Bloody Williamson (3 page)

Without protest from the crowd, one of the mob urinated in the faces of the victims.

About midmorning, when it was perfectly safe to do so, Sheriff Melvin Thaxton of Williamson County, and one deputy, took up the trail of the mob. Wherever they found dead and wounded men they called for ambulances and undertakers. Those still alive were taken to the Herrin Hospital; the dead were sent to a vacant storeroom in the same city. There they were stripped, washed, laid on pine boxes, and covered with sheets. Then the doors were opened, and for hours men and women (often with babies in their arms) filed past. Some spat on the corpses; some said to the children whose hands they held: “Look at the dirty bums who tried to take the bread out of your mouths!”

Late June in southern Illinois is hot, and the door of the improvised morgue had no screen. Long before nightfall flies blackened the wounds that still seeped in the eighteen bodies.
^†

September 1921-June 1922

I
N THE
immediate sense, the succession of events that led to the bloody morning of June 22, 1922, began in the preceding September. Early in that month the Southern Illinois Coal Company opened a strip mine
^*
midway between Herrin and Marion in Williamson County, Illinois. About the first of November the mine shipped its first coal. From then until April 1, 1922, when the soft-coal miners of the country went on strike, it operated regularly. About fifty men, all United Mine Workers, were employed.

The Southern Illinois Coal Company was owned by William J. Lester, then living in Cleveland, Ohio. Lester, Cornell graduate and civil engineer by profession, had had some eight years’ experience in strip mines, but this was his first independent venture. A promoter at heart, a man of energy and determination,
he did not intend to see it fail at the outset. Moreover, he was heavily in debt for his equipment, and could not afford a long period of idleness. In his predicament he turned to the local union officials. In order to keep men at work, and perhaps for less laudable reasons—rumors of a “fix” have persisted to this day—they gave him permission to repair the two steamshovels used for stripping the overlying earth from the coal. This finished, they made a further concession: he could uncover as much coal as he chose on condition that he refrained from loading and shipping.

This in itself was an important privilege, for the operator who could fill orders the minute the strike ended would have an advantage over his competitors. But Lester was not satisfied. By early June he had sixty thousand tons of coal uncovered, and with the price pushed sky-high by the strike, sixty thousand tons of coal meant a profit of a quarter million dollars. He could not resist the temptation. In spite of the remonstrances of friends and other operators, who warned him of certain bloodshed, he decided to load and ship. “It’s legal,” he insisted, “and I need the money. Why shouldn’t I?”

On June 13 the Southern Illinois Coal Company dismissed its union miners. Two days later a contingent of some fifty men arrived at the mine and were put up in bunk cars. About half of them were private mine-guards, hated by union men as professional strikebreakers. The others were steam shovel operators, locomotive engineers and firemen, and commissary workers. All came from Chicago agencies.

On June 16 Lester notified the Burlington Railroad, which had a spur to the mine, that sixteen cars of coal were ready for shipment. The first train crew refused to take them out, but a second crew came in and hauled them away.

Word that Lester was mining and shipping coal on an open-shop basis flashed through Williamson County and near-by mining camps. The striking miners could hardly believe that any operator would be so foolhardy. Throughout Illinois, the miners
were so thoroughly organized that no serious attempt had been made to operate non-union for fifteen years. Moreover, the locals in Williamson and the adjoining county of Franklin were the union’s citadel. There lived half of the state’s sixty thousand miners; to a man they held union cards. Unionism had permeated every craft and industry, so that the miners had the active sympathy of the entire laboring population. Even the merchants and bankers depended so much upon the good will of organized labor that they were hardly less ardent in their sympathies than they would have been as union members.

The loyalty of members of the United Mine Workers of America to their organization had a deep and durable quality impossible to overestimate. Investigators for the United States Coal Commission, probing the causes of the Herrin Massacre a year after it happened, contrasted conditions in Williamson County before and after unionization.

Then, in 1898 and 1899, came the union.

Small wonder, the Coal Commission men implied, that Williamson County miners “believe in the union, for they think it brought them out of the land of bondage into the promised land
when their government had been careless or indifferent to their needs.”

When Lester started to ship coal, the striking miners saw his action as a threat to all they had gained in a quarter of a century. If he succeeded in operating with nonunion labor, other coal companies would follow his example. The union would be broken, and before long there would be a reversion to the conditions that prevailed before the days of organization.

The man had already accumulated a burden of dislike. Farmers in the vicinity of the mine resented the fact that he had closed a road they had used for thirty years, even though he had built a detour to replace it. And when guards took up posts along the detour, which skirted the edge of his property, irritation turned into hostility. For several days after June 16, when they first went on duty, the guards behaved with the utmost arrogance. One old resident, picking berries by the roadside, suddenly found the barrel of a revolver against his ribs.

“What the God-damned hell are you doing here?” the guard snarled. “Beat it, and that God-damned quick!”

A farmer who lived in the vicinity was stopped several times. When he threatened to go to the State’s Attorney and swear out a warrant, the guard snorted: “You and the State’s Attorney can go to hell.”

A deputy sheriff stopped near the mine, his car stalled by a blowout. He flashed his badge, only to have a guard snap at him: “We don’t give a damn if you’re the President of the United States; you move on.”

As another local resident drove along the detour, two guards signaled him to stop and ordered him out of his car.

“He’s a God-damned son-of-a-bitchin’ spy,” one remarked. “Yes, that’s just what he is,” the other replied.

They slapped the man in the face, punched him with gun barrels, took his small change, and told him to move on.

“If you ever cheep this I’ll bump you off,” one of them warned him.

Lester’s superintendent, C. K. McDowell, was almost as arrogant as the guards. When a local man went to the mine to collect a bill, McDowell told him:

“We came down here to work this mine, union or no union. We will work it with blood if necessary, and you tell all the God-damned union men to stay away if they don’t want trouble.”

A powder salesman who visited the mine a day or two after the strikebreakers moved in heard the same kind of swaggering talk. When he reminded Lester of earlier attempts to operate nonunion that had ended in violence and failure, the latter replied:

“Our operation is different. We use less men and can pay a certain amount for protection, and if the shovel is blown up we will get $800 a day insurance.”

At that moment McDowell came into the office.

“If McDowell doesn’t make me $7,500 a day,” Lester commented, “I’ll run him over the hill. Isn’t that right, Mac?” he added. The superintendent nodded.

A few minutes later Lester told the salesman: “I’ve broken strikes before and I’ll break this one.”
^†

Talk such as this, with the insolent actions of the guards, was intended to frighten the striking miners and their sympathizers—which meant nearly the entire population—into docility. Actually, it only intensified existing fears and hatreds.

That disorder was likely to be the result of Lester’s venture was apparent to experienced observers from the beginning. One of these was Colonel Samuel N. Hunter, personnel officer in the office of the Adjutant General at Springfield. Prior to his appointment in 1920, Hunter had been active in politics in Perry County, which almost touches Williamson on the northwest; hence he
had had experience in gauging public opinion, and he knew the temper of southern Illinois. When he picked up the
Chicago Tribune
shortly after noon on Saturday, June 17, and read that the Southern Illinois Coal Company had started to ship coal, whatever hope he had had for a pleasant weekend vanished.

At the moment Adjutant General Carlos E. Black was at Camp Logan in the northern part of the state; the Assistant Adjutant General was on vacation. In their absence Hunter was the ranking officer. Disturbed by the
Tribune
story, he tried to reach Black by long-distance but failed. Then he called State’s Attorney Delos Duty of Williamson County. From what Duty told him he concluded that the situation there was serious. Len Small, the governor, was at Waukegan, also in the northern part of the state, defending a suit for misappropriation of funds. After a talk with the governor’s secretary, Hunter decided to go at once to Marion, the Williamson County seat. He wired the State’s Attorney that he would arrive at noon the next day, and asked him to arrange a conference to be attended by himself, Sheriff Thaxton, and representatives of the Southern Illinois Coal Company and the striking miners. Then he telegraphed Major Robert W. Davis, a capable National Guard officer who lived in Carbondale, to join him on the train to Marion.

Hunter and Davis arrived at the county seat shortly after noon on Sunday, June 18. They called on the sheriff, who outlined the situation for them, and spent the rest of the afternoon on the streets forming their own estimate of public sentiment. That evening, with a Marion police officer, they went out to the mine. Guards stopped their car but recognized their uniforms and took them to McDowell. The superintendent told Hunter that no one had threatened him in the operation of the mine, but he asked the Guard officer for a company of troops. Then he could discharge his private guards and save money. If Hunter would agree, he would make him an “interesting proposition.” Hunter advised him to close down the mine: he was courting serious danger by using strikebreakers in a union stronghold. McDowell
replied that he knew his rights and intended to mine coal.

On Monday morning, June 19, Hunter and Davis met with Duty and the men he had called together—Lester, A. B. McLaren, a local mine-operator, and the sheriff. No one represented the striking miners. Both Duty and Hunter pleaded with Lester to shut down the mine, Duty warning him that he would lose his investment and perhaps his life if he persisted. Lester was obdurate. In the course of the conference he asked the sheriff to deputize the guards at the mine. Thaxton refused, but promised ample protection. After the meeting Hunter took Lester aside, told him that he did not believe the sheriff would make any effort to prevent trouble, and again urged him to close the mine.

“I’ll be damned if I will,” Lester answered.

As soon as the conference ended, Hunter reported by telephone to Adjutant General Black, now in Springfield. He informed his superior that the feeling among the miners in Marion and near-by towns was intense, and that the local officials sympathized with the union men. The fact that Sheriff Thaxton was a candidate for the office of county treasurer did not help the situation. With the labor vote amounting to seventy-five or eighty per cent of the total, Hunter doubted that the sheriff would exert himself to protect the property of a mine being worked by strikebreakers. In Hunter’s opinion, troops would be needed, and he recommended that two companies be held in readiness.