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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
The Herald identified all but one of the first five men indicted as miners, counting Joe Riegel, who was listed as a "Shoe Cobbler and former Miner." Wesley Beaver was listed as a saloon porter.64 The other six men who would be tried with Riegel included four miners, a plumber's helper, and a stockyard worker. When they were arrested, Johnson had "told newspaper men that while the defense of the men was not a union fight, he would give all he could to secure bail for the men," according to the Herald.65 Unlike the union men in Staunton who had attempted to donate to the defense fund for Severino Oberdan, Johnson would face no opposition from the business and professional men of Collinsville.
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The stimulated patriotic fervor that had been used in Staunton to break a union was used in Collinsville to defend organized labor. The success of that defense was confirmed when J.O. Monroe, whose reporting of the lynching and the trial had been remarkably dispassionate under the circumstances, accepted the idea that no real harm had been done by the lynch mob, and when the jury voted to acquit Joe Riegel and the others.
Thus the patriotic hysteria of 1918 should not be considered as a simple phenomenon in which most Americans surrendered their reason and cooperated in the suppression of labor radicals and unassimilated members of ethnic minorities. In Collinsville, at least, an ethnically complex community was united and rebellious union members accused of German sympathies were transformed into unquestionable patriots in one transcendent moment-the moment of Robert Paul Prager's sudden death.
NOTES
1 The Collinsville Herald (Collinsville, Illinois) 5 April 1918, 1.
2 Prager's "proclamation" declared that he was "heart and soul for the good old U.S.A." He also said that Fornero, president of the Maryville local of the UMW, called him a liar and a German spy, tried to have him arrested and "tried to have an angry mob deal with me." He asked readers "in the name of humanity to examine me to find out what is the reason I am kept out of work." St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 6 April 1918, 4.
3 Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 1-14.
4 Ibid., 21-4.
5 David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 68.
6 H.C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 202-7.
7 Donald R. Hickey, "The Prager Affair: A Study in Wartime Hysteria," Journal of the Illinois Historical Society (Summer 1969), 126-7.
8 Ibid.," 133-4.
9 Herald, 7 June 1918, 2.
10 Herald, 5 January 1976, 5; 8 January 1976, 7.
11 Beaver had been a soldier in the 124th Field Artillery the the previous year. (Herald, 12 October 1917, 3.) Dukes's 24-year-old brother James C. Dukes died of pneumonia in France on 22 February 1918. (Herald, 1 March 1918, 1.)
12 Carl Monroe, interview with author, 22 October 1989.
13 United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Population, Vol. II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), 508; United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Population, Vol. III (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1923), 261, 265; United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Vol. III, Part 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), 629, 632.
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