Bloody Williamson (5 page)
Authors: Paul M. Angle
Early in the evening Circuit Judge D. T. Hartwell, who had been holding court at Metropolis, reached Marion. During supper his wife told him what had happened, and what threatened. He drove uptown. There he heard all kinds of rumors, but learned nothing except that serious trouble was impending.
Shortly after nine p.m. he found the sheriff in the State’s Attorney’s office. Thaxton and Duty had just come in from investigating the morning’s shooting. In a short time Hugh Willis appeared. He had heard in Herrin, he said, that a group at the Greater Marion Association had induced Lester to shut down the strip mine; he had come to find out about it. Duty located Hunter and asked him to come to his office. After some delay the colonel and Major Davis, who had come over from Carbondale that evening, joined the meeting.
Once again the group faced the problem of putting into effect the truce that had been agreed upon late that afternoon. There was no argument over the terms: the mine was to be shut down, and Lester’s men were to be given safe conduct from the county. The sheriff, they decided, should see that the truce was carried out. Hunter and Hartwell urged him to take his deputies and go
to the mine immediately, and Hunter, Davis, and Hugh Willis offered to accompany him. Thaxton refused: he must have sleep. He would go to the mine, but not until morning. With that the others had to be satisfied. Before the conference ended, Hunter, Davis, and the sheriff agreed to meet at Thaxton’s office at six o’clock the following morning.
Hunter put through a final call to General Black. The truce, he reported, would still go into effect. Troops would not be needed.
After the meeting broke up, Hunter and Davis returned to the office of the Greater Marion Association. There they found Edrington, his wife, and his secretary. For two hours the five people talked about what had been the most eventful day of their lives. As they talked, the sheriff slept. Hugh Willis, back in Herrin, made a little speech to a group in front of the union office. Thaxton, he told them, was a mighty good fellow: they shouldn’t forget him at the election in the fall. At the mine, he said, there was nothing more to do until morning; then the scabs would come out.
“God damn them,” Willis concluded, “they ought to have known better than to come down here; but now that they’re here, let them take what’s coming to them.”
Under their coal cars and behind their barricades of ties lay Lester’s hungry, frightened men. Shortly before dawn two of them slipped out from their place of refuge and brought back pitchers of lukewarm coffee. They remembered later that it was as “bitter as gall.”
At six o’clock on the morning of June 22, Hunter and Davis knocked on the sheriff’s door. No one responded. They waited, walking around in the vicinity to kill time. On the street they heard that the men had come out of the mine, and that some of them had been roughly treated. More than two hours passed before Thaxton made his appearance; he had understood, he said, that he was to meet the officers at eight. Davis told him of the rumors they had heard, and urged that they try to head off the
Lester men and their escort of striking miners before some of the former were killed. The sheriff made light of the possibility, and insisted on proceeding directly to the mine.
It was nine a.m. when the three men, with one of Thaxton’s deputies, reached the mine. All the cars and buildings were on fire. From the crowd they learned that the strikebreakers had surrendered and had been marched off toward Herrin three hours earlier.
After deciding that the mob was beyond control, the party separated. The sheriff and his deputy started for Herrin, Hunter and Davis returned to Marion. There, at 11.15, Hunter telephoned the Adjutant General and reported that the men had surrendered that morning and were on their way to Herrin in accordance with the terms of the truce. When Black informed him that he was certain, from newspaper dispatches, that the terms of the truce had been violated, and that many men had already been killed, Hunter was incredulous.
The two officers picked up Judge Hartwell, drove back to the mine, and started over the route the prisoners had taken. They found the spot where McDowell had been killed, and at the powerhouse woods saw bloodsoaked ground and fragments of flesh and clothing on the barbs of the fence. By that time there was nothing to do but collect the dead bodies, and make sure that those who still lived suffered no more from the mob.
*
In strip mining, or surface mining as operators now prefer to call it, the vein of coal nearest the surface (if no more than fifty feet underground) is uncovered by a giant shovel, after which a smaller shovel is used to break up the coal and load it on trucks or cars. The process is much more economical than shaft mining. In 1922 it was relatively new.
†
If Lester made this statement—and the powder salesman testified under oath that he did—he made it for effect, and without regard for truth. His only experience in strip mining had been as a superintendent in companies controlled by R. H. Sherwood, now of Indianapolis. Mr. Sherwood tells me that no company of his has ever attempted to operate during an authorized strike.
‡
Since John L. Lewis has been accused repeatedly of precipitating the Herrin Massacre, the findings of Theodore Cronyn, representing the
New York Herald,
are pertinent. Cronyn wrote from Herrin on July 11, 1922:
“Officers of the union deny that Lewis’s telegram had any provocative effect whatever or that it was intended to have. Lewis has denied it; his whole organization has denied it. And men who are as free from prejudice as can be found in the county tell the writer that however the telegram may have been construed by those who read it the mine would have been Lewis sent his message.”
One “veteran of Williamson County” told Cronyn:
“Well, you can never make me believe John Lewis intended to have anybody go out and do some killing. I should say he was merely settling a disputed point in the routine of his business. But I will say that John Lewis was unfortunate in his choice of language. Everybody down here knows how the union miners feel about these things.… When Lewis officially told them that those fellows out at Lester’s mine were to be treated like any other strikebreakers I should say it was about the same as saying, ‘Hike out there to the mine and clean ’em out.’ I don’t believe that John Lewis gave the matter enough thought, or may be he didn’t know how bad conditions were down here.”
MASSACRE: THE AFTERMATH
June 1922–October 1922
Where whole communities openly sympathize with ruthless murder of inoffensive people in the exercise of the right to earn a livelihood, and where wholesale murder goes unpunished, it is imperative that public opinion should demand that the strong arm of the law, under fearless officials, take positive action.
General John J. Pershing, July 4, 1922.
N
O EPISODE
in the history of American industrial warfare has ever shocked public opinion more violently than the Herrin Massacre. In country weeklies as well as metropolitan dailies, in papers all the way from Maine to California, editors flayed Herrin, Williamson County, and union labor. The events of June 22, 1922, constituted “the most brutal and horrifying crime that has ever stained the garments of organized labor”; the massacre was “hideous,” an “archdeed of savagery,” a succession of “bestial horrors”; those who took part in it were “unspeakable moral Turks.” “In justice Herrin, Illinois, should be ostracized,” wrote the editor of the
Journal
of Augusta, Maine, in a denunciation representative of hundreds, “shut off from all communication with the outside world and [the people] left to soak in the blood they have spilled … until they learn that this affair is everybody’s business.”
In the Senate of the United States, on June 24, Henry Lee
Myers, Democrat, of Montana, read several newspaper accounts of the Williamson County killings and then declared: “German atrocities of the World War horrified this country from one end to the other; but I doubt if any German atrocities were perpetrated … that were more horrible, more shocking, more inexcusable, than the atrocities of which I have just read.…”
Two days later, in the House of Representatives, Wells Goodykoontz of West Virginia, a Republican, took the floor to say of the massacre: “There were no palliating facts, no mitigating circumstances. No crime ever committed could have been more inhuman or revolting in its nature.…”
If the people of Williamson County had any hope that such reprobation as this might soon lose its virulence, that hope was shattered by the coroner’s jury. After deliberating for a few hours the six jurors, three of whom were union miners, found that all the men killed on June 21 and June 22 except one—Jordie Henderson, a union miner whose death was attributed to Lester’s superintendent—were killed by unknown parties. They also found “that the deaths of the decedents were due to the acts direct and indirect of the officials of the Southern Illinois Coal Company,” and recommended that an investigation be undertaken to fix the blame upon those officers.
The verdict started a new wave of denunciation. Again Senator Myers took the floor, this time to refer to the Herrin killings as “anarchy pure and simple, ruthless defiance of the Federal government and State government … defiance of all constituted law and authority.…
“What is worse,” he concluded, “than the commission of the crime itself is the fact that the united populace of the county where it occurred appears to approve of it. The populace of Williamson County, Illinois, appears to be unitedly and one hundred per cent disloyal to the United States and its Constitution.”
Newspapers, equally bitter, saw similar significance in the finding of the coroner’s jury. The people of Williamson County, the
Chicago Tribune
asserted,
have recognized the conventions by holding an inquest and returning a verdict. Apparently that will be satisfactory to them. The fact that there has not been an arrest for the murders, that there has not been an indictment by the grand jury, that there has not been a charge of murder placed against any living man, means nothing but justification in such a community.
But it means more than that outside the community. It means that here in the heart of the state a community has set itself above the law, and that those within it, who are not party to the massacre, are so intimidated that they ignore the crime and attribute the guilt only to those outside the circle.
“Shall unionism be set above the laws of God and of man?” the
St. Louis Times
asked. “Can any red-handed murderer defend himself by saying: ‘If this had not been done, I would not have slit this helpless captive’s throat?’ ” Others saw in the coroner’s inquest “a travesty of justice … as appalling and as menacing as the crime itself,” “a piece of callous shamelessness and a deliberate taunt flung at the United States,” which “would be regarded as a joke if any humor could attach to the butchery at Herrin.”
In Williamson County many deplored the killings, but outsiders saw only sympathy for the rioters and scorn for the victims. At the funeral of Jordie Henderson a twenty-piece band, two thousand men on foot, and a row of automobiles more than a mile long followed the hearse. Four thousand mourners awaited the casket at the Herrin cemetery. A similar throng attended the last rites for Joe Pitkewicius,
*
also killed by strikebreakers’ bullets on the afternoon of June 21.
(While the funerals of Henderson and Pitkewicius were being held, sixteen bodies were buried in the potter’s field of the Herrin cemetery. As the rough boxes were lowered into graves dug
by union miners, three of Herrin’s four Protestant ministers sang a hymn, and then each said a prayer. A few spectators looked on impassively. After the yellow clay had been piled on top of the caskets, the sexton marked each mound with a plain board bearing the simple inscription: “Died, June 22, 1922.”)
†
More striking evidence of local approbation came from certain southern Illinois newspapers, which incautiously printed stories of the massacre before the nationwide revulsion had become evident. The following eyewitness account, by Editor Robert Drobeck of the
Williamson County Miner
, shocked millions when they read it in a pamphlet circulated by the National Coal Association:
At daybreak the 3,000 armed citizens [surrounding the mine] realizing that the future peace of their county was at stake, formed what has been termed by many, one of the neatest columns of troops ever seen in the vicinity, worked their way into the stronghold of the outlaws and captured those that remained alive. Several of those that were taken from the pit alive were taken to the woods near Herrin, where later they were found dead and dying. There were no riots, merely the citizens of the county acting in the only way left them for the safety of their homes. The faces of the men who were killed in the disturbance are horrible sights. Uncouth, as all crooks must be at the beginning, they were doubly unattractive as seen after justice had triumphed and the county had again resumed its normal peace-time behavior.