Bloody Williamson (28 page)

Fortunately, the truth came out quickly. The dead man turned out to be a ne’er-do-well from a near-by town, unconnected with either faction. His hat had been stolen from Galligan a few days earlier, and had no significance. The only inference that could be drawn from his behavior was that Herrin was a poor place for a man in his cups to flash a pistol.

Though the killing almost led to a riot, its result was salutary. Realizing how narrowly another disaster had been missed, the responsible members of the county board decided that a solution for the county’s troubles was imperative.

For two days the supervisors listened to leading citizens, Boswell and Galligan among them, and wrangled with one another. Then they decided to send a committee to Springfield in an effort to induce the governor to remove the sheriff from office. Governor Small listened to the delegation and turned down their demand: Galligan had given no cause, under the law, for which he could be removed. Then the governor called in Attorney General Carlstrom, Adjutant General Black, and Galligan (on hand to argue his own case if need be) and tackled the job of effecting a compromise. Five hours later an agreement was reached. It provided:

1.
That Galligan would turn over his office to one of his deputies, Randall Parks, who would have unrestricted authority.

2.
That Galligan would leave Williamson County at once and remain away “until and unless, after conference with the Governor of the State of Illinois, it is agreed conditions are such as to permit his return.”

3.
That the sheriff would receive his full salary for the remainder of his term.

4.
That the county board would take steps to revoke all gun permits and to induce citizens with arms in their possession to surrender them.

5.
That in the future all raids should be made by regularly constituted or elected county officers.

All who were present signed the document embodying these provisions.

Back in Marion, the supervisors met to ratify or reject the work of their committee. They invited the public to attend the meeting and the public accepted—widows whose husbands had been killed in the feuding, men who had argued the questions at issue with a pistol in each hand, graybeards who had participated only to the extent of talking endlessly on the courthouse square. And the public let its feelings be known. Abe Hicks, the Herrin justice of the peace who had issued pistol permits by the wholesale, wanted to know what assurance of protection law-abiding citizens would have if they turned in their arms. Klansmen objected to Randall Parks on the ground that he was a second cousin to Delos Duty. The payment of Galligan’s salary during his absence rubbed many the wrong way. “I don’t care if Galligan goes to Niagara Falls and jumps off,” one objector said. “I don’t want him to go to Cub-y and drink that Cuban whiskey at the taxpayers’ expense. I don’t want him to go to Hiwaya or any of them places!”

In the end it was a speech by Attorney General Carlstrom, who had come down from Springfield for just such a contingency, that was decisive. After everyone had spoken he took the floor. Deferentially, but with impressive earnestness, he told his audience:

“I hope we can go back to the day when confidence is placed in the courts and processes of the law. Only then can we remove the necessity of an armed camp in this county. I don’t want to be understood as making a threat, but if it should be necessary to declare martial law here values of property will go down below the present level and the county must bear the cost. Martial law would bankrupt Williamson County.”

In spite of his disavowal it was a threat, and the supervisors
knew it. They retired, argued for a seemly interval, and returned to announce that they had ratified the agreement unanimously.

A few days later Galligan departed. Before leaving he gave a statement to the newspapers: he had signed the abdication agreement in good faith and intended to live up to it, but if the other party failed to keep its word he would consider himself relieved of all obligations and would return.

Three months later, without advance notice, he walked into the county jail and announced that he was resuming his office. He had missed his friends, he told startled reporters, and wanted to come home. Yes, he said in reply to inquiries, he had seen the governor a few days ago, and had encountered no serious objection to his return. For his part, he believed that the recent township and municipal elections (in which anti-Klan candidates had been successful) proved that the people were tired of strife and that there would be no more trouble.

Galligan’s return might easily have touched off another explosion had it not been for the fact that Herrin was about to turn to a familiar but neglected help in time of trouble—the old-time religion.

For several weeks Harold S. Williams, a young evangelist whom “Gypsy” Smith had converted only two years earlier, had been conducting a series of revival meetings at Cairo. The Rev. John Meeker, who had heard of his phenomenal success, asked him on what terms he would come to Herrin. Williams made only one stipulation: that he should have the full co-operation of the other ministers. Meeker assured him that that would be his as a matter of course. Yet when the minister returned to Herrin and talked with his fellow preachers, he found them apathetic.

Then Hal W. Trovillion, editor and publisher of the
Herrin News
, intervened.

Trovillion reinforced his plea with a check and the promise of the full support of his newspaper. Williams agreed to come.

The first of the revival meetings took place on the evening of May 24, 1925. On behalf of the thousands who packed the gymnasium of the Herrin High School, Mayor McCormack welcomed the evangelist and his party. Williams won his audience immediately. Three of the four Protestant ministers—all except Story, who was absent—pledged their support. The manager of the Hippodrome and Annex theaters offered the Annex for noon-day prayer-meetings.

For the next six weeks practically every business house in Herrin closed daily for prayer meetings, many of which were held in stores. A big poster advertising the revival, hanging from a coatrack in the European Hotel cigar store over the very spot where Young fell, indicated the spirit that permeated the town. At the evening services more than a thousand citizens, including a sprinkling of gunmen, feudists, gamblers, and bootleggers, declared themselves ready to embrace Christ’s way of life. Even Galligan attended frequently. On one of his visits Williams asked those who were present—and they numbered some five thousand—to recognize the sheriff as the symbol of law and order in Williamson County. The audience rose and cheered, and several hundred men, including some of Galligan’s inveterate enemies, pressed forward to shake his hand.

While the revival meetings were in progress, State’s Attorney Boswell made a contribution to the growing wave of good feeling
by asking that 145 pending cases, all of which had originated in the activities of S. Glenn Young, be stricken from the docket. To support his motion he pointed out that in several of the cases that had already been tried juries had been unable to arrive at verdicts, and admitted that in those which remained the evidence was so flimsy that convictions could not be expected. His motion was granted.
^†

Another event that had a mollifying effect was the suspension of the
Herrin Herald
, Klan newspaper. As the revival drew to a close the
Herald’s
creditors forced it into bankruptcy, and the
sheriff—with relish, one may be sure—attached the property.

After the last of Williams’s services, when cool judgment had supplanted emotional fervor, all appearances indicated that the revival had accomplished its purpose. Local citizens, even Klan leaders, assumed that the Klan was dead. Hal W. Trovillion, taking stock, expressed the belief that “we are now set well back on the road,” and that “the church houses are rechristened once more as the House of God.” A group of Illinois legislators came to the opinion that the Golden Rule had replaced the blue-steel pistol as the arbiter of honor. And a staff correspondent of the
New York Herald Tribune
, visiting Herrin to investigate the remarkable transformation that had been reported as having taken place there, concluded that Williams had really worked a re-formation—that he had “taken the guns out of Herrin’s hip pockets and replaced them with clean handkerchiefs,” and had put a “kindly smile” on the faces of people who had worn “grouchy frowns” for years.

Yet those who knew Williamson County best had reservations. Its people held grudges. A resident still had to be careful of what he said about the Bloody Vendetta, although half a century had passed since that feud had come to an end. Even Trovillion, justly proud of his part in arranging the Williams revival, inserted a warning in the pamphlet, “Persuading God Back to Herrin,” that he published to record the community’s attempt at regeneration: “It may not all be over yet—the volcano may not only send up smoke from time to time but it may again spout destruction and death.…”

The volcano did, in one final, convulsive eruption.

The occasion was a series of elections held in April 1926. The first, for township officers, took place on the 6th; the second, for members of the Herrin school board, was held four days later. In both, the results proved that the Klan had come to life and had succeeded in electing members or sympathizers to almost every office. By the 13th, when candidates for county and state officers were to be nominated, the old familiar tension was again
apparent. Klansmen strutted about Herrin with chips on their shoulders; anti-Klansmen sullenly oiled automatics and filled cartridge belts.

On election day tempers were taut, nerves jumpy. Nevertheless John Smith, a watcher at one of the polls, recklessly challenged a number of Catholic voters, including a nun who had lived in Herrin for twenty years. Anti-Klan watchers objected violently, then fists flew. Special deputies rushed up and separated the disputants, and Smith retired from the polling-place to his garage.

Commenting on the incident in its afternoon edition, the
Marion Post
asserted that the fight had aroused little excitement in Herrin, and that no further outbreaks were expected. But it warned: “There is a funny feeling in the air … and we advise people to stay away from the crowds that swarm after a little excitement during the pitch of election battle. Both Klan and Anti-Klan are reported heavily armed now for any new developments.”

The involvement of John Smith gave reason for apprehension. Somehow this garage owner, a relative newcomer—he had lived in Herrin since 1918—had attracted to himself the same fervent hatred that the anti-Klan forces had lavished on Young. Yet he was a man of altogether different mold. Smith was mild-mannered where Young swaggered, cheerful where Young was dour—his bright blue eyes twinkled with almost every word—facile and pungent in his soft Kentucky speech, and neither a church member nor an advocate of prohibition on principle. The only qualities he shared with Young were stubbornness and the ability to inspire loyalty. He knew himself to be a marked man, and for months had had armed guards stationed in his garage night and day.

Early in the afternoon Smith made his second mistake of the day—he left his garage for the street. As he emerged, a car filled with anti-Klansmen drove past. One of its occupants—“Blackie”
Armes, a known gangster—fired at him. The bullet grazed Smith’s neck, and he ran back to the garage.

As if the pistol shot were a signal, firing began from the direction of the European Hotel, two short blocks away, and bullets shattered the windows and chipped the walls of Smith’s building. Armed men deployed from cars parked near by. Others worked their way up on foot, all the while pouring a steady rain of bullets into the garage. Now and then a shot was fired in reprisal, but the defenders—Smith’s guards—were too badly outnumbered for effective counterfire.

After fifteen minutes the attackers stopped shooting. Those who had come in cars drove away with motors roaring, those on foot ran. Not a whole pane of glass remained in the building, the outside woodwork was splintered and torn, and many cars in storage were badly damaged. Miraculously, no one had been hit.

Shortly after the attacking party withdrew, twenty guardsmen arrived from Carbondale by truck. (Someone had called for troops as soon as the first shot was fired.) The soldiers, with rifles loaded and bayonets fixed, formed in line before the garage.

The militiamen had hardly taken their positions before the gunmen returned to the attack. Parking their cars a block or so away, they started forward on foot. When they saw the troops they hastily re-entered their automobiles and drove off.

This time, however, they proceeded only as far as the Masonic Temple, where one of the polling-places was located. The drivers stopped in the middle of the street, keeping their engines running. Men armed with rifles and pistols stepped out and walked toward the poll watchers and loungers, mostly Klansmen, who stood on the Temple lawn. Approaching John Ford, one of the newcomers said to another:

“Here’s one of the sons-of-bitches we’re going to kill.”

He fired and missed, although he was so close that the powder of the charge burned Ford’s face.

A burst of gunfire answered the initial shot. The gunmen,
knowing that the troops would arrive in a minute or two, ran to their cars. In seconds they were out of sight.