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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
Like Monroe, Dilliard took note of the effect of the lynching on the reputation of Collinsville. He recalled, "Nothing like that had happened anywhere else in the country, and we had a United States senator, then, I think, by the name of Lawrence Y. Sherman, and just a little while before this you had the race riots in East St. Louis, and he called East St. Louis and Collinsville the Sodom and Gomorrah of Illinois."15
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A third person interviewed was William Jokerst, a native of Collinsville who had lived there most of his life. His father was a grocer and his grandfather was a miner. Jokerst was president of the Collinsville Building and Loan Company, a thrift institution with two branches. At fifty-six, he was far too young to have any personal recollection of the lynching and trial, but he had studied what happened because of a family connection. He said, "My father used to sit my sister and I on his knee and tell us this story about the lynching ... . His mother, my grandmother, her name was Mary Haupt Jokerst, she was born in Leipzig, Germany, which wasn't far from Dresden." She worked with Prager at the Bruno Bakery in Collinsville.
"Because Paul was from the same area and so was Muta, we called her, or they called her-I didn't know her-they often spoke there at the bakery in German," he continued. " His grandmother, Prager's co-worker, "was very fond of her fatherland and she spoke German 'til she died, whether anybody liked it or didn't like it, and there was a lot of people that did not like that, and she was warned several times that she should speak English."
Jokerst's connection to Prager through his German grandmother was not his only family connection to the case. His uncle-his father's brother Hannah Jokerst-was a deputy sheriff. And Dick Dukes, one of the men indicted for the lynching, was his uncle's brother-in-law. Jokerst described Dukes as "absolutely a whipporwill, I mean, he was bad, he was a drunk all his life, wasn't worth shooting."
Jokerst's uncle was relieved of his duties at the jail by the judge "simply because of the treatment which they were giving the prisoners, which was pretty nice. They were bringing them steaks and potatoes and made sure they all had a nice American flag on their lapel, and they all came dressed like you never saw miners in your life." Jokerst produced a photocopy of a posed picture of the defendants published by the Post-Dispatch during the trial that shows all but one of them-Joe Riegel-wearing identical bows on their lapels-presumably of red, white and blue ribbons, but the photo was, of course, in black-and-white.16
Why was Prager hanged? Jokerst said, "There was certainly some bad feeling among the miners that some of their boys were in France fighting the war," but the underlying explanation lies, ambiguously, in "a union involvement. This is really what the problem was, I think." Prager had "made things tough for the union." After he put up his proclamation and "things got going," there were "certainly German people there, and they may have been a little bit afraid that if they didn't be harsh on him they would have been [identified as] pro-German, and they didn't want that." He said that "most of the Germans, not all, not my grandmother, but most of the Germans ... were saying you're either pro or you're anti, and they had to be anti. So if he was a problem they wanted to show that they were American. They were willing to punish him for that. ... Maybe that could have been part of it."
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