE

  JUNE 21–2, 1922

  2. APPROACH TO MASSACRE

  SEPTEMBER 1921—JUNE 1922

  3. MASSACRE: THE AFTERMATH

  JUNE 1922—OCTOBER 1922

  4. TWO TRIALS AND AN INVESTIGATION

  NOVEMBER 1922—JUNE 1923

  5. THE BLOODY VENDETTA

  JULY 1868—JANUARY 1876

  6. DOCTRINAIRE VS. UNION

  1890—1906

  7. MILLIONAIRE VS. UNION

  1901—1910

  8. KLANSMAN AND DICTATOR

  MAY 1923—FEBRUARY 1924

  9. THE KLAN WAR

  FEBRUARY 1924—MAY 1924

  10. DEATH IN A CIGAR STORE

  MAY 1924—JANUARY 1925

  11. THE KLAN LOSES

  JANUARY 1925—JULY 1926

  12. GANG WAR

  JUNE 1926—JANUARY 1927

  13. MURDER — AND MORE MURDER

  JANUARY 1927—JULY 1927

  14. THE HANGING OF CHARLIE BIRGER

  JUNE 1927—APRIL 1928

  15. JUSTICE

  AUGUST 1928—AUGUST 1930

  CONCLUSION

  1930–1951

  THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS

  CHAPTER BY CHAPTER

  SOURCES

  MAPS

  Locale of the Herrin Massacre, September 21–2, 1922

  Williamson County in Relation to the Principal Cities of Illinois

  The Heart of “Egypt”: Williamson and Contiguous Counties

  Downtown Herrin, Scene of the Klan War

  I

  MASSACRE

  June 21–2, 1922

  The most brutal and horrifying crime that has ever stained the garments of organized labor. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 24, 1922.

  ALL THROUGH the night the mine guards and workmen huddled beneath empty coal-cars. Soon after sundown they were jolted by a series of explosions, and no one needed to tell them that their water plant had been blown to bits. Behind piles of railroad ties they were safe enough, even though now and then bullets spattered against the steel sides of the cars or thudded into the tough wood. But they were trapped, and they knew it.

  At dawn John E. Shoemaker, assistant superintendent, and Robert Officer, timekeeper, ran from the barricade to the office to telephone for help. The line was dead. While the two men worked with the phone, shots crashed through the flimsy siding. Looking out, they saw armed men lying behind the crests of the high piles of dirt that surrounded the strip mine in which they were besieged. The men underneath the cars, now near panic, begged C. K. McDowell, the superintendent, to surrender. He agreed, reluctantly.

  Bernard Jones, a mine guard, tied a cook’s apron to a broomstick and came out from the barricade.

  “I want to talk to your leader,” he called to the men lying behind the hills of raw earth.

  One of the attackers rose to his feet. “What do you want?” he asked.

  Jones replied that the men inside would surrender if they could come out of the mine unmolested.

  “Come on out and we’ll get you out of the county,” was the answer.

  Behind the barricade the guards and workmen threw down their arms. As they emerged they put up their hands and formed a line. Then they walked along the railroad track and through the cut in the piles of overburden through which the spur entered the mine.

  The besiegers—some five hundred miners on strike and their sympathizers—surged forward, a rifle or revolver in almost every hand. They searched the prisoners and lined them up two abreast. One of the captives near the end of the line went back to the bunk car and returned with his grip. A striker took it from him.

  “You won’t need that where you are going,” he said.

  The procession started along the railroad toward Herrin, five miles to the northwest. After a short distance the prisoners were ordered to lower their hands and take off their hats. The mob grew ugly. Some of its members fired their guns into the air, some swore at the captives, and some called out to newcomers: “We got the scabs! We got the scabs!” A Negro armed with a long rifle ran up and down the line in a frenzy. Several white men urged him to use his fists on the prisoners. One of them called out:

  “See these white sons-of-bitches that we don’t think as much of as we do of you, colored boy!”

  At Crenshaw Crossing, a hamlet half a mile from the mine, a number of men waited for the procession. The column halted. A dark, burly man with a revolver—not the leader who had promised safe conduct—waved his hat for quiet and started to talk. As the noise subsided his words carried to the frightened captives:

  “The only way to free the county of strikebreakers is to kill them all off and stop the breed.”

  Someone in the crowd demurred. “Listen, buddy, don’t rush things,” he warned. “Don’t go too fast. We have them out of the mine now. Let it go at that.”

  “Hell! You don’t know nothing,” the first speaker answered with a burst of temper. “You’ve only been here a day or so. I’ve been here for years. I’ve lost my sleep four or five nights watching those scab sons-of-bitches and I’m going to see them taken care of.”

  The mob, moving again, became uglier. Some of its members struck the prisoners with pistol butts, and blood began to streak sweaty faces caked with the dust raised by shuffling feet. As the crowd approached Moake Crossing, a half mile beyond Crenshaw, McDowell was bleeding from several head wounds. A cork leg made it impossible for him to keep the pace the captors had set.

  “We ought to hang that old peglegged son-of-a-bitch,” someone muttered.

  Several times the superintendent faltered and almost fell; each time his captors jabbed him with rifle barrels and jerked him to his feet.

  At Moake Crossing he stopped. “I can’t walk any farther,” he groaned.

  The burly man who had talked about stopping the breed stepped up. “You bastard,” he snarled, “I’m going to kill you and use you for bait to catch the other scabs.”

  He took one of McDowell’s arms and motioned to another man in the mob to take the other. When the crowd moved on the three men started down a crossroad. Before the prisoners had covered a hundred yards they heard shots from the direction in which McDowell had been taken.

  “There goes your God-damned superintendent,” one of the mob members boasted. “That’s what we’re going to do to you fellows, too.”

  A farmer living near by also heard the shots. After a safe interval he walked down the crossroad. There lay McDowell, two bullet holes in his chest. He was dead.


  At the powerhouse,* a mile farther on, the procession came to a halt.

  “We’ll take four scabs down the road, kill them, and come back and get four more and kill them,” the leader of the column announced.

  At that moment an automobile came up, and a man with an air of authority stepped out. Several of the prisoners heard him referred to as “Hugh Willis,” and “the president.”

  “Listen, don’t you go killing these fellows on a public highway,” the frightened captives heard him say. “There are too many women and children around to do that. Take them over in the woods and give it to them. Kill all you can.”

  With that, he drove away.

  Across the tracks and to the north of the powerhouse was a strip of woodland, green with the fresh foliage of early summer, lush with the undergrowth of many years. Into it the mob herded its captives. In less than three hundred feet they came to a stout fence strung with four strands of barbed wire. A big, bearded man in overalls and a slouch hat called out:

  “Here’s where you run the gantlet. Now, damn you, let’s see how fast you can run between here and Chicago, you damned gutter-bums!”

  He fired. An instant later the woods rang with rifle and pistol shots. Several of the terrified strikebreakers fell. Those who escaped the first volley leaped for the fence, vaulting it or tearing their way through the barbs.

  Sherman Holman, a mine guard, went down in the first fusil-lade. As he dropped, he fell across the arm of the assistant superintendent, Shoemaker, who was wounded and unconscious. One of the mob came up and kicked Shoemaker’s body.

  “The son-of-a-bitch is still breathing,” he said. “Anybody got a shell?”

  A man with a revolver stooped over and sent a bullet into the assistant superintendent’s brain.

  William Cairns, another guard, was part way through the fence before his clothing caught. While he struggled to free himself he was shot twice. He fell, but he could still see and hear what went on around him. Not far away a strikebreaker, spattered with blood, leaned against a tree, screaming. With every scream someone hit him. One of the mob lost patience.