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lynching of Robert Prager, the United Mine Workers, and the problems of patriotism in 1918, The
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Winter 2003 by Schwartz, E A
On the night of Monday, 11 February according to St. Louis Labor, a union meeting in Staunton was broken up by a man named Barney Brazier who, using a pistol for a gavel and backed up by fifty-five special deputies, made a patriotic speech and then led the union members in singing The Star-Spangled Banner. Then, between midnight and three A.M. on 12 February, the Vigilance Corps held a "Loyalty Round-Up," going to about one hundred homes to hold patriotic exercises involving men of dubious loyalty. Oberdan and his lawyer were arrested by police but turned over to the mob, which tarred and feathered them.51 The Post-Dispatch said that the door-to-door vigilantes introduced some variety into their efforts by obliging those victims who could play musical instruments to perform The Star-Spangled Banner.52
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In Staunton, patriotism displaced union autonomy, and that patriotism, at least in the jaundiced eyes of St. Louis Labor, was promoted by a solidly middle and upper class group. (Almost all of a group of twenty special deputies the Socialist paper identified by occupation were business and professional men.)53
A little more than two weeks after the Staunton affair, at the end of February, Robert Paul Prager went to work at the Donk mine in Maryville.54 At about the same time, patriotic tension began taking on an institutional form in Collinsville. On 7 March a small group met to form a "neighborhood committee of the state council of defense," the Herald reported, adding, "The primary aim of the committee is to promote loyalty and suppress disloyalists."55
An organizational meeting featuring the singing of patriotic songs and an "inspirational speech" by Thomas Williamson was held on 27 March, at the Orpheum Theatre and hundreds of memberships were said to have been taken out.56 The day after Prager was lynched, the Herald announced that six hundred applications had been made for membership. On 12 April, the Herald announced that the organization had fifteen hundred members.57
On 6 April, Frank Armstrong of the Chicago Daily News reported from Collinsville that the strongest cause for "the development of a murderous frenzy" was the belief of the miners that Prager was a German spy and "was going to blow up the Maryville mine four miles north of here. ... A singular thing in this tragedy is that thus far no person in Collinsville or Maryville has come forward with statements alleged to have been made by the victim to prove disloyalty against him." Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, Armstrong noted, "Moses Johnson of Collinsville, district board member of the United Mine Workers of America, says he knows Prager was a spy."58
The patriotic frenzy whipped up in the organizational campaign had collided with Robert Prager's problems with the UMW and become a murderous frenzy. The drunken crowd that hanged him probably included many people who were willing to believe that he was a German spy, but the men who started the affair earlier that day may have believed that Prager was a spy of a different sort-a spy for the coal operators.
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