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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
According to Peterson and Fite, the jury took only twenty-five minutes to return a verdict of not guilty in the case of the alleged mob leaders. The authors wrote, "There was cheering and handclapping, and one juryman shouted, 'Well, I guess nobody can say we aren't loyal now.'" Peterson and Fite, like Luebke, interpreted the lynching as a result of induced hysteria, but they put it in a slightly different context-as the climax of a wave of violence directed at immigrants and labor organizers.6
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Another historian, Donald R. Hickey, has suggested that Prager was singled out more for his reputed socialism than his nationality; he reasoned that Prager had been rejected by the UMW union "because he was an active socialist (it seems likely that his German birth was not the reason for his rejection since there were many German-Americans in the Collinsville area who were union members)." Hickey also found evidence that Prager was not merely loyal but passionately patriotic. John Pohl, a St. Louis baker, said that when he objected to Prager's display of an American flag, Prager had him arrested and he spent thirty-two days in jail.7
Hickey concluded that the significance of the Prager case was that it demonstrated that most "leaders of public opinion" failed to recognize the threat to civil liberties the lynching embodied, but saw "only a need for better laws to suppress sedition. ... They usually did little more than repeat demands made at the grass-roots level, where spies, traitors, and bogeyman were seen behind every tree."8
The most basic common element shared by these accounts is the assumption that the Prager case developed out of a national mood of fear and loathing of foreigners and other outsiders. That concept of the significance of the case is also at the center of the historical memory of the Prager case nurtured in Collinsville. Because the lynching can be seen as one event in a national trend, it can be interpreted in Collinsville a universal tragedy rather than a reflection on the character of the community.
The initial response of the community is suggested by an editorial by J.O. Monroe, editor and publisher of The Collinsville Herald, published the week after the acquittal of Joe Riegel and his co-defendants. Monroe said that, "Outside a few persons who may still harbor Germanic inclinations, the whole city is glad that the eleven men indicted for the hanging of Robert P. Prager were acquitted." The judge had refused the defense the right to try to show Prager was disloyal, Monroe noted, "but the community is well convinced that he was disloyal. ... The city does not miss him. The lesson of his death has had a wholesome effect on the Germanists of Collinsville and the rest of the nation."
Monroe concluded his editorial with an indicative quote: "'It's all over now,' was the comment of one citizen. 'Let's forget it.'"9
Such a remarkable and dramatic event is not so easily forgotten, however. In the early 1960s, a newspaperman named Jim Gill who worked at the Herald wrote a history of Collinsville that included a long and colorful account of the Prager case. That account was tardily published in the Herald in 1976 as part of a bicentennial series. Gill took no position on whether Prager was disloyal or a spy but uncritically recited the case for suspicion of Prager that was made after the lynching by Moses Johnson of the United Mine Workers. Gill assigned all guilt to the impersonal and irresistible force of national hysteria. Prager, he said, "was the victim of a fanatical patriotic fervor that swept not only Collinsville, but the entire country. Incidents of hanging the Kaiser in effigy and kissing the American flag were common." He compared the loyalty hysteria with the Spanish Inquisition.
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