Bloody Williamson (23 page)

February 1924–May 1924

I
N A LITTLE
more than three months S. Glenn Young had made himself the dictator of an American county of which he was not even a legal resident. Who, and what, was he?

Only the barest outline of his early life can be established today. He was born on a farm near the little town of Long Island, Kansas, on March 4, 1887, and named Seth Glenn in honor of a great-uncle. His father, a prosperous farmer, also owned an implement store in Long Island. The mother died while the boy was very young, so he spent much of his boyhood and youth in the homes of relatives. He attended Long Island High School and Western College at Western, Iowa—a small college no longer in existence—but did not remain at either institution long enough to graduate. In 1911 he decided to study medicine and enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Milwaukee (later absorbed by the Marquette University School of Medicine). He married in the same year.

Evidently Young left medical school after one year and went to work as a nurse. In 1918 he became an agent of the Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice. For several months he tracked down draft dodgers, mainly in the mountainous regions of the southern states. He made a record as an energetic, fearless, and resourceful officer.

A change in organization led to his resignation, but a year later he obtained an appointment as a special agent in the newly created Prohibition Unit of the Treasury Department, the agency charged with the enforcement of the Volstead Act. On June 25, 1920, he took the oath of office, and started to work at a salary of $1,800 a year.

Young was assigned to southern Illinois. He soon became a conspicuous figure, partly because of a striking Belgian police dog that accompanied him everywhere, and partly because of a series of flamboyant feature stories that appeared in the
East St. Louis Journal
during the latter part of August. In these he was pictured as a “noted sleuth … one of the youngest, nerviest and most successful of the army of secret workers which enforces government edicts.” Before coming to southern Illinois he had operated for three years under the War Department—so the author asserted—and for seven years as an agent of the Department of Justice. Prior to that he had been a Texas Ranger and a deputy United States marshal in western Kansas! While serving as a government agent in the southeastern states he had made approximately 3,000 arrests, and had been forced to kill twenty-seven desperadoes.
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Young, the feature writer revealed, had been the subject of hundreds of columns in newspapers and magazines. “Has the publicity made him egotistic,” he asked, “or, in plain, everyday English, big-headed? I say absolutely no. It has had no more effect on this modest hero than a bang-up selling-talk of a live wire salesman would have with a deaf and dumb man.…”

The author concluded with a personal description that contrasted happily with his several columns of unwitting fiction. “The officer is five feet, seven inches tall and weighs 144 pounds.… He is strongly, but not heavily built, and is an average man in size only. He has slightly bowed legs, superinduced by many days spent in the saddle. His arms are long and his hands well kept, with very long fingers. His eyes are full and prominent and of a peculiar shade of bluish gray.”

Young was in the prohibition service a bare four months before he became involved in serious trouble. With two Granite City police officers he raided a house in Madison, a small town near East St. Louis. They found a still, mash, and a small quantity of whisky. During the raid Young learned that Luka Vukovic, a relative of the man whom he had just arrested, lived next door, so he took one of the officers and went to investigate. According to Young’s report, he saw Vukovic drinking from a milk bottle. Suspecting that the bottle contained whisky, he decided to enter in spite of the fact that he had no warrant. No one responded to his knock, so he and the police officer forced the front door.

Inside the house the officers found a twenty-five gallon keg of liquor. Suddenly Vukovic appeared, pointed a pistol at Young, and pulled the trigger, but the weapon missed fire. Young drew his gun, shot several times, and killed Vukovic.

Young was exonerated by a coroner’s jury but indicted for murder by the Madison County grand jury. The Prohibition Unit suspended him on December 20, 1920, pending the result of its own investigation. On the ground that he was a federal officer at the time of the offense, the case was taken from Madison
County and set for trial in the U.S. District Court at Springfield.

A few days before the trial began, Young’s wife filed suit for divorce. Her petition alleged that he was subject to violent fits of temper, that on one occasion he had thrown her down and kicked her, that his course of cruelty toward her had begun soon after their marriage, and that for a long time he had failed to support her and their twin daughters. The divorce was granted on July 1.

At Young’s trial, which began on June 6, 1921, the prosecution presented only two witnesses—the deputy coroner, to identify the body, and Vukovic’s widow, who testified that her husband had had no gun, that Young had shot him in cold blood, and had then planted one of his own guns beside the dead body. Young took the stand and claimed self-defense. The case went to the jury on the evening of June 10. After an hour’s deliberation, it brought in a verdict of not guilty.

Young was a free man, but any elation he may have felt at his acquittal must have been dampened by the knowledge that he had no job. Two weeks earlier he had been dismissed as a prohibition agent, with the dismissal dated December 10, 1920, when he had been suspended.

His discharge was the result of an investigation, conducted by two special agents, that the Prohibition Unit initiated after he killed Vukovic. In that case the agents concluded that Young had acted in self-defense, but that he did not exercise the caution and discretion to be expected of a government officer when he entered the house without a search warrant. In other instances of alleged improper or unlawful conduct the agents found Young guilty. He had, as charged, presented a fictitious claim for auto hire; he had inspired the
East St. Louis Journal
articles, which were held to be “improper newspaper publicity”; he had continued to represent himself as a prohibition agent after his suspension.

In the course of their investigation the government agents uncovered irregularities beyond those specified at the outset. They
learned that, in August 1920, Young had confiscated a roulette wheel, 500 poker chips, and $157.50 in cash from a gambler at Tamms, Illinois, and had never turned the property over to the agent in charge, although repeatedly ordered to do so. They learned that while he was acting as a Department of Justice agent he had borrowed four hundred dollars from a woman who lived in Aiken, South Carolina, and had never paid the debt. And they learned that while he was in the active service of the Prohibition Unit he and a young woman had frequently registered at hotels as man and wife.

The only conclusion in Young’s favor that the special agents arrived at came as the result of their review of a rape charge on which he had been arrested in early December 1920. In that episode the local grand jury had refused to bring an indictment. The investigators also found the charge baseless.

But one favorable verdict could not offset half a dozen adverse ones. Young had been in trouble constantly by reason of his lack of discretion and good sense.

While the investigation was in progress dozens of Young’s supporters—district attorneys, U.S. commissioners, ministers, Anti-Saloon League officers, and lay workers in the cause of prohibition—appealed to the prohibition commissioner in his behalf. He was “unostentatious in bearing and diligent in the performance of his duty,” “admired and trusted by all law-abiding
people,” “faithful and efficient,” “a terror to evil doers.” And so forth.

The testimonials had no effect, but when Young himself, after his dismissal, complained to the commissioner that the agents who had investigated him were prejudiced, that official reopened the case. Two other agents reviewed the evidence and interviewed the original investigators. In September 1921 they reported that Young’s charges were without foundation and recommended that the case be closed.

Six months later Richard Yates, Congressman at Large from Illinois and an ardent dry, asked the prohibition commissioner, a new appointee, to reconsider the Young case. A Congressman is not to be disregarded, so the commissioner pulled out the file and went through it. He could find no reason, he informed Yates, for reopening the investigation.
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Thus the man who, on the evening of February 10, 1924, ruled Williamson County in the name of law enforcement and good government bore on his official record black marks for recklessness, dishonesty, boastfulness, arrogance, and immorality.

In Herrin, troops were still disembarking as late as Monday, February 11, almost three days after the first Klan bullets shattered the windows of the hospital. In all, 1,700 soldiers patrolled the streets and manned machine guns at strategic corners. The ranking officer of the Illinois National Guard, Major General Milton J. Foreman, was in command.

As his first official act General Foreman issued a proclamation prohibiting all except duly authorized officers of the law from carrying firearms. The order continued: “Only such persons as are legally elected or appointed will be permitted to exercise the functions of deputy sheriff, police officer or other peace officer and all appointments of special deputy sheriffs and special peace officers heretofore made are revoked and annulled.” Young,
Foreman told newspaper correspondents, had no official standing. “We do not understand that Young occupies any position justifying him in administering law and order in the State of Illinois.”

Nevertheless, Young continued to occupy the office of the chief of police until February 12, when John Ford returned to resume the position.

By this time the regular authorities were emerging from the various jails in which they had spent the weekend. Ford and Crain, whom Galligan spirited away on the night of the 8th, were turned loose at Belleville. Galligan and four deputies came to light in the Champaign County jail at Urbana; Acting Sheriff McCown and a detail of guardsmen brought them back to Marion. Mayor Anderson of Herrin was freed from the county jail at Marion.

The release of the mayor and twenty-three others resulted from the verdict of the coroner’s jury in the inquest over the death of Caesar Cagle. After examining fifty-four witnesses the jury concluded, on February 13, that “Caesar Cagle came to his death … by gunshot wounds at the hand of one Shelton, described as tall and slim, and one Shelton, described as heavy set and sleepy eyed.” With the verdict, all those whom Young had jailed on the charge of murdering Cagle were released. The two Sheltons—Carl and Earl—were not in custody.

While the coroner’s jury was still hearing witnesses, General Foreman initiated a movement that he hoped would bring peace to the troubled community. In conferences with officials and other leading citizens he urged them to take the lead in rescuing the county from disgrace. Good-hearted men, he told them, must dispel the antagonisms and hatreds that had brought about virtual mob rule. A county couldn’t be run with rifles and machine guns, and it wasn’t the state’s business to do it even if it could be done.

As the result of his plea, a group of representative citizens met at Marion on the 13th and constituted themselves the Citizens’
Committee. The next day the members, thirty-five or forty in number, spent several hours in separate conferences with Klan leaders and Sheriff Galligan. Their deliberations took on urgency from the call that Judge E. N. Bowen of the Herrin City Court
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issued for a special grand jury to investigate the events of February 8 and 9. “It’s about time the real citizens of this county ran things,” the judge asserted. “Far more important than any faction’s desires or ambitions is the right of law-abiding people of Herrin to enjoy peace and quiet, to have in this city a decent place in which to live and bring up families.… This is not something for Williamson County to do, or for the State of Illinois and its troops to do. It’s our task, and we’re going to do it.” The Herrin post of the American Legion, the Rotary Club, and the Lions Club all promised their co-operation.