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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
He continued, "At the red-brick, two-story city hall nearby, with a stone Union soldier on its postage-stamp front lawn, Prager was concealed; but he was then given up after the mob pushed its way into the city hall and Wesley Beaver found Prager hiding in the basement. Officer Frost, who had rescued Prager on Main Street, said, 'I was on the telephone. There was a problem with a car somewhere and I was on the telephone at the time and didn't pay any attention.' And they all had excuses." The mob, now about two hundred strong, went back to Main Street, and this time they started down Main Street toward the city limits. Jokerst went on with his story, "Once they got out of town they were no longer in jurisdiction of the city so the policemen couldn't do anything, at least weren't supposed to. Now why they didn't I don't know, but they didn't."
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A tow truck came up behind the mob. Jokerst said he had interviewed Earl Bitzer, who was in the truck and had been out towing motorists: "See, coming into Collinsville from St. Louis we're on the bluffs, and there's hills to come up here, and those hills were dirt. In the springtime they were ruts." The truck, he said, "got in behind this large crowd, and three or four guys jumped on his truck and said, 'Hey, let's tar and feather him. So let's go down to the mounds,' [the Cahokia mounds, below the bluffs] where they had a blacktop place, 'and we'll get the tar.'" But "it was closed and they ... wouldn't let him in."
They went back toward Collinsville and met the mob where Prager would be hanged, "and that's when somebody grabbed the rope out of Bitzer's truck, and that was the tow rope ... and I guess maybe that was the first time that they honestly thought about hanging him," Jokerst said. (Frederick C. Luebke said the tow truck was an automobile driven by Harry Lindemann, an auto mechanic.18 Jim Gill said the driver was Harry Linnemann and the vehicle was "a service car, an old touring car containing a tow rope and some tools."19)
The tree from which Prager was hanged is gone. It was at what had become the corner of St. Louis Road and a street called National Terrace. The site was at the corner of a cemetery, but Jokerst said that in 1918 "there was a little cemetery, but there were a couple of houses here. The cemetery was further in back."
Like Monroe and Dilliard, Jokerst said the significance of the Prager case was the damage done to the reputation of Collinsville. In the eyes of the public, Collinsville became a place where law and order were not maintained. That retarded the growth of the city from the raw mining town that it was in 1918 to the suburb of St. Louis that it has become.20
The historical memory of the Prager case that Monroe, Dilliard, and Jokerst expressed is pragmatic; it avoids any suggestion of community division. Thus it is an evolution of the view J.O. Monroe expressed in 1918. If Collinsville had divided into pro-Prager and anti-Prager factions in 1918, the Monroe and Jokerst families among many others would have been deeply affected. The question of community division was not an abstraction. The imperative need for unity required J.O. Monroe to be hostile toward Prager. Later, Jim Gill adopted a neutral stance, and William Jokerst could express sympathy. By way of compensation, ultimate responsibility for the killing has been shifted from the community (where it rested rather lightly, according to J.O. Monroe) to irresistible outside pressures. The real issue at all times has remained reputation.
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