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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

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Significantly, Gill was not particularly interested in the trial and acquittal of Riegel and the other ten men; he devoted only one brief, neutral paragraph to it.10

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Carl Monroe was the son of J.O. Monroe. Like his father before him, he was the editor and the publisher of the Herald. In an interview at his Collinsville home in 1989, the younger Monroe revealed the findings of his study of the Prager case as he had reported them to the Madison County Historical Society twenty years earlier. Monroe said, "I traced the outrageously overemphasized, zealous patriotism." He continued, "Just a week before that thing [the lynching] they had a big mass meeting at the Methodist church in Collinsville where a guy named Williamson who was an attorney from Edwardsville came down and made a flamboyant speech-inflammatory speech, actually." Monroe remembered Riegel and the other defendants as obscure figures, recalling, "Some of these guys that were tried came to disagreeable ends. Dick Dukes ended up as the town drunk, and Wesley Beaver didn't do well." A kid named Cecil Larremore, only fifteen years old [at the time of the lynching], became a leading restaurant owner in Collinsville, but most of the rest of them just faded out."

Monroe said that after the lynching Riegel brought a letter written by Prager just before his death to Monroe's father, who "was back at the office maybe about midnight trying to write the story." The letter, he said, was in German-"very moving letter, briefly, today I die and so on, and didn't blame anybody or anything." J.O. Monroe had no difficulty translating the letter: "My dad knew German. His mother-in-law had studied in Germany for eight years and was [from a] German family. His wife was named Koch, and he knew German like the back of his hand, and he translated this letter and ran that."

J.O. Monroe's wife and mother-in-law were among many German Americans in Collinsville. There were about two thousand miners in Collinsville at the time, Carl Monroe said, and "a lot of the miners were Italian here ... but lots of them were German, too. ... Maybe half the town was German ... and they had a lot of east Europeans, also, Austrians and so on." Patriotism was a major concern in this mixed community. A "block organization" was set up to monitor loyalty. "I don't know whether they did anything, but there weren't any spies to look for," Monroe said.

The significance of the Prager case in the end-its significance in Collinsville-was stunted growth, according to Monroe, who said it "probably set the city of Collinsville back twenty years in their development because the population in 1930 was, I can't remember whether it was less than 1920 or just the same, but didn't go up at all. ... I always thought that the incident and the notoriety it gave us was really bad for years afterward ... for the progress of Collinsville.12

Census reports confirm that Collinsville lost population between 1920 and 1930 while nearby cities were growing. Collinsville had grown rapidly between 1910 and 1920, from 7,748 to 9,753, but then declined by about 5.3 percent to 9,235 in 1930. Nearby Edwardsville grew by about 16.8 percent during the same period, from 5,336 in 1920 to 6,235 in 1930, and East Saint Louis grew from 66,767 in 1920 to 74,347 in 1930, an increase of about 11.4 percent.13

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

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