Bloody Williamson (7 page)

“I do not mean to lecture you,” Hartwell said. “A good many of you are older than I am. I am not going to indulge in any moral sermon. You and I live in this county. You and I have enjoyed the protection of its laws and of the laws of the state and government.…”

He concluded with quiet impressiveness: “There comes a time in the life of all of us when a man will have to take a stand. If a man stands for the things he believes to be right, who can complain? With full confidence in you, I now ask you to go to your jury room to commence the performance of your duty as grand jurors.”

Within two days, the grand jury returned its first indictment, charging Otis Clark, farmer and miner, with murder. Hearing of his indictment, Clark came to Marion and surrendered before the sheriff could serve the warrant for his arrest. Frank Farrington, president of the Illinois District of the U.M.W.A.; Harry Fishwick, vice-president; Walter Nesbit, secretary-treasurer; Hugh Willis, subdistrict board member; A. W. Kerr, chief counsel
for the defense, and associate counsel George R. Stone and A. C. Lewis ostentatiously escorted him from the courthouse to the county jail.

At intervals throughout the next three weeks the grand jury returned additional indictments. By September 23, when it recessed for thirty days, it had brought in a total of 214—forty-four for murder, fifty-eight for conspiracy, fifty-eight for rioting, and fifty-four for assault to murder.

Before recessing, the grand jury filed a report. After reviewing what had happened on June 22 and the preceding days, the jurors made some pointed observations. The sheriff—“holder of a card in the Miners’ Union and a candidate for county treasurer”—had refused to ask for troops and had taken no adequate measures to preserve the peace, although he could not have been unaware of the strikers’ plans to attack and close the mine. The Adjutant General’s office had tried to shift responsibility to the sheriff, and had not taken decisive action to prevent disorder. The laxity of the police in the towns where stores were looted for firearms was deplorable. John L. Lewis’s telegram advising that members of the steamshovelmen’s union be treated as common strikebreakers was quoted in full, and although no comment was offered, the jury pointed out that preparations for the attack on the mine followed its publication. The Southern Illinois Coal Company had been within its legal rights in resuming operations, but “was either woefully ignorant of the danger of its operations or blindly determined to risk strife and conflict if profits could be made.”

In view of the fact that the labor press was to make much of the grand jury’s failure to indict anyone for the killings on the day before the massacre, one paragraph of the report deserves quotation in full:

To the press of the country the action of the grand jury and its outspoken report came as a surprise. Editors who had condemned Williamson County and the state of Illinois for inaction reversed themselves overnight. Delos Duty (“splendid name”), Attorney General Brundage, and the members of the grand jury deserved the thanks of the entire country for their “noble vindication of the law.” What was more, the law could be expected to operate effectively in the trial of those against whom indictments had been brought. “America is still America,” the
New Haven Journal-Courier
proclaimed “… and the flag lifts its drooping folds.”

Labor and the labor press, on the other hand, were bitter. The grand jury had played into the hands of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and other organizations whose purpose was not to bring murderers to justice but to smash union labor. A. W. Kerr, chief counsel for the defense, struck the keynote in a statement that he issued two days after the grand jury filed its report. That document, he charged, bore “all the ear-marks” of having been prepared by the Attorney General in collaboration with the officials of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce. The Attorney General had taken “so-called massacres” in different parts of the state with complacency: not until violence took on a capital-labor aspect did he become aroused. And the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, Kerr charged, was an organization “whose only record is that of an effort to destroy organized labor; to break
the morale of those organizations; to take little children out of school before their time; to give less food to the wives and children of Illinois.”

Labor papers repeated Kerr’s theme. “American capital is getting ready to stage a bloodier orgy than ever was staged on the industrial arena of this country,” one editor announced. Another sneered: “It’s a Roman holiday for the union haters and all talented folk who can get their feet in the slush fund.” Still others pounced on the failure of the grand jury to return indictments for the killings on the day before the massacre. The Illinois Chamber of Commerce had obtained 214 indictments against workers, commented
The Worker
, of New York, without “one indictment being returned against a mine owner or any of his retinue,” while the
Minneapolis Labor Review
pointed out caustically that “this grand jury that indicted the union miners refused to indict those, who on the day previous to the engagement at Herrin, had shot down and murdered unarmed unionists, who were attempting to reach the mine officials for a conference”—ignoring the grand jury’s statement that the miners’ attorneys had refused to offer any evidence on which indictments might be based.

Herrin made its attitude toward the indicted men plain by actions rather than words. When the defendants were arraigned on September 25, Judge Hartwell announced that eight would be held without bail, while the others would be released on bonds ranging from five to twenty thousand dollars each. Eighty-six citizens of Herrin promptly stepped forward and signed bonds aggregating $410,000. Writing down their names, the judge remarked that it was like taking the census.

One week after the arraignment Ignatz Kubens, a Lester employee from Chicago who had been shot at the powerhouse fence, died in the Herrin hospital, bringing the total number of massacre victims to twenty-three—three union miners and twenty guards and strikebreakers. His death led to forty-eight additional indictments when the grand jury convened in late
October for its final meeting at the end of its month’s recess.

In the Williamson County jail the eight defendants who were held there escaped the worst rigors of confinement. The Illinois miners’ union furnished fans to keep them comfortable; a Herrin local donated a Victrola and a supply of records. From time to time friends brought delicacies to supplement the prison fare, and the wives of the married prisoners took turns at cooking chicken dinners with all the fixin’s.

November 1922–June 1923

O
N THE
morning of November 8, 1922, crowds pushed into the Williamson County courthouse as soon as the sheriff unlocked the doors. Long before ten a.m., when the trial of eight men charged with the murder of Howard Hoffman, Lester mine guard, was to begin, spectators had filled the circuit courtroom on the second floor. If they noticed their surroundings at all, they saw nothing incongruous in features that visiting correspondents were describing in dispatches sent out to the entire country—the cracked plaster of the walls and ceiling, the flyspecked campaign poster of President Harding draped with a far-from-fresh American flag, the signs admonishing against spitting hanging over cuspidors that resounded with an almost continuous fusil-lade of tobacco juice. In this room justice had been measured out, by local standards, for more than thirty years, and the people were used to it.

As the clock struck ten the bailiff called for order. Judge Hartwell, youthful, debonair, casually but immaculately dressed,
walked from his chambers to the bench and asked the regular panel of jurors to come forward. Before there could be a response the state requested an hour’s recess for the purpose of preparing a motion. At eleven o’clock, when court reconvened, the motion was made and granted: indictments against all the defendants except Otis Clark, Bert Grace, Peter Hiller, Joseph Carnaghi, and Leva Mann were nol-prossed. Court adjourned until afternoon.

After lunch—“dinner” in the Marion of 1922—the first panel of veniremen stood before the bench, and the attorneys began to ask their interminable questions. This man was rejected because he had formed an opinion in the case, this one because he did not believe in the death penalty, this one because he was a relative of a defendant, this one was challenged peremptorily. The day dragged to its close without a juror in the box.

Many such days followed. The defendants, keenly alert in the beginning, read newspapers or dozed in their chairs, the clerk of the court lost himself in adventure magazines, the court reporter studied the
Ladies’ Home Journal
until even the new styles lost their interest. But one by one, jurymen were accepted. On December 8, exactly one month after the trial began, and after 220 veniremen had been examined, the jury was completed. Judge Hartwell set December 13 as the date for opening statements.

On that morning the defendants were brought into the courtroom early. Otis Clark, forty or thereabouts, of medium height and weight, bearing himself with habitual soberness, looked as much the insurance salesman (which he had been) as the miner (which he was). Bert Grace was all animation, calling to his friends and exchanging jokes with them. Neatly dressed, his thinning hair prematurely gray, he could have passed for a traveling salesman as easily as for a coal miner. Peter Hiller, young, round-faced, stolid, bore himself like a garage mechanic on a Sunday outing, and with no more concern. Joe Carnaghi’s black hair and olive skin confirmed his Italian parentage; his pleasant, good-humored expression explained his popularity in the community.
By contrast, Leva Mann’s grave face seemed almost misanthropic as he sat with one knee in his big muscular hands waiting for the proceedings to begin.

“There is little to tell about them [the defendants],” Philip Kinsley wrote, “because they are ordinary men and have led ordinary lives. They are Americans, proud of their country, proud of the power of their union. There is no tinge of ‘red’ about them. They are not of the bolshevik persuasion. They are not ‘wild, ignorant foreigners.’ They are conservative and commonplace, an indistinguishable part of the herd washed from the main current by accident.”

Conservative and commonplace, too, were the jurymen whom State’s Attorney Duty faced when he rose to make his opening statement. One of the twelve was a miner; the others were farmers, though two had worked in mines. The youngest was twenty-seven, the oldest fifty-six; their average age was forty-four. Such names as Swanner, Weaver, Riddle, and Cox testified to their “American” lineage.

Duty opened by reviewing the events of June 21 and June 22. Not until he outlined what the state expected to prove did his high-pitched voice become tense. The state would show, he asserted, that Otis Clark was one of the two men who led McDowell to his death, and that he was the leader who gave the order to fire, by the fence in the powerhouse woods. It would show that Bert Grace took part in the hangings and shootings in the Harrison woods, and that he was the man in the Herrin cemetery who threatened to shoot anyone who should attempt to give water to the wounded. It would show that Leva Mann, Joe Carnaghi, and Peter Hiller were participants in the killings at the cemetery, and that it was Hiller who cut the throats of the dying strikebreakers.

Kerr rose to reply to Duty. Heavyset, fatherly, he had endeared himself to union labor by his defense of the copper miners in the Calumet strike of 1913; the defendants and the miners’ union looked to him with complete confidence. As he described
the early days of coal mining in Illinois—the low wages, long hours, hazardous working-conditions, the uphill pull of the diggers to better themselves—the intensity of the zealot supplanted his customary graciousness.