Bloody Williamson (38 page)

The Sheltons never returned to Williamson County. After the gang war they used East St. Louis as headquarters for enterprises in gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution until an honest sheriff drove them out. Peoria was more hospitable. There, in the late thirties, they established themselves; from there they dominated an illegal empire that comprised, if informed observers are correct, most of the rackets in downstate Illinois. Apparently immune to prosecution, they were unable to protect themselves permanently against personal enemies or rival racketeers. Carl, who had left Peoria to retire on his Wayne County farm, was killed there in the fall of 1947; Bernie was fatally
shot outside his tavern near Peoria in the summer of 1948; Earl survived a murderous attack at Fairfield, Wayne County, in the spring of 1949, and still lives. Roy, the oldest brother, was killed in early June 1950, while driving a tractor on Earl’s farm. Although he had a criminal record he had never been associated with Carl, Earl, and Bernie. “Little Earl,” a son of Dalta, the fifth brother, has survived two attempted assassinations.

Early in 1951 all the Sheltons except the mother of the brothers and their youngest sister, Mrs. Lulu Shelton Pennington, disappeared. In April they sold most of their Illinois land. But the feud continues. In June 1951, a young farmer was shot from ambush as he stood talking to friends on one of the Wayne County farms that Earl had retained; the next day the barn on the same farm burned to the ground. Late in the month Mrs. Pennington and her husband, a roadhouse operator, were shot by occupants of a sedan, who forced the Penningtons’ car to the curb on the outskirts of Fairfield. Both Penningtons were seriously wounded. As soon as they recovered they vanished; so did Mrs. Agnes Shelton, the mother of the brothers. On the night of December 1, 1951, the old homestead, unoccupied, burned to the ground. At the same time a garage on Big Earl’s farm, a mile away, went up in flames.
^*

All the murders of the Sheltons and assaults on members of the clan remain unsolved.

With this attempt to wipe out the entire family, Williamson County appears to be unconcerned. Where once a shot that even grazed a Shelton head would have brought quick reprisal,
successful murder causes only mild speculation, and the peace remains unbroken.

But prosperity, which peace so often makes possible, shunned Williamson County for more than a decade after the end of the gang war. During the Klan clean-up, businessmen began to complain of hard times. It was natural that they should attribute the decline in trade to the “troubles” that beset the county, but the cause was more deep-seated and more enduring than this diagnosis indicated. For a generation coal had been the mainstay of the region. Now coal was a sick industry, and becoming sicker.

By 1925 or thereabouts, the stimulus that the first World War gave to coal mining in southern Illinois had run its course. Consumers began to turn to oil and natural gas. In the competition for a market no longer large enough to absorb full production, southern Illinois operators found themselves at a disadvantage: producers in the nonunion fields of Kentucky and West Virginia could undersell them. Mine after mine in Williamson and Franklin counties went on part-time, many closed down altogether. Those that survived did so only by taking advantage of every technical improvement, and every technical improvement meant fewer miners on the payroll.

The depression that followed the crash of 1929 accelerated the trend. As factories closed, the demand for coal shrank to a fraction of what it had been. Miners, working a day or two a week or not at all, drew on their savings until they were gone, sold their cars, mortgaged their homes. After that only the pittance that local charity could provide kept them alive.

By 1932, actual starvation threatened Williamson and Franklin counties. When Mauritz A. Hallgren, associate editor of
The Nation
, visited the region in the spring of that year he found a dozen towns in which as many as sixty per cent of the able-bodied men were unemployed. Local business came almost to a standstill. Empty storerooms dotted every business street, and half-empty shelves marked the stores that remained open.
People walked the streets, killing time. They had nothing else to do.

Hallgren noted that of forty banks in the two counties a few years earlier, only three remained. Marion and Benton, the county seats, had no banking facilities. Local utilities and chain stores cashed the checks of those fortunate enough to have them, and merchants did much of their business through postal money-orders. Lawyers and physicians, once the most prosperous class in the region, were no better off than the miners and merchants.

Without the federal relief-programs inaugurated in 1933, the people of Williamson and Franklin counties would have been subjected to suffering inconceivable in a civilized nation. Relief quickly became the region’s biggest industry. Year after year, in the thirties, relief and WPA employment-quotas were three and four times as large as in average comparable communities. In fact, conditions became so bad that in 1941 the Works Progress Administration made Williamson, Franklin, and Saline counties the subject of a special study and published the findings under the title,
Seven Stranded Coal Towns: A Study of an American Depressed Area.
The authors found that three out of every four jobs the coal mines had provided had vanished, and that no new industries had appeared to fill the gap in the economy. They summed up the result in a few stark sentences:

After war broke out in 1941, conditions improved, but less than might have been expected. The mines stepped up production, the government built a thirty-eight-million-dollar ordnance plant between Herrin and Marion, the normal number of
young men were drawn into the armed forces, yet the coal towns continued to be plagued by unemployment. If there could be no real revival even under the stimulus of war production, what hope did the future hold?

Near the end of the war, Herrin faced the facts. At the instance of leading citizens, the mayor called a mass meeting. Speaker after speaker took a realistic view of the future. The ordnance plant, it was obvious, would be one of the first casualties of peace. What would happen to the hundreds of Herrin residents who worked there, and what would happen to Herrin’s merchants when the paychecks stopped? Unless the city secured new industries, its population would decrease, retail trade would fall off, and property values would decline. The end might well be an aggregation of boarded storefronts and deserted, dilapidated homes. Herrin could take its fate lying down, or it could try to save itself.

The people chose to mold their own future. In a short time they subscribed one hundred thousand dollars, to be used for industrial development. The Herrin Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of its president, O. W. Lyerla, went to work. Learning that Borg-Warner intended to build a new factory for the manufacture of washing-machines under its Norge division, Lyerla and others pressed Herrin’s advantages: plenty of industrial water from Crab Orchard Lake, a federal project completed in 1941, as well as adequate electric power, an abundance of high-grade labor, ample housing, and a free factory-site. The company, convinced, constructed a modern factory, and went into production in 1946.

This was only a beginning. The same advantages that induced Borg-Warner to build a plant at Herrin led a manufacturer of women’s dresses to locate there a year later. In 1950 and 1951 two other industries came to the same decision. All were influenced by the community’s willingness to make a substantial investment—more than eight hundred thousand dollars altogether—in
mortgage notes on the factory buildings. Most of these notes have already been retired.

At the same time that Herrin was helping itself, it bore its share in the larger job of regional rehabilitation. Other communities in Williamson and neighboring counties faced the same bleak future, and enjoyed the same basic advantages. In addition, there were the buildings of the ordnance plant—an asset that might be turned to the advantage of the entire region. Leading citizens, working through Southern Illinois, Incorporated, a sort of regional chamber of commerce, induced the federal government to make this property available for industrial leasing. The Sangamo Electric Company, of Springfield, was the first to take advantage of the opportunity, and established a plant for the manufacture of condensers and other electronic equipment. By the summer of 1951 fifteen other industries had leased space.

The benefits of high employment at Ordill, as the ordnance plant is now called, permeate the area that includes Carbondale, Carterville, Herrin, West Frankfort, Johnston City, and many other communities. None of these cities is more than twelve miles from any other, and with good roads, and cars in every family, transportation is no problem. Some, like Marion, remain true to the rural tradition and are content to keep industry at a comfortable distance. But whether factories are located within city limits or a few miles away, well-kept homes, attractive stores displaying an abundance of new merchandise, new school-buildings, and hospitals where there were none before testify to the general prosperity these factories have created.

Williamson County, proud of what it has accomplished in recent years, would like to forget its turbulent past. The eighty-four pages of a “Progress and Achievement Edition” of the
Herrin Daily Journal
, published August 30, 1937, contained no mention of the Massacre, the Klan clean-up, or the gang war. The same subjects were carefully avoided in a county centennial history,
Pioneer Folks and Places
, published in 1939.

The people of the county feel that they are being subjected to gross injustice whenever the story of the “troubles” is retold. That has happened often in the last five years. Whenever a Shelton has been shot or shot at, feature writers have jumped for their typewriters; while in 1950 and 1951 articles on the gang war appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
,
Life
, and
Esquire.
Upon the publication of the
Esquire
article (February 1951) the Herrin Lions Club passed resolutions that undoubtedly reflect majority opinion. “Articles of this nature,” the Lions asserted, “serve only to open old wounds; is [
sic
] in reality nothing more nor less than persecution of Southern Illinois and its people; is a definite detriment to this area in its civic efforts; molds the minds of the peoples of the whole world so this community and this area cannot attain their rightful niche in society because of the resultant prejudices.” The old disorders, the Lions insisted, “should be discontinued and forgotten by our own press as un-American and undemocratic.”

The press is not likely to agree. What happened in Herrin and Bloody Williamson is still news. Besides, there is a conviction on the part of many thoughtful persons that the story has a significance that goes beyond one limited geographical area. William L. Chenery sensed it as early as December 1924, when he wrote in the
Century
:

More than twenty-five years later John Bartlow Martin groped for fundamentals when he wrote of the Sheltons, and tangentially of Williamson County:

What
has
made Williamson County bloody so long? We cannot explain, with assurance, why explosive forces in American life have come to the flash point not once but many times in this one small region, but we can identify the forces, and thus contribute to understanding.

The Bloody Vendetta, the Massacre, the Klan crusade, the gang war—all revealed the frailty of social restraints. Conscience, it was shown, is a monitor easily disregarded, for a man can come to kill another without losing a half-hour’s sleep. Against greed and other strong emotions the law is a weak barrier. Adamant adherence to principles can breed its own troubles: witness the conflicts between union labor, certain of its right to organize, and men like Brush and Leiter, equally certain that an owner had a right to conduct his business in his own way.

Witness, too, the presence of factors never openly admitted.
In the Brush mine riots, which was more important: the fact that Brush’s imported miners were strikebreakers, or the fact that they were black? Who knows what mixture of motives impelled the participants in the Klan crusade? What part was played by the rigid moralist’s envy of the pleasures of sin? By the Protestant’s deep-seated fear of the Catholic? By the desire of the old “American” to put the newer citizen—in this instance the Italian—in his place?