Bloody Williamson (21 page)

After each meeting of the county board the sheriff bestirred himself and made a few raids. His activities, however, satisfied no one. The supervisors had no confidence in his sincerity and were unwilling to provide the additional deputies he said he needed. And the Klan, now numbering many thousands, was militant and impatient. It decided to carry out the promise Glotfelty had made at the law-enforcement meeting in August: Williamson County “will be cleaned up if we have to do it ourselves.”

The first move was an appeal to Governor Small. A committee
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went to Springfield, sat in hotel lobbies for three days, and was then told by the governor: “If you want the law enforced, go back and elect someone that will enforce the law.” Rebuffed, the committee proceeded to Washington for a conference with Roy A. Haynes, Commissioner of Prohibition. Haynes sympathized with their determination to clean out the bootleggers, but admitted that his office could not be of much help. His force was limited, the demands upon it were many, and he simply could not spare enough men to do the job. If, however, the committee really meant business, and was willing to hire a private investigator to collect evidence, he would send in men to make arrests and prepare the way for prosecutions.

Somehow, in Washington, the committee met a former agent of the Prohibition Unit, S. Glenn Young, and retained him to conduct the clean-up they were determined to undertake.
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Young arrived in Williamson County about November 1, 1923. With his father-in-law, George B. Simcox, who had served several
years as a United States marshal, he began to visit the “soft-drink parlors.” By the end of the month the two men had bought liquor at more than a hundred of these establishments. Fortified with this evidence of law violation, Young, John L. Whitesides, Marion Klan leader, and Arlie O. Boswell, lawyer, Klansman, and avowed candidate for the office of State’s Attorney, went to Washington. There, sponsored by Richard Yates, Congressman-at-Large from Illinois, and E. E. Denison, Congressman from the Williamson County district, they appealed again to Prohibition Commissioner Haynes. This time they asked that he send an agent from his force to deputize Young and such men as he might select to raid the places in which liquor had already been purchased. Haynes agreed.

At home again, Young set out, with the utmost secrecy, to recruit his raiders. Approximately five hundred men, including most of the ministers of the county and many of the leading citizens who had joined the Klan, agreed to be deputized as federal agents for the purpose of carrying out a large-scale liquor raid. Then he telephoned to Haynes, told him that he was ready, and asked the commissioner to send the agents he had promised.

At six p.m. on Saturday, December 22, the prospective raiders assembled at the Odd Fellows Hall in Carbondale. There they found Young and the three federal agents whom Haynes had sent in—Gus J. Simons, divisional chief from Pittsburgh, and Victor L. Armitage and J. F. Loeffler from the Chicago office.
The men stood around laughing and chatting until Simons called for order. After giving them their instructions he said:

“Some of you may be sent home to your wives as a Christmas present, in a box. Are you ready?”

They answered with a shout. When Simons read the oath deputizing each man as a federal officer for the duration of the raid, all raised their right hands and the “I do’s” rocketed through the room.

Shortly after seven o’clock the raiders left the hall in groups of five. Each group carried a federal search-warrant signed by U.S. Commissioner William W. Hart of Benton. In their own cars they proceeded a mile or two toward Murphysboro and then turned eastward to their destinations. At about eight o’clock they closed in on a hundred roadhouses and bootlegging establishments in Herrin and Marion. Everywhere they followed the same tactics, approaching stealthily, covering all doors with drawn guns, and demanding entrance in the name of the federal government. No word of the impending raid had leaked; in fact, rumor had had it that all prohibition agents in the region had been called to Chicago to clamp down on holiday festivities there, so the local liquor-sellers were operating with more than usual freedom. As a result, the raiders found evidence in almost every establishment, and soon had their cars filled with owners and bartenders under arrest.

Their instructions had been to take all prisoners to Benton for arraignment before the U.S. commissioner. The first groups arrived there while the Saturday-night shoppers were still on the streets. As the townspeople saw the occupants of one car after another dismount, guns in hand, and push their prisoners toward the commissioner’s office, excitement ran high. Benton residents, including many who had already gone to bed, left their homes and headed for the public square, where by midnight between two and three thousand, the biggest crowd in the town’s history, had gathered. In his office Commissioner Hart worked furiously, releasing those who could put up bail, sending the others to jail.
Long before all the raiding parties had reported the jail was full, and prisoners were being taken to the Herrin lock-up.

Two weeks later, on the night of Saturday, January 5, the raiders struck a second time. This time they met at Marion, and again federal officers deputized them. Led by Young, now a conspicuous figure in semimilitary uniform, with two forty-fives strapped to his thighs and a sub-machine gun in his hands, they arrested nearly a hundred alleged lawbreakers. Once more the jails at Benton and Herrin were crammed with those who could not give bail.

Less than forty-eight hours later 250 men, deputized by the same federal officers who had administered the oath on Saturday night, raided places in Herrin and the smaller towns of the county.

The three raids had resulted in 256 arrests, and Williamson County was in an uproar.

From the beginning, the Klan had met stout opposition. Part of it arose from the considerable number of men who had good reason to fear strict law-enforcement. In Herrin these men went so far as to form a counterorganization, the Knights of the Flaming Circle. Although it fell far short of the Klan in numbers and discipline, it was strong enough to lead many to fear an armed clash even before the raids took place. Part of the opposition also came from sober, thoughtful citizens who had no sympathy with the Protestant and nativistic platform of the Klan, and who feared the excesses to be expected when a secret organization takes the law into its own hands.

These, and many others who had assumed a wait-and-see attitude, were shocked when the full story of the mass raids seeped out. The raiders had not limited themselves to bootlegging establishments; they had invaded scores of private homes. (Doubtless it was mere coincidence that the homes were usually those of Italians who, in addition to being wine-drinkers, were also Catholics.) There were ugly stories of rough treatment, robbery,
even planted evidence. French nationals—there was a small colony at Johnston City—and the Italians at Herrin made so many complaints that the French consul at Chicago and the Italian consular agent at Springfield protested to the U.S. State Department. Klansmen scoffed at the charges of brutality and lawlessness, but many a troubled citizen outside the ranks of the Klan found them convincing.
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The central figure in most of the stories of robbery and brutal behavior was S. Glenn Young. It was Young—so they said—who used abusive language toward women, turned the contents of cash drawers into his own pockets, and pistol-whipped an occasional victim who failed to raise his hands above his head quite fast enough. And it was Young whose arrogant and foolhardy conduct precipitated the first crisis.

The chain of events started on December 28, 1923, when a deputy sheriff and two other officers arrested State Representative Wallace A. Bandy of Marion, an ardent dry and avowed Klansman, on a warrant issued by the State’s Attorney. Bandy was held in jail for two hours, and then released on the personal recognizance of Judge Hartwell. Anti-Klansmen chortled at the fact that a bottle of liquor had been found in Bandy’s home. Young claimed that the liquor was white mule that he himself had confiscated and had left with Mrs. Bandy for safekeeping.

Two days later Young and several men entered Paul Corder’s restaurant in Marion and ordered coffee. Corder told them that the place was closed, but that he would make some if they would wait. While the water was heating he remarked:

“Well, they got Bandy.”

Young replied that the case was a frame-up.

“You’re a smart son-of-a-bitch,” Corder said.

A fight followed, and Corder took a beating. The next day he had Young arrested on an assault-and-battery charge.

A justice of the peace heard the case on January 8. A few minutes before it was called, Young and several of his followers stalked into the courtroom. All were heavily armed, and two of the group carried the portable machine-gun they used on raids. The jury retired, and emerged almost immediately to render a verdict of acquittal. The crowd clapped and cheered.

But before the case even went to the jury three companies of militia had orders to proceed to Marion with all possible speed. Sheriff Galligan, with the Herrin Massacre in mind, had wired to Adjutant General Black for troops as soon as Young and his men took their guns into the courtroom. The state authorities, who had learned their lesson in the summer of 1922, responded immediately, and General Black took the first train for Williamson County.

The next day, while soldiers guarded the courthouse and patrolled the streets, Klansmen protested vehemently to the Adjutant General. Arlie Boswell, Young’s attorney in the Corder trial, spoke for a delegation which demanded that the troops be sent home at once. There had been no threats against the sheriff, he said, nor any menace to life or property. The hubbub about a machine gun in the courtroom was nonsense—the gun, dismantled, had been carried only because it would have been stolen had it been left outside. The Bandy case was a frame-up. Marion was a clean city, and the people of the rest of the county were determined that their communities should be equally clean. Since the sheriff never found any evidence in the raids he undertook, the people had had to take matters into their own hands. Sam Stearns, chairman of the county board of supervisors, and Exalted Cyclops of the Klan, told Black that all but two members
of the county board were in sympathy with the Klan, and that three fourths of the people of the county wanted the clean-up to continue. Others, including the mayor of Herrin and the pastor of the Christian Church, supported their spokesmen’s statements.

Black refused to be stampeded. He knew that newspaper correspondents were wiring their papers that Williamson County stood on the verge of civil war, and he could see plenty of evidence to support that estimate of the situation. The arrest of Young and four prominent Herrin Klansmen on charges growing out of the recent raids—charges filed by persons who swore that they were beaten and robbed by the raiders—pointed to trouble. So did the alacrity with which Klansmen rushed to sign the bonds of the prisoners. Ominous, too, was a telegram from W. W. Anderson, division chief of prohibition agents: “Make no further raids under present conditions.”

The Klan leaders quickly concluded that persuasion would not send the troops home. Accordingly, they asked the sheriff, ill at his residence adjoining the jail, for a conference. Far into the night they argued over Galligan’s demand that Young be excluded from enforcement activities, and the Klan’s counterproposal that the sheriff discharge its bitter enemy and his own chief deputy, John Layman. They reached no agreement other than to meet again the following day.

Young contributed nothing to the prospect of peace by his own belligerency. “With or without federal aid we’re going to continue the raids and I’m going to lead them,” he told a representative of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
“The sheriff’s gang tried to rule me out in the conference last night, but the Klan leaders called me in and said they would stay with me to a man as long as I produced results in the clean-up and assured me fifteen thousand others in the county were behind me as well.” To a reporter for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
he bragged: “Upon thirty minutes’ notice I can gather two thousand men about me
to do my bidding in this drive, and in two hours I can get seven thousand from Williamson and Franklin counties, members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

On the tenth the conference with the sheriff was resumed. No agreement resulted, but Galligan came to a decision: he would ask that the troops be removed when he was satisfied that Herrin, the potential trouble-spot, was quiet. On his orders Chief Deputy Layman called the alleged saloonkeepers and bootleggers to a meeting at the Rome Club. Tear down your bars, he told them, and find some other way to make a living. Young and the Klan were applying for injunctions in the United States Court, and they—the saloonkeepers—could either shut up now or be padlocked later.

Only three of the eighty-three who were present agreed to quit. An attempt to disarm the people of Herrin, where more than two hundred gun permits had been issued to Klansmen in recent weeks, failed dismally. Even when appealed to by Sam Stearns, the justices of the peace who had issued the permits refused to revoke them. The city, they argued, was under the control of the anti-Klan element, and the men who had applied for the right to carry guns were still in danger.

In spite of the failure of these moves, a compromise was reached. The mayor of Herrin agreed to discharge his anti-Klan policemen and replace them with Klan sympathizers, and Galligan promised to raid any place suspected of selling liquor. To prove his sincerity he offered to meet in private any citizen who had, or believed he had, evidence of law violation. On January 14 his deputies made eight liquor raids, and in the next several days ten more. In most of the raids arrests were made.

Satisfied with the situation, the sheriff assented to the removal of the troops. Except for a few officers, who remained as observers, the militia left on January 15 and 16.