Bloody Williamson (10 page)

“You have an opportunity to strike at murder and lawlessness. If this crime is endorsed murder will grow upon the community and assassination will increase. Life, home and family will not be safe. You have the opportunity of stamping this out and I believe you will do it.”

Glenn finished late in the morning. After the noon recess the defense waived its right of argument. Judge Hartwell called in the jurors and gave them his charge. At 4.20 p.m. they retired.

Shortly after eleven o’clock that night word came that a verdict had been reached. The judge appeared, took his place on the bench; Middlekauff shuffled in in carpet slippers; twenty-five or thirty friends and relatives of the defendants found seats in the dimly lighted room.

“Gentlemen, have you reached a verdict?” Hartwell asked when the jury stood before him.

“We have,” the foreman answered, and handed over several sheets of paper.

The judge adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses, then read slowly:

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Hugh Willis, not guilty of the crime as charged in the indictment.”

He paused, then resumed:

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Phillip Fontanetta, not guilty of the crime as charged in the indictment.”

And so for the other four defendants.

There was no demonstration.

Middlekauff pulled himself to his feet.

“I ask your honor to poll the jury.”

The judge asked the first juror to stand.

“Were these and are these your verdicts?” he asked, holding up the papers.

“Yes, sir,” came the answer in a firm voice.

“Are you satisfied with them?”

“Yes, sir.”

Each juror, asked identical questions, responded in the affirmative.

The second trial was over. And the greater case into which this trial and the one that preceded it had somehow been transformed—the case of organized labor against the strikebreaker, the private guard, the organizations of employers who wanted a return to the open shop, against the law itself—that too had been decided.

On the following morning State’s Attorney Duty announced
that there would be no more trials. “I intend to nolle every one of these cases,” he said. “I have my personal opinion as to who did the crime and I tried to convince two juries.… I am not complaining, but it’s a hopeless proposition.” Middlekauff deferred to the State’s Attorney’s decision, although he reminded the court that the state legislature had recently appropriated $75,000 for the prosecution, and said he believed that body should have some voice in the matter. Brundage showed less restraint than his associate, issuing a statement in which he charged that many of the defense witnesses testified falsely, and that the court had permitted the selection of jurors who should have been disqualified. “The prosecution is reluctantly obliged to admit that justice cannot be obtained in Williamson County,” he concluded. To which the seven lawyers for the defense replied by pointing out that when the second-trial jury was completed, there were left to the prosecution, unused, almost a hundred peremptory challenges. “It is strange,” they commented with reference to Brundage’s charges of false testimony, “that because witnesses happen to be laboring men rather than gunmen their motives must be questioned.”

Amid these recriminations Judge Hartwell granted Duty’s motion that all remaining indictments be dismissed.

Herrin faded from the front pages, even from the editorial columns, of all but the few papers that followed the investigation authorized by the Illinois House of Representatives during the course of the second trial.

The occasion for legislative intervention was offered in mid-March 1923, when a deficiency appropriation of $120,000 for the Adjutant General’s office was under discussion. Representative Michael Igoe of Chicago declared that the responsibility for the Herrin riots ought to be fixed before this appropriation was voted. Adjutant General Black, he asserted, was trying to put the blame on Colonel Hunter, yet Hunter’s report, which had been read before the Appropriations Committee, showed that on three separate occasions Hunter had asked Black to send
troops to Williamson County, only to be told that the request could not be granted because the local authorities had not asked for troops. Igoe introduced a resolution providing for a committee to investigate and report its findings to the House. Representative McCarthy of Kane County pointed out that Igoe’s resolution was so worded that it practically fixed responsibility in advance of the investigation, and proposed a milder, less prejudicial substitute, which was adopted immediately.

A few days later the Speaker picked the seven members of the committee: Frank A. McCarthy, chairman, and Norman G. Flagg, W. B. Phillips, Thomas Curran, Michael L. Igoe, and M. P. Rice. Igoe and Rice were Democrats, the others Republicans. Phillips and Flagg lived in southern Illinois; the other five members represented constituencies in the northern part of the state.

As soon as the second trial ended, Chairman McCarthy announced that the committee would hold its first meeting in Springfield on April 11. The members plunged at once into the main purpose of the investigation—to ascertain the delinquencies, if any, of the state officials concerned—by putting Adjutant General Black on the stand. That day and the next he and Colonel Hunter told their stories. Most of the pertinent facts were brought out during their first appearances, though later witnesses added some information of value.

Reduced to its essentials, the question between the two officers was one of veracity. Had Hunter—not once but several times—asked Black to send troops, or had he led his superior officer to believe that they would not be necessary? The issue came out nakedly in their conflicting accounts of what was said in the course of the several reports Hunter made to Black by telephone on June 21.

Hunter denied that he ever made this call. Later in the investigation, telephone-company records proved that he did make it. The toll slip was filed at Springfield instead of Marion or Murphysboro, as was the case with the records of the other calls, and did not come to light for several weeks.

Other evidence indicated that Hunter’s repeated requests for troops were inventions after the damage had been done. Three days prior to the massacre, he had told Oldham Paisley of the
Marion Republican
that troops would not be used because the local authorities had the situation in hand. Two days after the massacre he had talked freely to the Board of Officers, headed
by Major General Milton J. Foreman of the 33rd Division, Illinois National Guard, who had made an investigation on the scene, and said nothing to any of its members to indicate that he had asked the Adjutant General or anyone else to send troops to the danger spot.

The fact was that at the time of the massacre Hunter believed that under the law state troops could not be sent into a county unless local authorities asked for them. On June 24, 1922, he had made that clear to a representative of the
Marion Post.
“Let me say right here,” he was quoted, “that I did not have the power to call out troops at any time. The law compels me to wait until the local authorities announce the situation is beyond their control and ask for troops.” Abundant testimony given during the investigation showed that this was his understanding at the time; hence his frantic efforts to induce the sheriff to make the appeal that he believed to be essential. When he learned, sometime after the riots, that the governor, acting through the Adjutant General, could send troops into any community on his own initiative, he altered his story to fit the newly discovered provisions of the state’s military code.

Having grilled the military in Springfield, the committee decided to move to the scene of the trouble. On April 26 it met in Marion. There, after a visit to the site of the Lester mine, it took up the question of local responsibility for the riot.

Melvin Thaxton, now county treasurer by virtue of the largest majority in the county’s history, was one of the first witnesses. Under questioning by Chairman McCarthy he was less than co-operative, but when Representative Igoe took over the examination his memory failed him almost completely.

Thaxton’s deputies, and the police officers of Herrin and Marion, were uncommunicative, even defiant, on the stand. Jake Jones, a Herrin policeman, admitted that while he was on duty on the night of June 21 he learned that several hardware stores had been raided for guns.

Police officers on duty on the night of June 21 saw nothing unusual in the crowds that almost blocked the streets in Marion or Herrin; or if they did, they were content to regulate traffic, and asked no questions. They showed no more concern on the morning of June 22. Al Richardson, one of Thaxton’s deputies, arrived in Herrin about nine a.m. He noticed crowds in the downtown section, but never asked the reason for them. Jake Jones knew well enough what was taking place, but simply ignored it.