Bloody Williamson (20 page)

B
RUSH HAD
succumbed to the union; so had Leiter. A wise man would have profited by their experience, but, as we have seen, W. J. Lester could learn a lesson only when it was driven home by death and ruin. As the Herrin Massacre slipped into the past, with its participants unpunished, a new kind of hysteria threatened the community.

On the evening of May 20, 1923, an evangelist was conducting a service at the First Christian Church of Marion. As he started to take up the collection he was interrupted by a slight commotion at the church door. Seventeen men, in masks and long white robes, marched down the center aisle. The congregation sat in silence, half fearful, half curious. The newcomers lined up before the pulpit while one of their number stepped forward and handed the evangelist a letter. Then they turned, filed out, entered waiting cars, and drove away quickly.

As soon as they were outside the church the minister read the letter to the congregation:

The token of appreciation turned out to be three ten-dollar bills. After a few seconds of silence the evangelist spoke. “That tells you,” he said, “whether they are all right. They stand for something good.”

In this manner the Ku Klux Klan made its first appearance in Williamson County.

Six days later the hooded Knights, two thousand strong, gathered shortly after midnight in a meadow near Marion. There, in the light of a flaming cross, they initiated two hundred candidates from Williamson and Franklin counties.

On the last Sunday in June twenty Klansmen in full regalia interrupted the evening service being held in the Methodist Church of Herrin, just as they had at Marion five weeks earlier, and presented the pastor, the Rev. P. H. Glotfelty, with thirty dollars. And late in July Klansmen to the number of four or five thousand met in a field near Carterville, burned a huge cross, and administered their secret oath to several hundred initiates.

On Sunday, August 19, by prearrangement, practically every Protestant minister in Williamson County preached on law enforcement and urged his parishioners to gather at Marion on the
following morning for a public meeting that would show the county officials where church members stood. They responded in force. By ten a.m., in spite of the broiling sun, and regardless of the beginning of a new work-week, two thousand people had congregated about a piano box in the courthouse yard. The Rev. A. M. Stickney, pastor of Marion’s Methodist Episcopal Church South, mounted this ready-made speaker’s stand to deliver a fervent eulogy of the flag. A call for the mayor met no response. Then the Rev. P. H. Glotfelty took the stand. In a voice intended to be heard in the near-by offices of the sheriff and State’s Attorney he proclaimed that saloons and roadhouses were operating openly, that gambling was rampant, prostitution widespread. The county, he admitted, had a black reputation with the rest of the world, but it was not too late to make the name of Williamson one of which the state and nation could be proud. “It’s time to show that we’re one hundred per cent Americans,” he shouted.

Foreigners, particularly those from Italy, were primarily to blame, Glotfelty declared. The time had come to say to them, and to a sheriff unwilling to disturb the bootleggers in their illegal occupation: “You must walk the line of Americanism.” Williamson County, he promised, “will be cleaned up if we have to do it ourselves.”

The crowd cheered and applauded. Someone shouldered the single American flag that had decorated the speakers’ stand; hundreds fell in behind it and paraded through the downtown streets. Back again at the piano box another minister, the Rev. L. M. Lyerla of Carterville, shouted a warning, grimmer, more accurately prophetic than he realized:

“Mr. Sheriff, Mr. State’s Attorney, Mr. Judge, you’d better do your duty. If you don’t, something is going to happen, and that little mine trouble out here will be but a drop in the bucket compared to it!”

After a benediction, the meeting broke up.

That night five thousand Klansmen met at near-by West Frankfort to initiate the largest class so far admitted to the order.

In 1923 the Ku Klux Klan was finding a welcome in many localities, but there were few in which history and current conditions combined to provide a field as hospitable as this part of southern Illinois. The Klan was Protestant. So, by a large majority, were the people of Williamson County. Theirs, moreover, was the old-style, fundamentalist Protestantism of the hill people of Kentucky and Tennessee, from whom so many of them had sprung. Their favorite denominations were the Missionary Baptist, Southern Methodist, and Disciples of Christ, denominations that, historically, had shown the greatest fondness for the revival and camp meeting, and the least willingness to depart from the literal interpretation of the Bible. No summer went by without a succession of revival meetings, with the visiting evangelist, abetted by his song leader, urging the sinners in his audience to hit the sawdust trail. That one was a believer was taken for granted, though it was understood that he might have become remiss in church attendance, and thus needed to have his spirit stimulated. Protestant affiliations were also assumed without question, for everyone knew that only foreigners were Catholics, that all Jews were clothing-merchants, and that nonbelievers were either heathen Chinese or crazy.

The liberalizing influences that were changing the character of the evangelical denominations in many parts of the United States had left Williamson County untouched. Before the discovery of coal its people had lived in isolation, almost unaffected by anything that happened more than twenty-five miles distant, and the coal era had not lasted long enough to produce fundamental changes. The son of a prosperous merchant who attended the state university or one of the state normal schools and caught there a glimpse of a world in which people were concerned with ideas or music or the other arts, rarely returned to settle down. Those who did come back were too often untouched by their “education.” Early in 1924 a woman who had lived in the region for many years could write. “If there is a single teacher [in Williamson County] who believes in evolution—or understands it—I
venture that he or she holds that belief in the strictest privacy.… What is to be expected of teachers who with rare exceptions read only the two or three books a year required for certificates?… Like church, like school—the Ku Klux mind is firmly entrenched.”

Coupled with emotional religion and cultural backwardness was a fervent patriotism. These people stemmed in the main from forebears who had lived in the New World since Colonial days. Their ancestors had fought in the Revolution, subdued the Indians, and peopled the wilderness west of the Alleghenies. Some, in the Civil War, had sympathized with the South, but since that time they had lined up with the Republican Party, and no section of the Middle West held more firmly to the political creed of Harding and Coolidge. In the Herrin Massacre the most fanatical red-hunters had been unable to find evidence of either political or economic unorthodoxy. In the war just ended the boys of Williamson County had done their full share; so had their parents. They may have had a tendency to confuse the symbols of patriotism with the substance, for few meetings could be conducted without a lusty singing of
America
and
The Star-Spangled Banner
, yet the substance—real love of country and unquestioned belief that the nation was worth whatever sacrifice one might be called upon to make for it—was there too. Even to the bitter anti-Klansman, the Klan’s slogan, “one hundred per cent Americanism,” seemed a laudable rule of life.

Fortunately for the Klan organizers, the Italian community in Herrin provided an easy, unresisting target. Italians, mainly from Lombardy, had been drawn to the county as mines opened in the nineties and early 1900’s. In 1923 they and their descendants constituted about twenty per cent of Herrin’s population. They had prospered from the beginning, and had been accepted by the “Americans,” yet they were Catholic, “foreign,” and fond of wine. Some, moreover, had taken to bootlegging after the county went dry. A whipping-boy is a handy fellow to have around, and the Italians of Herrin admirably fitted the part.

Williamson County already had a law-enforcement organization that the Klan needed only to make its own. The Marion Law Enforcement League had been organized by prominent citizens early in 1923 for the purpose of stamping out bootlegging and gambling. It started out to work in co-operation with the county officers, but soon reached the point where it condemned them as delinquent, and proclaimed that “as citizens we want the law enforced and … if our officers are not doing their duty, we must resort to such measures as will accomplish the end we desire in another way.” The Klan offered the other way.

That Williamson County needed cleaning up no one can doubt. In Herrin, with the advent of prohibition, saloonkeepers simply took down their signs and sold poorer liquor at higher prices. Bars continued to operate in the small mining-towns, while roadhouses, which offered gambling as well as liquor, sprang up along the highways. Marion, older and more conservative than Herrin, was relatively free from commercialized vice, but even there conditions fell below what those who had favored the Eighteenth Amendment expected. George Galligan, elected sheriff in the fall of 1922, did little to curb the lawbreakers, partly because his force of deputies was too small, and partly because he lacked the will. A bluff, good-natured Irish Protestant, he had been opposed by the “better element” during the campaign, and shunned by it afterward. Needing companionship desperately—such was his nature—he had found it among the gamblers and bootleggers. Understandably, he was reluctant to interfere with their operations.

And Williamson County had a peculiar, impelling reason for cleaning house. Ever since the Herrin Massacre its citizens had suffered from a sense of shame. One of its cities had been an object of universal condemnation, first for cold, premeditated murder, then for its failure to punish the criminals. Hundreds of editorial writers had called the people of Herrin and Williamson County inhuman; cartoonists had pictured them as fiends whose hands dripped blood. When a resident of Herrin registered at a
hotel in a strange city he usually gave a fictitious address; if he were bold enough to be truthful the clerk was likely to stare at him as if he were an escaped convict. The people of the county resented being considered a subhuman species. More than that, they were determined to prove that they did not deserve the evil reputation they had acquired. The Klan offered them an opportunity. Put the bootleggers and gamblers out of business, its leaders said, and make Williamson County “more like home and less like hell.”

In the Protestant ministers the Klan had powerful proponents. Preaching on a Sunday evening in August, 1923, the Rev. A. M. Stickney compared the United States to the
Titanic
, rapidly yet unwarily approaching disaster. The iceberg that would destroy the nation was foreign immigration. The assassins of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, Stickney declared, were all Roman Catholics; the great majority of newspapers were controlled by Catholic and Jewish capital. Only through the Klan could the impending calamity be averted. Another minister, preaching on law enforcement, commended “that fine body of men composing the Invisible Empire” to his congregation. And when the
St. Louis Star
quoted State’s Attorney Duty as having said that he “could take a firefly on the end of a red corn cob and chase the whole damn Klan out of the county,” it was a preacher—the Rev. A. E. Prince of the First Baptist Church of Marion—who publicly defended the order. He knew a great many members of the Klan, he said, and they were not cowards. He had never known of any action of the Klan which he thought needed to be investigated, but he had never seen any activity of the Knights of Columbus that was not, in his opinion, “besmirched with the stain of crime.”

While the preachers fulminated from their pulpits the members of the county board of supervisors, almost all Klansmen, called for law enforcement. At its meetings in the summer and fall of 1923 the board repeatedly passed resolutions asserting that the county officials were not doing their duty; that in all
sections of the county there were roadhouses where liquor was being sold, gambling taking place, and prostitutes operating; that lawless organizations were being formed to prevent enforcement and terrorize the citizens who wanted it.