Bloody Williamson (9 page)

When court convened at two o’clock Kerr announced that the defense would make no argument, thus cutting off further argument on the part of the state. Judge Hartwell announced a recess until the following morning.

On Thursday, the 18th of January, well over two months since the trial had begun, spectators who crowded the dingy courtroom to capacity listened intently while the judge delivered his charge. At 11.15 the jurors, their faces solemn, filed into the jury room.

Hours passed. Friends and families of the prisoners sat in groups in the courtroom, now strangely silent, and talked in whispers. Late into the night, in spite of the winter weather, people stood on the walks around the public square, hoping to divine the meaning of the lights that burned in the jury room. Soon after dawn they were on the streets again, joined now by miners dressed in their working clothes, their faces streaked with the black dust of the pits. Still no word came from the courthouse.

At 1.30 p.m., twenty-six hours after the jury had received the case, word spread that a verdict had been reached. The groups on the streets raced to the courtroom. There the judge, already on the bench, warned that there must be no demonstration.

The jury filed in; the foreman handed Hartwell a slip of paper. Slowly, evenly, the judge read:

“Otis Clark, not guilty. Leva Mann, not guilty. Peter Hiller, not guilty. Joe Carnaghi, not guilty. Bert Grace, not guilty.”

No sound came from the spectators—only the shuffling of feet as they filed out and down the steps. The jurymen, unable to realize that their long ordeal was over, wandered back to the jury room.

That afternoon came post mortems. “It was a fair and orderly trial,” Judge Hartwell said. “The jury is the judge of the facts and they have passed upon them. I have nothing to say, except that I did the best I could to give and believe I did give a fair and impartial trial.”

Defense counsel, in a written statement, emphasized the point that Kerr had made in his opening statement:

C. W. Middlekauff, for the state, was disappointed but determined. The jury had been misled, he asserted, into considering the case as a controversy between Lester’s strikebreakers and the miners’ union, while the real issue was whether the law of the land should prevail in Williamson County. The prosecution would proceed with the next case. “The issues involved in this whole transaction are important,” he concluded; “the people of the entire United States are interested in their solution. We are desirous of putting it square up to another jury in Williamson County whether they will be ruled by the laws of Illinois or whether the domination of the mob shall prevail.…”

Over the nation editors echoed Middlekauff’s comments,
though without his restraint. “The acquittal … is denounced by the daily press from one end of the country to the other as a travesty upon justice,” said the
Literary Digest
, “the editors rising almost as one man to point the finger of scorn at the town of Herrin and the County of Williamson, in the State of Illinois.” Herrin was “an unconquered province of lawlessness,” “a stench in the nostrils of humanity” that was “about to complete its secession from the United States of America.” The people of the county had proved that they chose “to condone murder and shield assassins,” and were content to leave “the stain of atrocious murder” on the annals of the state.

Labor papers might—and did—call the jury’s verdict “a vindication of the traditional American right of self-defense” and “a crushing condemnation of the practice of ‘protecting property’ with privately employed gunmen who usurp the police power of the State”; they might assert that it proved that liberty still lived in the United States; they might ask why there was not some punishment that could be dealt out to an “outlaw operator” who invaded “a peaceable and law-abiding county” and goaded it to violence. Editorial opinions such as these converted few readers. The vast majority continued to hold with the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, dismayed but unbowed, when it demanded in its official publication:

For its second case, the state chose to prosecute those who had been indicted for the murder of Antonio Molkovich, a cook who had lost his life at the powerhouse woods. Perhaps the fact that Molkovich, though of Russian birth, had served in the United States Army during the World War was counted on to nullify some of the prejudice against strikebreakers. The grand jury had returned eighteen indictments for his murder, but on
the first day of the trial the state moved to nol-pros all but six. Otis Clark and Bert Grace again stood in jeopardy; with them, at the table for the defendants, sat Hugh Willis, Phillip Fontanetta, Oscar Howard, and James Brown, a Negro.

When the trial began on February 12, 1923, the appearance of the courtroom contrasted sharply with what it had looked like when the first trial opened three months earlier. The same cracked plaster threatened to fall at any moment; the same flyspecked picture of the President stared from the wall, the same battered cuspidors stood in corners, but instead of hundreds of spectators a mere handful lounged in boredom while a winter rain beat against the windows. Three reporters—two for local papers and one for the
Illinois Miner
—sat at the table that had been crowded with metropolitan correspondents.

Even the lawyers seemed to be affected by a feeling of futility. Their examination of prospective jurors followed the same lines as before, but was more rapid and more cursory. As a result, though more talesmen were examined than at the first trial, the jury was completed in slightly more than two weeks instead of a month. Again the jury consisted mainly of farmers, one or two of whom had worked in the mines. All were of the old American stock.

The state opened its case on the morning of March 2, 1923. This time C. W. Middlekauff, the middle-aged, experienced prosecutor whom Brundage had borrowed from the United States District Attorney’s office, made the first statement. The state would show, he promised, that Hugh Willis, Otis Clark, and many others conspired to drive the Lester strikebreakers from the county. No man with “even horse sense,” he admitted, would have attempted to operate on a nonunion basis in that locality, but that fact was of no pertinence in this trial. He and his associates did not represent scabs or Lester or the Southern Illinois Coal Company: they stood in the place of the people of the commonwealth.

After recounting, once more, the events of June 22, Middlekauff
outlined what the state expected to prove. It would show that Otis Clark and Oscar Howard killed McDowell. James Brown was the colored man who maltreated the marching captives with frenzied cruelty. The union official who came up in a car and waved the prisoners to their death on the barbed-wire fence was the defendant Hugh Willis. Phillip Fontanetta had killed one of the men who had been wounded there; Bert Grace had taken part in the killings in the Harrison woods, and he was also the person who kept Don Ewing from giving a drink of water to the dying man at the Herrin cemetery.

In the afternoon Kerr took the floor for the defense. As at the first trial, he laid the blame for the riot on Lester and the strikebreakers. “We will show you, not by strangers, but by your own citizens,” he promised, “that the real murderers were the men that were brought in to work in the Lester mine.… This trouble … started in the greed of Lester for money.”

The defense would prove, Kerr continued, that Henderson had been dead for thirty minutes “before the community arose and started the aggression.” It would also prove that the men charged with killing Molkovich were not at the scene of that murder when it was committed.

The defense had been criticized for paying its witnesses. “We do so,” Kerr admitted, “and we do it proudly. These witnesses are laboring men and are now getting about one day’s work a week. If you had a lawsuit and were to need a witness from the hayfield during harvest time, you would probably pay that witness for his time lost. We are only paying our witnesses for the time we take them away from their regular work.”

“The miners’ union is standing behind these men,” he concluded, “because the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, two months before the miners’ union got behind these miners, had raised a fund to prosecute the miners and to send them to the penitentiary.”

The prosecution lost no time in producing its most important witnesses. After an undertaker and the coroner had given testimony
regarding the body of Molkovich, thus establishing the corpus delicti, William Cairns was sworn in. He pointed out Otis Clark, as he had in the first trial, as one of the men who had led McDowell away. Under questioning he continued:

Cairns described the ordeal at the powerhouse woods, repeating the testimony he had given at the first trial against Peter Hiller, and then added:

Bernard Jones and Odis Lawrence, Lester’s locomotive engineer, followed Cairns and confirmed what he had said about Clark, Brown, and Fontanetta. It was Robert Officer, however, who gave the most damaging testimony against Hugh Willis. At the first trial he had been unable to identify any of the defendants; now he pointed a steady finger at Willis and said:

After Officer stepped from the stand the judge declared a recess because of serious illness in the family of one of the jurors, and eleven days passed without a session. When the trial was resumed familiar witnesses told familiar stories—of the looting of stores for guns, of the killing of McDowell, of Otis Clark and the “stop the breed” speech. Then came another recess—this time of four days—because of the illness of a juror’s child. When court reconvened Don Ewing described again how the man whom he identified as Bert Grace kept him from giving water to the wounded prisoners. Again the defense attorneys could not shake his story.

The state finished its case on March 29, and the defense introduced its first witnesses the same day. As before, they testified to the provocative conduct of the mine guards and swore that on the afternoon of June 21 the first shots came from the strip mine. After two days, the parade of alibi witnesses began. Oscar Howard, according to four residents of Crenshaw Crossing, was there instead of at Moake when McDowell was killed. A Herrin miner who knew both Howard and Clark had stood within twenty feet of the crippled superintendent when he was led down the road, yet the witness recognized neither of the men who held McDowell’s arms. Several others confirmed his statement. Five men declared that it was Clark who told the mob he was washing his hands of the affair if they were going to kill the strikebreakers; a sixth swore that he took Clark in his car from Crenshaw to Moake at 9.20 a.m., hours after the killing of McDowell.

The proceedings became monotonous. Some of the defendants dozed; Otis Clark spent more and more time with his books. Judge Hartwell, always nervous and high-strung, wandered about the courtroom looking from the windows, inspecting the picture of President Harding, sitting on the court reporter’s bench, on the newspaper reporters’ bench, on the defense attorneys’ bench, on the State’s Attorneys’ bench, on the window-sills, yet ever alert even though he might sustain or overrule an
objection in a voice that sounded, as one reporter put it, “like a bored stud-poker player dealing a ‘last round’ at three o’clock in the morning.”

Alibis were offered for every defendant. Fontanetta was playing cards at the time the Lester men were being killed; Bert Grace was loitering on the Marion public square; James Brown was plowing with a borrowed horse; Hugh Willis was in Herrin. None, according to many witnesses, could have had a part in the murder of Antonio Molkovich.

On the morning of April 6 the defense rested, the state announced that there would be no rebuttal evidence, and Otis Glenn rose to make the opening argument. Early in his address he pointed to the logical weakness of the defense case.

“Someone was killed that day,” he reminded the jury. “The defense has spent several days in trying to prove that the killing of these men at the powerhouse was justified. Then, on the other hand, they have produced scores of witnesses to try to prove that their men did not do the thing which they said was the right thing to do.”

He made no effort to defend Lester. The man was a “fool” and “insane,” and as far as his property was concerned, he “committed suicide.” Yet no law forbade him to bring men, union or nonunion, into Williamson County to work a mine.

Irony gave a sting to Glenn’s voice as he reviewed the testimony of the witnesses for the defense, pointing out flaws and implausibilities in their statements. But irony gave way to fervor when he came to his conclusion: