Bloody Williamson
Page 30
March 14, 1924. The grand jury of the Herrin City Court returns ninety-nine indictments in connection with the murder of Caesar Cagle and the attack on the Herrin hospital.
March 17, 1924. The Klan stages a huge parade in Herrin as a protest against the action of the grand jury. Scores rush to sign the bonds of the indicted men.
April 25, 1924. Young takes over the job of reorganizing the Klan in East St. Louis.
10. DEATH IN A CIGAR STORE
May 23, 1924. Young and his wife, driving from Marion to East St. Louis, are attacked by the occupants of a passing car and seriously wounded.
May 24, 1924. Jack Skelcher, believed to be one of the Youngs’ assailants, is killed by Klan “police” on the outskirts of Herrin.
June 26, 1924. Young and Klansmen make a threatening display of weapons at Carlyle when the Shelton brothers and Charlie Briggs, accused of the assault on Young and his wife, appear for a preliminary hearing.
July 9, 1924. The Klan dismisses Young from his position in East St. Louis.
July 29, 1924. Federal Judge Walter C. Lindley rules that Young must stand trial in the state courts on indictments growing out of the liquor raids.
August 25, 1924. Judge Bowen of the Herrin City Court rules that bonds totaling $39,000 be forfeited when Young fails to appear in a larceny case in which he is a defendant.
August 28, 1924. The Klan puts on a huge demonstration at the county fairgrounds.
August 30, 1924. In a riot between Klan and anti-Klan factions at John Smith’s garage in Herrin six men are killed. The militia returns.
September 13, 1924. Young is officially expelled from the Klan.
October 11, 1924. Ora Thomas, ex-bootlegger, anti-Klansman, and bitter enemy of Young’s, is appointed a deputy sheriff.
January 24, 1925. Thomas, Young, and two of Young’s henchmen die in a gunfight at Herrin.
11. THE KLAN LOSES
February 7, 1925. As a part of a compromise between the factions Sheriff Galligan, anti-Klansman, turns over his office to a deputy and agrees to leave the county.
May 12, 1925. Galligan returns and resumes his office.
May 24, 1925. Harold S. Williams, evangelist, begins a series of revival meetings intended to reunite the faction-torn community.
June 27, 1925. The State’s Attorney moves to strike 145 cases, all originating in the Klan war, from the docket.
July 3, 1925. The Herrin Herald, Klan newspaper, is attached by creditors and ceases publication.
July 12, 1925. The Williams revival, its purpose apparently achieved, comes to an end.
April 13, 1926. In an election-day riot at Herrin three Klansmen and three anti-Klansmen are killed. This marks the end of the Klan in Williamson County.
12. GANG WAR
July 1926. Fights and killings in Herrin point to a war between rival gangsters.
August 22, 1926. Harry Walker and Everett Smith kill each other in a roadhouse brawl.
September 12, 1926. “Wild Bill” Holland, Mack Pulliam, and Pulliam’s wife are shot as they leave a roadhouse near Herrin. Holland dies.
September 14, 1926. Gangsters attack an ambulance carrying Pulliam from Herrin to Benton and beat the wounded man into unconsciousness.
October 4, 1926. Occupants of an armored truck owned by the Shelton brothers fire on Art Newman, a gangster allied with Charlie Birger, and Newman’s wife on the highway near Harrisburg.
October 14, 1926. Birger gangsters shoot up and wreck an unoccupied roadhouse owned by the Sheltons.
October 25, 1926. Birger and a gang of his followers demand that Joe Adams, mayor of West City and friend of the Sheltons, surrender the body of the Sheltons’ armored truck, and threaten to kill him when he refuses.
October 26, 1926. The dead body of “High Pockets” McQuay, Birger gangster, is found near Herrin. On the same day the body of “Casey” Jones, another Birger follower, is found in a creek near Equality.
October 28, 1926. Early in the morning a roadhouse near Johnston City, said to belong to Birger, is shot up and set on fire. It burns to the ground.
November 6, 1926. John Milroy is killed in a roadhouse near Colp. Shortly afterward W. J. Stone, mayor of the town, is fatally shot and the chief of police, James C. Keith, is wounded.
November 10, 1926. A homemade bomb is tossed at Birger’s roadhouse, Shady Rest, but misses its mark.
November 12, 1926. Machine-gunners fire into the home of Joe Adams, in West City, from automobiles. An airplane drops homemade bombs, which fail to explode, on Shady Rest.
November 19, 1926. A bomb damages the home of Joe Adams but the occupants escape injury.
December 12, 1926. Two young men murder Joe Adams at his front door.
January 9, 1927. Shady Rest is bombed and burned to the ground. Four bodies are found in the ruins.
January 19, 1927. Lory Price, state highway-patrolman and friend of Birger’s, is discovered to be missing. Mrs. Price has also disappeared.
13. MURDER—AND MORE MURDER
January 31, 1927. Carl, Earl, and Bernie Shelton go on trial for mail robbery in the United States Court at Quincy.
February 4, 1927. The Sheltons are found guilty, largely on the testimony of Charlie Birger and Art Newman.
February 5, 1927. The Sheltons are sentenced to twenty-five years in the federal penitentiary. On the same day the bullet-riddled body of Lory Price is found in a field near Dubois in Washington County.
March 4, 1927. Harry Thomasson and two other Birger hangers-on are convicted of robbery at Marion, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.
April 29, 1927. Charlie Birger is arrested and charged with the murder of Joe Adams.
April 30, 1927. In open court at Benton, Harry Thomasson confesses that he and his brother Elmo killed Joe Adams at Birger’s instigation.
May 9, 1927. The Williamson County grand jury indicts Rado Millich, Clarence Rone, and Ural Gowen, all Birger gangsters, for the murder of “Casey” Jones, also a Birger henchman.
May 23, 1927. Art Newman is arrested at Long Beach, California, on information that he is wanted for the murder of Joe Adams.
May 26, 1927. The Shelton brothers are granted a new trial and freed on bond after Harry Dungey, Birger gangster who testified against them, admits that he perjured himself.
June 11, 1927. At Nashville, Illinois, Art Newman appears in court and admits that he took part in the murder of Lory Price and his wife. He charges Birger, Connie Ritter, Ernest Blue, Leslie Simpson, and Riley Simmons with participation in the crime. All are indicted.
June 13, 1927. The body of Mrs. Price is uncovered in an abandoned mine where Newman stated it would be found.
June 24, 1927. Rado Millich and Ural Gowen go on trial at Marion for the murder of “Casey” Jones. Clarence Rone turns state’s evidence and is not prosecuted.
July 7, 1927. A jury finds both defendants guilty and sets Gowen’s punishment at twenty-five years in the penitentiary, Millich’s at death.
14. THE HANGING OF CHARLIE BIRGER
July 6, 1927. Charlie Birger, Art Newman, and Ray Hyland go on trial at Benton for the murder of Joe Adams.
July 27, 1927. The jury finds the three defendants guilty and decrees death for Birger, life imprisonment for Newman and Hyland. Birger is sentenced to be hanged on October 25, 1927.
October 5, 1927. Birger’s attorneys file a petition for a writ of error with the state Supreme Court.
October 7, 1927. The Supreme Court grants Birger a stay of execution.
October 21, 1927. Rado Millich is hanged in the jailyard at Marion.
February 24 1928. The Supreme Court denies Birger’s appeal for a new trial and directs that the original sentence be carried out on April 13, 1928.
April 12, 1928. The Illinois Board of Pardons and Paroles refuses to intercede in Birger’s case. On the same day his attorney files a petition for a sanity hearing. The judge orders a stay of execution until the hearing can be held.
April 16, 1928. A jury
finds Birger sane, and his execution is set for April 19.
April 19, 1928. Birger is hanged in the jailyard at Benton.
15. JUSTICE
September 20, 1928. Leslie Simpson, under indictment for the murder of Lory Price, is arrested in New York.
November 5, 1928. In court at Marion, Simpson pleads guilty to the murder of Lory Price.
November 7, 1928. Simpson’s plea is accepted, but the judge defers sentence.
November 16, 1928. In the U.S. District Court at East St. Louis, Arlie O. Boswell, State’s Attorney of Williamson County, and several other county and city officials are indicted for conspiring to violate the national prohibition law.
January 7, 1929. The trial of Art Newman, Leslie Simpson, Riley Simmons, and Freddie Wooten for the murder of Lory Price begins at Marion. The defendants all plead guilty, but the judge orders the prosecution to present its evidence.
January 9, 1929. The four defendants are sentenced to life imprisonment under one indictment, and to fifty-seven years under two others.
January 21, 1929. Arlie O. Boswell goes on trial in the Federal Court at East St. Louis.
January 25, 1929. Boswell is found guilty of violating the national prohibition law.
February 2, 1929. Boswell is fined $5,000 and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary.
October 18, 1929. Connie Ritter, under indictment for the murder of Joe Adams, Lory Price, and Ethel Price, is arrested at Gulfport, Mississippi.
May 25, 1930. In court at Benton, Ritter pleads guilty to the Adams murder, and is sentenced to life imprisonment.
CONCLUSION
October 23, 1941. Ural Gowen is discharged from prison at the expiration of his sentence.
October 23, 1947. Carl Shelton is killed on his farm near Fairfield, Illinois.
January 6, 1948. Connie Ritter dies in Menard Penitentiary.
July 26, 1948. Bernie Shelton is killed in front of his tavern outside Peoria.
May 24, 1949. Earl Shelton is shot in the Farmers’ Club at Fairfield but recovers.
June 7, 1950. Roy Shelton is shot to death while driving a tractor on his Wayne County farm.
March 13, 1950. Leslie Simpson is paroled.
January 23, 1951. Harry Thomasson is paroled.
April 17, 1951. The Sheltons sell most of their Illinois land. All except the mother of the brothers and one of their sisters disappear.
June 28, 1951. The sister—Mrs. Lulu Shelton Pennington—and her husband are machine-gunned in Fairfield. Though seriously wounded, both survive.
July 9, 1951. Ray Hyland is paroled.
December 1, 1951. The Shelton homestead, now unoccupied, is detroyed by fire.
SOURCES
In General
WHEN the Herrin Massacre took place, Oldham Paisley, editor of the Marion Republican, began pasting his own stories of the tragedy, as well as those which came to him in exchanges, in a scrapbook. He continued the process until the last Birger gangster was sent to the penitentiary in 1930. By that time he had filled thirteen books, and had preserved an incomparable record of most of the events with which this study deals.
Today, these scrapbooks, kept in the Marion Public Library, are the only local contemporary record of what happened in Williamson County between 1922 and 1930. Except for the chapters on the Bloody Vendetta and the Brush and Leiter mining ventures (v, vi, and vii), they have been my primary reliance and may be taken as my authority where no specific sources are indicated.
I write under circumstances that compel me to have practically every source I intend to use microfilmed or photostatted. Thus, in addition to a microfilm copy of the Paisley scrapbooks, as well as a complete set of projection prints, I acquired a microfilm copy of the Illinois Miner from November 25, 1922 to December 28, 1929 (the only extant file is in the Department of Labor Library), a microfilm copy of the stenographic transcript of the proceedings of the Herrin Investigating Committee, hundreds of photostats of magazine articles and newspapers not represented in the Paisley scrapbooks, a large number of clippings, and many pamphlets and books relating to my subject. These have all been placed in the library of the Chicago Historical Society, where anyone who wishes to check my sources, or examine the great surplus of original material that I could not use may consult them.
In Particular
1. MASSACRE
There is no satisfactory account of the Herrin Massacre. The longest narratives within books are to be found in Oscar Ameringer’s If You Don’t Weaken (New York: Holt; 1940), McAlister Coleman’s Men and Coal (New York: Farrar & Rinehart; 1943), and Saul D. Alinsky’s John L. Lewis, An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Putnam; 1949). All are superficial, incomplete, and biased. The one full-length account—The Herrin Massacre, by Cortland Parker (Chicago: Parker Publishing Company; 1923)—is accurate factually, but incomplete and repellingly hortatory. Besides, copies are almost impossible to find.
My account, in this chapter, is based almost entirely upon the sworn testimony of witnesses at the two trials and the legislative investigation. For the trials, I have followed the day-to-day reports in the Marion Republican; the testimony before the House Investigating Committee comes from the stenographic transcript of the committee’s hearings, now to be found in the Archives Division of the Illinois State Library, Springfield. Formal testimony has been supplemented by the accounts that survivors—notably Bernard Jones and Edward Rose—gave to Thoreau Cronyn of the New York Herald and George E. Lyndon, Jr., of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Quotations used here are from the Herald of July 12 and July 13, 1922; and from the Daily Eagle of August 15 and August 19, 1922.
Donald M. Ewing, who appears in this chapter as Don Ewing, is now associate editor of the Shreveport Times, Shreveport, Louisiana. In correspondence during the summer and fall of 1951 he confirmed my account of his experiences during the Massacre and added vivid details.
2. APPROACH TO MASSACRE
This chapter opens with a characterization of William J. Lester, and an interpretation of his motives in deciding to defy the striking miners, that differs considerably from all previous accounts. As far as I know, no earlier writer on this subject has even attempted to find out what kind of man Lester really was. For my information I am indebted to Mr. R. H. Sherwood of Indianapolis, who knew him intimately for twenty years, and Mr. Arthur S. Lytton of Chicago, former member of the firm of Bull, Lytton and Olson, his Chicago lawyers.
My account of the somewhat devious course followed by local mine-union officials immediately before the Massacre is based on this passage from an address that Follett W. Bull, of Lester’s law firm, made before the Association of Life Insurance Counsel on May 24, 1923 (published as a pamphlet with the title, “The Herrin Massacre”):
It was with a distinct understanding on Mr. Lester’s part with the Union officials, that that being a small mine, and its output small anyway, that that coal might be placed around in southern Illinois in charitable institutions, even during the strike; and as a matter of fact … they did load coal with Union men, United Mine Workers men, for one day only.… It immediately aroused considerable opposition, and Hugh Willis, who was the National Board member of the United Mine Workers for that district, came to him and said … “You better lay off for a couple of days and then you go on again”—which was done. In the meantime the sentiment got so strong against the Union men loading out any coal for any purpose, charitable institution or otherwise, that Hugh Willis told him it was impossible, they could not go on with the agreement to let them run.
This accords with the recollection of Arthur S. Lytton. A. B. McLaren, of Marion, recalls that Lester intimated to him that he had the local union officials “fixed.” McLaren warned him that neither he nor anyone could “fix” the rank and file, and that the rank and file would cause serious trouble.
The report of the United States Coal Commission, from which I quote, is to be found in the National Archives, Washington. Stories of the arrogance of Lester’s guards rest on testimony given at t
he first trial. The narrative of the efforts that Hunter and his associates made to avert trouble and to effect a truce after the attack on the mine had taken place is based almost entirely upon testimony before the House Investigating Committee, principally by Hunter, Edrington, and General Black, but I have also drawn upon Hunter’s personal record of events, published in the Marion Post, June 24, 1922.
3. MASSACRE: THE AFTERMATH
The first paragraph of this chapter is a composite of editorial opinion as expressed by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the New York Evening World, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the Augusta Journal within a day or two of the Massacre. The Congressional Record is, of course, the source for the strictures spoken in the Senate and House of Representatives. The Chicago Tribune’s comment on the verdict of the coroner’s jury is to be found in the issue of June 27, 1922; that of the St. Louis Times in its issue of June 28, 1922. Other papers quoted in this connection are the St. Louis Globe-Democrat for June 27, and the Detroit Free Press and the New York Herald of the same date.
A photostat of the flyer, cited in the text, of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, a copy of the National Coal Association’s pamphlet, “The Herrin Conspiracy,” and a photostat of the folder, “Herrin Massacre,” issued by John Price Jones (my source for the Pershing quotation), are now in the Chicago Historical Society. The appeal of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce is recorded in that organization’s official publication, the Illinois Journal of Commerce, for September 1922. Editorial comment on the appeal is taken from the October issue of the same publication. My authority for the miners’ defense fund is Carroll Binder’s article, “Herrin—Murder Trial or Holy Cause?” in The Nation, October 11, 1922, as well as press dispatches.