Bloody Williamson (25 page)

May 1924–January 1925

T
WENTY-FIVE YEARS
ago the motorist traveling from Marion to East St. Louis drove northward until he came to an improved east-and-west road known as the Atlantic-Pacific Highway, which he followed to his destination. The highway crossed the Kaskaskia River a few miles beyond the little town of Okawville, traversing a stretch of country dreary even in springtime. Tangled trees and underbrush lined both sides of the road, and backwater from the river lay stagnant in the ditches. No one lived there.

On May 23, 1924, Young, accompanied by his wife—he had married again after his divorce—was driving to East St. Louis in the big Lincoln car that had become almost as well known as he was. As he entered the lonely road through the Kaskaskia bottoms a Dodge that had been following him started to pass on the left. When it drew abreast its occupants poured a volley of shots into the Lincoln. Mrs. Young slumped forward. Young skidded to a stop and jumped from the door to fire at the Dodge, now speeding into the distance. Instead, he collapsed. He had been hit in the knee, and one leg was useless.

In a short time a passing motorist found the wounded couple
and took Mrs. Young to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Belleville. Young followed in his own car, with another man driving. Mrs. Young, hit in the face by shotgun pellets, was in serious condition; Young’s knee had been shattered. Surgeons operated at once. Both patients would recover, they announced, although Mrs. Young would certainly lose the sight of one eye, and perhaps of both.

Word of the attack flashed through southern Illinois. In Williamson County, Klansmen swore that the outrage would be avenged. During the evening of the 23rd a report reached Herrin that Young’s assailants were on the way to that city. A member of the city police force hastily “deputized” a large number of Klansmen, who took up posts on the roads at the edge of town. Throughout the night and the following morning they stopped and searched all cars.

About ten a.m. word came that a side-curtained Dodge touring car had just passed through Carterville at high speed and that it was headed in the direction of Herrin. The “deputy police” on the Carterville road were warned to be on the lookout. In a few minutes the car came in view. The road guards, pistols in hand, signaled it to stop. The occupants responded with a burst of speed and a volley of shots, which the Klansmen answered. An instant later the Dodge crashed into another car on the road. Two men crawled from the wreckage and ran. Klan pistols brought both to the ground. One died at the Herrin hospital a half hour later; the other, not seriously wounded, was held there under guard.

The dead man was identified as Jack Skelcher. He had been arrested for bootlegging during the Klan raids, and was under indictment for assault with a deadly weapon at the time of his death. His companion was a hoodlum named Charles Briggs. Several months earlier Briggs had been indicted, with Bernie Shelton, a brother of Carl and Earl, for highway robbery.

A coroner’s jury held that Skelcher had come to his death at the hands of parties unknown.

The murderous assault in the Kaskaskia bottoms and the quick vengeance visited on one of the reputed assailants brought Young into the headlines as never before, and the injuries to his wife, an innocent sufferer, aroused much sympathy. Bulletins came from the sickrooms in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital as regularly as if the patients had been royalty. Other reports indicated that Young’s arrogance, recklessness, and egotism had, if anything, been heightened by the attempt on his life. A small coterie of Klansmen were standing guard around the hospital, a Catholic institution, and the raider’s pistols lay within his reach. The man would not remain silent. On June 12, for no apparent reason other than to keep himself in the public eye, he released the text of a letter he had written three weeks earlier to W. W. Anderson, head of the federal prohibition forces in Illinois. There he charged that hundreds of saloons and stills were operating in Madison and St. Clair counties, and threatened that if the officials did not act soon, he and Klansmen under his leadership would clean them up. The laxity of U.S. District Attorney Potter, he implied, was primarily responsible for the deplorable situation. Copies of the letter were sent to Illinois Congressmen, ministers, and others active in “law enforcement.”

Potter replied by pointing out that Madison County was not in his district, and citing the record his office had made in convictions for violation of the liquor law. Stung, Young issued a wild statement from the hospital in which he charged that Potter had been “fixed” by the bootleggers, that those who had been arrested were allowed to plead guilty and were let off with light fines, and that the district attorney “had done everything within his power to obstruct the officers in the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment in Williamson County.”

Within two weeks Young made another public display of bad judgment. This time the occasion was a hearing before a justice of the peace at Carlyle, the county seat of Clinton County, in which the assault on him and his wife had taken place. Early in June he had sworn out warrants for attempted
murder not only against Briggs but also against Carl and Earl Shelton, who, he charged, were the other occupants of the car from which assassins’ bullets were fired on May 23. The two brothers voluntarily surrendered to the sheriff of Clinton County and were admitted to bail. On June 26 they were to appear at the county seat for a preliminary hearing.

The biggest crowd in Carlyle’s history gathered for the event. The courtroom was packed, and hundreds were turned away. Fifty deputies, each armed with a shotgun, stood guard. Shortly after two o’clock Young arrived, not alone, or with a small escort, but accompanied by thirty autoloads of Klansmen. Most of the cars were decorated with American flags. Many of the Klansmen carried arms, which the sheriff compelled them to leave in his office.

It was a spectacular performance, but many saw it as a brazen effort to give notice that the Klan meant to see its own concepts of justice carried out.

The hearing took little time. Without any show of doubt Young identified Briggs and the Shelton brothers as members of the party that attacked him and his wife on May 23. The justice bound the three men over to the November grand jury, and then released them on bond.
^*

No matter how much Young’s swaggering, brash behavior pleased his Klan followers in Williamson County, the practical
men who headed the statewide organization knew that they could no longer retain him as an official and employee. In early June, as soon as he was permanently discharged from St. Elizabeth’s,
^†
he was dismissed from his position in East St. Louis. At the same time the Grand Dragon for Illinois, Charles G. Palmer, wrote a public letter to District Attorney Potter in which he stated that Young’s intemperate charges did not represent the official attitude of the Klan and apologized for his “exhibition of impetuosity.”

Nor was this the only blow. Ever since spring Young had been trying to have the cases pending against him as the result of the liquor raids—robbery, assault, and so forth—transferred to the United States District Court on the ground that he was a deputized federal officer at the time the alleged offenses occurred. Potter, of course, tried to block the move, but he did ask the Attorney General for instructions. That officer and his assistants
were no more anxious to defend the Illinois troublemaker than the District Attorney, but they made a thorough investigation of the merits of his contention. Gus J. Simons reported that he deputized Young for the raid on December 22, 1923, but that—and this was contrary to statements given out at the time—he had not deputized him for the raids that were staged on December 31, 1923, January 5, 1924, January 14, or later. Since the alleged offenses had been committed during the later raids, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General, decided that Young’s defense was not a responsibility of the Department of Justice. Accordingly the District Attorney moved that Young’s cases be remanded to the state courts, and Judge Lindley, sitting in East St. Louis, ruled in Potter’s favor on all except two indictments. These, growing out of the raid of December 22, could be tried in the federal courts; all others in which Young was a defendant would have to be heard in Williamson County, where both judges—Bowen and Hartwell—were definitely hostile.

From this time on Young acted with complete abandon. Two performances in quick succession were typical. One took place on July 31 at East St. Louis, where he had been summoned to appear for a preliminary hearing on an attempted-murder charge. Young arrived with an escort of hundreds of Klansmen, who proceeded to take over the Labor Temple. Instead of appearing in court he sent for the justice of the peace to come to the Temple for the proceedings. That official supinely obeyed. After being bound over to the grand jury, Young ordered the corridors of the building cleared while he made out his bond, and his followers sprang to do his bidding. Then he emerged to receive the cheers of his private army.

The other incident occurred in Marion two weeks later. Learning that a charge of carrying concealed weapons had been filed against him there, he appeared, late in the afternoon, to give bond. Three carloads of his henchmen, armed with pistols, rifles, and a portable machine-gun, accompanied him; he
himself wore his pearl-handled automatics. The group strode into the clerk’s office as if they were officers of the law. When Young saw that the information against him was sworn to by Ora Thomas, he cursed the clerk for issuing the capias. The violent argument that followed attracted a score of spectators, who watched in fascination even as they looked for cover in the event that someone pulled a pistol.

The next morning Young and his gang appeared again. As the little caravan circled the public square Galligan leaned from the window of his office and called out derisively: “Hello, Young!”

Young stopped his car and yelled back: “Come out here and say that, you dirty crook!”

Parking near the sheriff’s office, he exchanged profane epithets with Galligan for several minutes. Again a cluster of bystanders watched expectantly for an outbreak of gunfire.

Tension, in fact, had reached a point that made everyone fearful of another eruption. The primary cause, aside from Young’s inflammatory antics, was the session of the Herrin City Court scheduled for August 18. Twelve cases growing out of the killing of Cagle and the riot that followed were set for trial at that time.

During the first days of the term, several cases against Klansmen were dismissed, and in one or two the defendants were acquitted. Then, on August 25, the judge called a larceny case in which Young was one of three defendants. His attorneys asked for a continuance on the ground that he had gone to Atlanta, Georgia, for medical treatment, and supported their motion with affidavits from two physicians of that city. State’s Attorney Duty, prosecuting, contested the motion. Judge Bowen found for Duty and ordered Young’s bonds, totaling thirty-nine thousand dollars, forfeited.

The tension tightened. Klansmen sent hundreds of telegrams to Governor Small urging him to intervene in Williamson County. The sheriff, according to many of those who sent wires,
had deputized a large number of gunmen so as to dominate the Herrin court while Young’s cases were being tried. Small made a blanket reply in an interview at Springfield: it was the sheriff’s duty to preserve order, and the State of Illinois had already spent as much as it intended to in the turbulent county.

But the Klan had other ways of exerting pressure. One of these was tried in late August, when the Klan held a big picnic at the county fairgrounds. The day of festivity came to a close with a parade consisting of floats, bands, a ladies’ drum corps, and hundreds of cars decorated with flags and white crosses. The parade over, five thousand people assembled to listen to the speakers and to participate in initiation ceremonies for both men and women.

Galligan, infuriated by the performance, gave out a bitter interview:

“It’s a shame that the Ku Klux keep stirring up trouble.… Instead of letting things get quiet they stir up trouble with this parade. Two men can’t get together on the street but what they start talking about the Klan. This business is ruining our lodges, it’s hurting the churches, it hurts neighborhoods—even brothers won’t speak to each other because of this Ku Klux business. Until the Ku Klux Klan is forgotten there will be no peace in Williamson County.”

On the day this interview was published the case of the
People
vs.
Carl and Earl Shelton
for the murder of Caesar Cagle came up for trial. By midmorning of the next day the jury was completed. But instead of introducing testimony, Duty moved that the case be dismissed. He took this course, he explained, because the sole witness who had connected the Sheltons with the Cagle killing had disappeared, and therefore the state had no case. Besides, Tim Cagle, father of the dead man, had become convinced that the two defendants had nothing to do with the murder of his son.