lynching of Robert Prager, the United Mine Workers, and the problems of patriotism in 1918, The

Schwartz, E A

There is no mystery about how Robert Paul Prager died in the spring of 1918, and not much doubt about who was responsible. Prager was hanged from a tree, and a man named Joe Riegel confessed that he led the mob that did it, although he later retracted his confession. He and another ten men were tried for killing Prager, but acquitted. The motivation for the lynching was set in large type when a local newspaper topped its first story about the lynching with the headline, "Anti-German Mob Hangs Man Here."1

Academic historians have put this case forward as the most extreme example of the results of ethnic (or political) polarization during World War I, and interpreted the response of certain politicians and journalists as a significant reflection of insensitivity to civil liberties. Local historians have understood the lynching as a natural disaster, growing out of drunkenness and other eternal verities of human nature, which might have happened anywhere under the circumstances.

While each of these interpretations has at least some merit, consideration of the deeper context of the Prager case suggests a different meaning. Prager unquestionably died at the hands of drunken, hysterical men because he was German. But when they killed Prager, they were also killing their own fears of being accused of disloyalty, fears rooted in a bitter and divisive labor struggle. The events that put the lynching in motion, as well as the attitude of the community afterward, were rooted in a successful struggle by United Mine Workers (UMW) leaders to balance the demands of a militant rank-and-file with the need to demonstrate patriotism.

The lynching took place in Collinsville, a southern Illinois coalmining town near St. Louis. Historian Frederick C. Luebke has provided an account of the lynching that can scarcely be improved upon. He began his 1974 book, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I, with an entire chapter about the lynching, entitled "Death in Collinsville." Relying mainly on newspaper accounts, Luebke wrote that Prager had been born in Dresden, Germany, and had come to the United States in 1905 at the age of nineteen. He was a drifter who spent a year in an Indiana reformatory for theft. He was living in St. Louis when the U.S. declared war on Germany one year before his death.

Prager showed patriotic feeling for his adopted country; he took out his first citizenship papers after the declaration of war and tried to enlist in the navy. He was rejected for medical reasons. Sometime afterward, he became a baker in the Collinsville vicinity, but he was fired because of what Luebke called his "stubborn, uncompromising personality." He applied for membership in the UMW union and went to work in a mine at Maryville, near Collinsville, but he was denied union membership because, according to Luebke, he was not only a German but was "unmarried, stubbornly argumentative, given to Socialist doctrines, blind in one eye" and "looked like a spy to the miners." He was seized by a group of miners on the evening of 3 April and warned away from Maryville.

United Mine Workers leaders Moses Johnson and James Fornero, fearing for Prager's safety, tried to get the Collinsville police to put him under protective custody, but they declined. The two men took Prager to his home in Collinsville. The next day, Prager went back to Maryville and prepared a document attacking Fornero.2 He posted carbon copies of this document around the town and stayed out of sight until that evening, when he went back to Collinsville.

Some of the miners who had gone after him in Maryville were in Collinsville drinking that night. They decided to go after Prager again at his home. He agreed to leave town but that was not enough for them; they dragged him into the street, stripped him of his shoes and outer clothing and draped him with a flag. Luebke wrote, "Bareheaded, barefooted, and half blind, the pathetic figure stumbled along, leading the mob down the main street toward the center of town."

Prager was rescued from the mob by a policeman, Fred Frost, who put him in the jail at city hall. Mayor John H. Siegel of Collinsville calmed the crowd for a time. Someone (Luebke does not say who) decided to close the town's saloons early at this point. "An officer was dispatched with the order. As he made his rounds of the saloons, he brought the exhilarating news that a German spy was in jail." The mob swelled. The mayor told the crowd Prager had been taken away. Joe Riegel, "an ex-soldier whose wife had left him because of his excessive drinking," got the mayor to let him into the jail to take a look, and the mob "swarmed in" after him.

A man named Wesley Beaver found Prager hiding in the basement. The police stood aside as the mob marched Prager out beyond the city limits. After questioning Prager, they tried to hang him from a tree, but they had forgotten to tie his hands and he grabbed the rope. He was lowered, allowed to write a brief letter to his parents in Germany and pray. Then, with some two hundred people watching, Prager "was yanked a full ten feet in the air" as he was hanged at 12:30 A.M. on 5 April.

The hanging was widely condoned. Luebke noted that the Edwardsville Intelligencer in the county seat called it "unlawful and unjustifiable" but argued that a traitor would be dealt with just as summarily in Germany. The mayor sent a telegram to a senator arguing that Prager's death was due to the failure of Congress to pass effective laws against disloyalty. Luebke said this was "a commonly held point of view, repeated endlessly in the newspapers."3

On 25 April the county grand jury indicted twelve men for murder. Luebke said that "as the trial got underway on 13 May, suspicion and fear were common among the citizens of Madison County, many of whom were of German birth or descent." The process of picking a jury went so badly that the state's attorney complained that Sheriff Jenkin Jenkins was not summoning jurors properly. A judge gave the job of summoning jurors to a special bailiff in place of the sheriff. The judge declined to allow the defense to try to demonstrate Prager's disloyalty. The case for the defendants amounted to three claims: no one could say who did what, half the defendants claimed they had not even been there, and the rest claimed they had been bystanders, even Joe Riegel, who had confessed to newspaper reporters and a coroner's jury. In its concluding statement the defense argued that Prager's lynching was justified by "unwritten law." Luebke reported that when the defense was finished, the judge declared a recess, "the familiar strains of the The Star-Spangled Banner filled the courthouse," played by a detachment of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center band, "on duty in Edwardsville for recruiting purposes. The players stood in the rotunda of the building, allegedly escaping a brief downpour of rain. Someone urged the group to perform, assuring them the court was in recess and that no disturbance would be caused." After deliberating forty-five minutes, the jury found the defendants innocent. Luebke blamed the hanging and subsequent lack of punishment for the perpetrators on the tension of three years of neutrality, on Prager's "unattractive and indiscreet" character, but most of all on Prager's status as a German.4

In their 1957 book Opponents of War, 1917-1918, H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite gave a condensed account of the lynching that is generally consistent with Luebke's description. They took more note of negative responses to the hanging than Luebke, however. Among those responses was a New York Times editorial arguing that "a fouler wrong could hardly be done America," which would be "denounced as a nation of odious hypocrites" as a result. But they also quoted the Washington Post as responding that, "In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country"-a quotation that would later be used by David M. Kennedy in his brief account of the Prager lynching in the 1980 book Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Kennedy's one-paragraph account, in which he unaccountably blamed Missourians for hanging Prager, was drawn entirely from Opponents of War.5

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

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.

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

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

Monroe himself, however, suggested another reason for the decline of Collinsville during the 1920s. "The miners were all patriotically mining like hell during the war because they were making huge amounts of money," he said, "and when the war ended the employment fell off too, and by 1926 the mines nationwide were in terrible shape. ... They had a nationwide mineworkers' strike in 1926 that lasted a long time, and the miners here never really recovered. We had mines until 1954, I think it was, 1958 when Lumaghi closed."14

Irving Dilliard, another retired newspaperman from Collinsville, also made a study of the lynching. Dilliard, the one-time editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was brought to Collinsville as a child by his banker father. When he was interviewed, he was in his middle eighties, and his memories were impressionistic. Although his father took him to the latter part of the trial when he was about fourteen, by his estimate, he did not recall any of the testimony, or mention the often-repeated and well-documented story that the band played The Star-Spangled Banner at the end of the summation for the defense. Dilliard's one personal recollection of the Prager case suggests the atmosphere in Collinsville after the lynching:

I did have a view of Prager that not everybody had. ... Herr's undertaking place was on Main Street [and] ... I walked along there, [in] late afternoon. ... I was going home and I might have walked home from high school. Anyway, I was going by this place and there was a line-up of people out of the front door of the undertaking establishment out onto the street, and I asked somebody what it was all this about, and they said that's where the fellow is that was hanged ... and there had been some references to this at the high school by a teacher we had, so I knew this had happened, and what not, so I thought I might just as well see what happens here, so I got in the line. ...

I remember hearing this remark-was a crazy remark-but somebody in line ahead of me said to somebody else in line, "They say take a good look at his neck because they say that the rope that hanged him left his neck red, white and blue." ... I didn't see red, white and blue. I saw some red, I think.

Dilliard's understanding of the reason for Prager's lynching was that "he had some kind of disagreements in connection with the union or the miners or whatever ... and then having the German connection." Prager "wasn't picked out to be hanged," but "one thing leads to another." Prager might have been saved, but Mayor John Siegel had "let things get out of hand. I think he should never have allowed them to turn the prisoner over to them. He could have held them off."

Prager's alleged socialist views seem not to have had any part in the lynching, and the fact that he was a German was more pretext than cause. The root of the event was that Prager "was in a disagreement of some kind with the union. Now whether that resulted from a political attitude in life, I just don't know, but he was in trouble with the union, and the whole thing began with union activity."

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

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."

Jokerst understood the lynching itself as essentially accidental-an outgrowth of the "patriotic" atmosphere in Collinsville and the prevalence of alcohol. He remembered that his father said that "it wasn't very abnormal, especially around taverns, to have someone recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sing America the Beautiful, you know, and that's what they were doing when they walked him down Main Street barefooted that evening, wrapped with a flag."

In 1918, it seems, Collinsville was drenched in alcohol-a part of the culture of the immigrant miners. "Those miners, you know, are not-I hate to say this because my grandfather was one, too-but they were not really a well-educated people ... at the time of Prager. ... I think there was probably a tavern on every corner and two in the middle of the block," Jokerst said. "The coal miners, they'd come out of the coal mine and [that was] the first place they'd stop, spend their money they were making during the day. ... That was about all the entertainment there was in the town other than maybe a baseball game in the summertime."

Jokerst gave a tour of the route Prager was made to march the night he was hanged. It began in the parking lot at the Catholic church on Vandalia Street near, he said, "what we call the Y-Vandalia, Clay Street, and then going up to Main Street. ... all the miners used to walk down the street here heading out of town to the mine, Lumaghi mines, down below the Lebanon road." At one time, trolley cars shuttled down Vandalia Street en route from Edwardsville to St. Louis and back. Prager had lived in a room in a house across Vandalia Street from the church, "a two-story house built sort of on the French type with a second-floor balcony." The house is no longer there. The space it occupied has become a parking lot for a tire store.

The day he was hanged, Prager was made to kiss the flag in Maryville. Then he went back to his room in the house on Vandalia Street.

After a time his tormenters followed. "Maybe three or four guys met out here in a tavern north of town," Jokerst said. "They came here and they stood in the street and hollered for him." Prager came out on the balcony. They wanted him to kiss the flag. He agreed to come down if they would not hurt him. He kissed the flag again. But they weren't satisfied. They took Prager up Vandalia to Main, "and this was paved, and it was cold, you know, when you're barefooted, and the temperature had to be probably in the forties." On Main Street, there were "taverns everywhere. ... There was a tavern here, a tavern here, there was a tavern on this next corner, Blaha's- just loaded with those kind of places." By the time they reached the Miner's Institute, a theater built not long before with money raised by miners, spectators had gathered.17

Jokerst said, "I've talked to a number of people who were lining the streets and honestly saw it, I mean, there were a lot of people that came." It was at the Miner's Institute that "it started, the singing and so on. ... They came down the street here, and of course as they were singing and hollering, and he had a flag around him, different people started to congregate along the sidewalks. ... By that time the group instead of being five or six was like maybe fifty." The mayor, who was also a doctor, came out of a tavern across the street from the Miner's Institute, saw what was happening, "walked across the street in this block to his [doctor's] office, and called the police station, which was just around the corner there ... in the city hall." Two policemen "came over and just walked into the crowd, grabbed ahold of Prager, and said, 'Come on. We're taking you to jail.' And those guys didn't say a whole lot about it, seeing the policemen."

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."

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.

The evolving inquiry of Carl Monroe, Irving Dilliard, and William Jokerst retained more traces of a deeper context than the published accounts. Each of them traced an ambiguous connection between the lynching and the United Mine Workers.

That connection is the key to the deeper context. Prager went to his death (with unsung courage, it must be added) as the result of cultivated irrational fear, but the killing began because he publicly challenged union leadership, and it quickly became an impenetrable defense for the union against accusations of disloyalty based on bitter labor discord in Collinsville. The Prager lynching was one incident in a struggle whose main figures were Moses Johnson of the United Mine Workers, his radical antagonist Joe Riegel, and the patriotic managers of a campaign to eliminate disloyalty in southern Illinois. In Collinsville it was a union leader who seized the patriotic high ground, and the result was the preservation of community unity under strong union influence.

According to reports of the 1920 census, Collinsville then had a population of 9,753. Native-born whites of native-born parentage made up less than half of that population-about 45.5 percent. Native-born whites of foreign or mixed parentage made up about 33.7 percent. Foreign-born whites numbered 1,790, or about 17.6 percent.21 Politically, at least before the United States entered World War I, Collinsville included Socialist minority related to local organized labor. Several Socialist candidates ran in the April 1917 municipal election. Most did not do well. Charles Britton finished second in the three-man contest for city clerk with only 155 votes out of 897, or about 17.3 percent. Mayoral candidate Robert Bertolo, president of UMW Local No. 685, did less well, and so did Ed Franek, candidate for alderman in the fifth ward and chairman of the Collinsville trades council. Only one Socialist was elected, R.C. DeLaney, as alderman for the fourth ward with 258 out of 502 votes cast.22

On 5 June 1917, the war came to Collinsville in the form of registration for conscription. The day was made a holiday. Some two thousand people, by the account of the Collinsville Herald, marched down Main Street in the "Registration Day" parade, which was led by mounted marshals, followed by the Collinsville band, the Daughters of Veterans, and Grand Army Veterans in automobiles. Also marching were "Prudential Life Insurance Company representatives, the Chester Knitting Mill employes, the Lutheran school children, Local Union No. 264 U.M.W.A. of Consolidated Mine No. 17, the Catholic school children, Local Union No. 685 U.M.W. of Lumaghi Mines Nos. 2 and 3, Kreider's band, the public school children and their teachers, the city firemen's platoon, a group of 'campfire girls' on a float, a group of 'Red Cross girls' and mail carriers' delegation carrying an immense flag, members of the city council and city officials. ... Nearly all carried flags."

Registration exceeded expectations; 1,079 men registered, and a subhead stated, "Nearly half decline to claim any ground for exemption; over 400 indicate dependents." The writer of the story related that as the registrants were asked whether they claimed exemptions, "One blond-haired German miner who had taken his first papers and who said he was the sole support of his mother, father, and sister, said nothing in answer to the question, but a steely glint in his eye showed that he was made of the heroic stuff that puts country above all other considerations."23

If the report of St. Louis Labor, a weekly Socialist newspaper, can be trusted, Robert Paul Prager arrived in Collinsville at about this time and went to work at the Bruno Bakery. Oddly, if Luebke was right about Prager having been fired by the bakery, Mrs. Bruno would describe him as "the best workman we ever had in the many years we are in business." She said that Prager "could do the finest bakery work, or any other work he was asked to do. And he was a fast worker, although he was somewhat of a physical cripple." Although he was very intelligent, she said, "he had was a certain peculiarity in his makeup which, at times, made him quarrelsome with people who did not agree with his ideas on ways of doing things. But as a rule he would soon get over his excitement and, when seeing that he was wrong, he would not hesitate to apologize for his queer actions."24

At least some miners in southern Illinois were showing signs of rebellion against their union in the middle of the summer of 1917. Frank Farrington, president of District 12 of the UMW, the Illinois district, issued an "official circular" on 20 July in Springfield that called upon miners in his district to keep labor peace in order to defeat "the monstrous infamies, the cruel barbarities, the disdain shown for all civilized ethics, the desecrations of everything good in human life" of the "military despotism" America had been forced to fight. Miners must cooperate in increasing production, Farrington said, because, "Men who are in a position to know tell us that a more plentiful supply of coal is necessary to success."

Cooperation did not mean disturbing "established standards" or failing to take advantage of "every legitimate opportunity to improve standards and increase wages," Farrington added. The union, however, would deal with standards and wages: "It is intended that it shall be made clear to you that the practice of shutting down mines in violation of our agreement to force some desired condition, and of suspending work under every conceivable pretext, must be stopped."25

A work stoppage that could and would be interpreted as fitting into the category Farrington had defined took place on 26 July at the Lumaghi Mine No. 2. According to the Herald, the strike had been caused by "a small group of malcontents-thought by some to be paid German agents or I.W.W. agitators." In the column next to the story about the strike, the Herald quoted a story from the St. Louis Republic claiming that "I.W.W. leaders are being supplied with German money to carry on a war against industry intended to cripple the United States Government and its Allies." Agitators making liberal use of German money were provoking strikes with "no real causes."

As the Herald described it, the strike had begun when "a dozen or more of the miners-some Italians, some Austrians-refused to work, saying the scales used to weight [sic] the coal at the mine to determine what each miner's pay shall be were inaccurate." Moses Johnson, UMW district board member, was called in, and both he and the county mine inspector certified the accuracy of the scale. Johnson declared the strike was unjustified and ordered it ended. "The only result was a near riot at the mine," the Herald reported. "Most of the men were afraid to go down because of possible violence."

The following Monday night a union meeting was held at city hall, and it was

one of the stormiest ever known here. All the older and more reputable members of the union, including the officials, tried to reason with the disturbers but were hissed down. Another meeting was held Tuesday with no different results.

Following the meeting Tuesday night, Johnson and a group of the disturbers engaged in an argument on Main street during which Johnson used force on two of them. Joe Riegel was thrown to the street and suffered a dislocated elbow. ... Henry Shercikes, the other, had Johnson arrested on a charge of assault and battery, and Johnson pleaded guilty Thursday morning and paid his fine.

Johnson later said "the disturbers were paid agents of the German government deliberately seeking to tie up the mine."26

In this situation, it was Joe Riegel who was battered on Main Street. Joe Riegel was the dissident and accused German agent. Moses Johnson, who would become Prager's chief accuser, was the man who dealt out the blows and the accusations to Riegel. But in April, 1918, as we shall see, Johnson would become, in effect, Riegel's defender.

Threatened with the loss of their union charter, members of the striking UMW local voted on the evening of Thursday, 9 August, at another meeting at city hall to accept Johnson's demand that they return to work before their grievance was negotiated. Johnson himself, however, was not present "due to being kept at home since Monday by a slight knife wound in the abdomen where he was cut by some unknown person during an argument on Main street." The agreement to return to work, the Herald said, would be "welcomed by the entire city, inasmuch as the strike has had an unsettling effect on business and industrial condition during the past two weeks."

But even as that strike was being resolved, the St. Louis Smelting and Refinery Company lead smelter, "one of Collinsville's largest industries," was shut down by a strike over the dismissal of four men "discharged by the company as undesirable." This strike drew the support of the local trades council, whose representatives told the Herald that all the unions in the council were prepared to support the smelter workers, and miners at Maryville would have one percent of their pay set aside for a strike fund.27

What strikes might mean to unions in Illinois was demonstrated at about this time by the arrests of union leaders for disloyalty. The Chicago Daily News editorialized on the subject 11 August, after "officials of certain labor organizations" protested to President Wilson that "union leaders have been arrested for disloyalty when the purpose of the arrests was merely to break up strikes." Specifically, two men had been arrested because "a superintendent of shops in Rock Island had expressed the belief that a troublesome strike would be broken" if they were taken away. The Daily News editorialist called for compulsory arbitration and added, "Irresponsible agitation at home, some of it tainted with treason, cannot be permitted to place in jeopardy the lives of American soldiers fighting in the trenches of Europe."28

Meanwhile, the miners around Collinsville continued what the Herald called "sporadic and unorganized strikes at most of the mines about the city." Although miners went back to work at Lumaghi Mine No. 2, an "epidemic of drivers strikes" began at the Donk Bros. Mine No. 2 on 11 August and spread to Lumaghi Mine No. 3 and Consolidated Coal Co. Mine No. 17. Frank Farrington sent telegrams to all the UMW locals in the state demanding that the strikers resume work immediately and threatening explusion for non-compliance. An unidentified "prominent mine local official" told the Herald that German agents were responsible: "At one mine the rebels object to the mine manager," he said. He continued, "at another they objected to the scales, at another they want more wages-and I understand the same thing is going the round all over this section of the state."29

Nonetheless, the Herald declared that the Labor Day celebration on 3 September was the "best in history." It began at 10 A.M. with a parade to Collinsville Park. Members of all the locals belonging to the Collinsville Trades Council marched, accompanied by three bands. "Thousands of persons stood along the street and watched the procession," the Herald said. At the park, Mayor Siegel "complimented the unions for the splendid showing they made in the parade, and commended them for the steadfastness of purpose and good judgement they had shown during the trying times of the past few weeks-in which there had been absolutely no trouble or violence in spite of the strikes."

A new unauthorized mine strike began the next day over the lack of a wash house at Lumaghi Mine No. 3 and then turned into a lock-out when the company shut down the mine the following day "while new cages were put in and other repairs made. The shut down probably will extend over a few weeks. It had not been intended to shut down the mine for repairs this season on account of the heavy demand for coal, but the company decided to make the needed repairs while the miners sweat out their dissatisfaction."

On 5 September the striking lead smelter workers held what the Herald called "a mass meeting" to formulate demands and then met with the smelter superintendent. They dropped their demand for reinstatement of the dismissed employees. They said they would go back to work if the company recognized their union and gave them a thirty percent wage increase. The superintendent said he was unwilling to give them thirty percent.30

Union members in southern Illinois got a fresh warning of the potential consequences of their unrest on 9 September when, according to the Associated Press, armed state troops broke up a parade in Springfield on behalf of striking streetcar workers. The following day, some five thousand miners responded by refusing to go to work at seventeen mines. The Associated Press account said "two men were slightly wounded by a shot fired from an army pistol, and several others were bruised and cut" when the troops broke up the parade.31 The miners returned to the pits on Monday, 17 September, after holding a parade said to have included some two thousand people.32

The St. Louis Smelting and Refining Company got a federal injunction on 24 September aimed at restricting the activities of a number of men, among them Moses Johnson. Also named were the president of UMW Local No. 685, Robert Bertolo, who had been the Socialist candidate for mayor of Collinsville in 1917, and Ed Franek, secretary of the trades council and the former Socialist candidate for fifth ward alderman.33

The smelter opened the following day under the protection of a deputy U.S. marshal; "Sheriff Jenkins had informed the company when the strike was first called that he would withdraw all protection from the plant if any attempt was made to operate."34 On 30 September a thousand union men, by the account of the Herald, marched in protest against "the attitude of the St. Louis Smelting and Refining company in employing non-union labor," and thousands more watched the demonstration. The parade was described as "one of the most orderly ever seen here."35

Moses Johnson went to Washington in early October and returned with word of a wage increase negotiated with the operators and the federal fuel administrator that was expected to continue in force until the end of the war or 1 April 1920, whichever came first. The operators would be allowed an increase in the price of coal on 15 October and the new wage scale for the mine workers would go into effect the following day. The Herald said, "The increases are thought sufficient to keep all the mines working uninterruptedly so far as the miners are concerned. They will mean an end to the sporadic and unauthorized strikes such as have prevailed in the district within the past two months."36

Instead, both the price increase and the wage increase were delayed, and the miners walked out 16 October at every mine in and around Collinsville. The Herald observed that the strikes in Collinsville and the Belleville area had been the beginning of a shut down throughout the central and southern parts of Illinois.

Robert Bertolo told the Herald, "They've been promising us a raise for weeks. In September they told us to wait until October 1. When October came they promised us the raise on October 16. When that day came they told us they could not give us the raise because they hadn't been able to get a raise in coal prices. We simply decided to quit until they gave us what we want." Moses Johnson "was non-committal. ... He rather indicated he doubted the legality of the strike, but he did not order the men back to work."37

H.A. Garfield, the federal fuel administrator, hit back at the strikes as soon as they began. The New York Times reported in a story datelined Washington, 16 October, that, "Operators and miners in the coal industry were warned tonight by Dr. Garfield, the Fuel Administrator, that all who participated in strikes and embarrassed the Government would be considered unpatriotic in view of the war crisis."38

Frank Farrington, president of the Illinois UMW district, agreed, in effect, when he said the following day that the strike would "resolve itself into a fight with the Federal Government" if not settled. The Herald said he declared that "he believes pro-German influences are backing the strike."

At about the same time that the miners were going on strike, about twenty-five would-be strikebreaking smelter workers were being arrested on the orders of Sheriff Jenkin Jenkins. The Herald coyly explained the charges against these men in this way: "One of the men had been found to be carrying concealed weapons while others had not." The sheriff was hauled into court on 17 October to explain himself, and despite the strenuous efforts of the state's attorney to find a law forbidding interstate movement of strikebreakers, was obliged by a writ of habeas corpus to let his prisoners go, "inasmuch as no charge had been preferred against most of them." Two deputy U.S. marshals, on the following day, cited Jenkins and five of his deputies (including Hannah Jokerst) for violating the injunction against interference with operations of the lead smelter. Before they took Jenkins away to Springfield, he said he had acted to preserve "peace and order. ... He had feared that the importation of the strike breakers, particularly the negroes, would cause trouble." He added that he was "especially seeking the agents who had been bringing the negroes into the city under false representations with regard to the strike."39

A racial challenge had been superimposed on an already heated labor situation by the smelter company. A similar situation had led to a white-against-black race riot in nearby East St. Louis only a few months before.40 The hiring of black strikebreakers seems to have been a further spur to unify the almost entirely white community of Collinsville.

As for the mine strikes, fuel administrator Garfield said Thursday, 18 October, that leaders of the UMW were cooperating with him and "the whole matter will be straightened out within a few days." The New York Times had been told that "a radical element among the miners was, perhaps, responsible for much of the trouble."41 In a story datelined Springfield, 19 October, the Times said the miners were "on the verge of rebellion against Garfield, Farrington, and John P. White, President of the mine workers." Farrington was quoted as having threatened to revoke the charters of locals that declined to return to work by Monday, 22 October, "Mr. Farrington said his action was prompted by a desire to save the miners from industrial conscription."42

Representatives of the mine union locals in the Collinsville area met Sunday night. The Herald said, "sentiment was badly divided" at the meeting, but they decided to go back to work, and the strike ended Monday at all but one of the mines. The exception was the Donk Bros. Mine No. 3 in Maryville, where work began on Tuesday.43

The following night several strikebreakers, "mostly negroes," according to the Herald, were forced off streetcars "and in many other ways ... made to feel the hostility of the union men." A striking smelter worker cut a man identified as Mexican Mike Medina with a knife as he was leaving the plant.44

Nine men who had been pickets at the smelter were found guilty on 31 October of violating the federal injunction against interference with operations.45 Jenkins and his deputies were found guilty of violating the injunction the following day. The Herald commented, "The evidence showed that the sheriff and the deputies had arrested numerous men, mostly negroes, and had taken them to the county jail at Edwardsville, many of them with no charges against them. The judge based his decision on this evidence." Moses Johnson warned that the convictions "would cause a storm of protest among union men all over the state."

Even as Jenkins and his men were being tried, the miners were get- ting their first increased paycheck, based on an increase in the price of coal granted, at last, by the fuel administrator. The threat of mine strikes in southern Illinois had finally been blunted.46

The conflict over the organization of smelter workers was not the only occasion for labor solidarity in Collinsville as winter approached. In November, five telephone operators walked out on the Central Union Telephone Company. The tactic chosen in this case was a boycott. Union men made "a systematic canvass of the business district" and convinced fifty merchants to remove their Bell telephones, the Herald would report at the beginning of the following February. Only eight merchants refused to join the boycott.47

One of the effects of the constant labor/management clashes in and around Collinsville beginning in the summer of 1917 was the neutralization of the conservative influence of Moses Johnson. He was drawn into a militant stance through the trades council's support of the smelter workers and then, faced with a general rebellion of the miners, declined to assert whatever authority he still possessed. He was up for re-election in December and although he held on to his post as district board member, he won only by what the Herald called a "small majority."48

The smelter strike demonstrated the ability of organized labor in Collinsville to exercise political influence in the form of the faithful support provided by Sheriff Jenkin Jenkins, and the telephone boycott showed that local businessmen could also be made to fall into line.

The most significant effect of the labor unrest around Collinsville, however, may have been a widespread fear of being accused of disloyalty. The miners had been told repeatedly that their actions sabotaged the war effort. From the beginning, dissidents such as Joe Riegel had been accused by implication of working for the Germans. At the same time, a muscular and unforgiving approach to the question of loyalty was on the rise.

That dark underside of the demand for loyalty, so unlike the sunny, flag-waving unity of the registration day parade, showed itself in a letter Mayor Siegel received from an organization calling itself the American Defense Society. The letter was printed in the Herald on 7 December. It called for the organization of "a small American Vigilance Corps in every city and town" that would classify all residents into four groups according to their loyalty and make note of whether they were alien enemies, pro-German, or anti-Government. Such people would be watched, and lists of their names would be sent to the police and any representatives of the Department of Justice and military intelligence services who happened to be in the area.49

In February 1918, the local "Vigilance Corps" in a nearby town demonstrated what could happen to unionists accused of disloyalty. The town was Staunton, about thirty miles north of Collinsville. The occasion was provided by a conflict within the local UMW union over a one hundred dollar contribution to the defense fund of Severino Oberdan. St. Louis Labor said Oberdan had been jailed for a time in September for disloyalty and sympathy with the IWW, and faced a new charge after having sworn out a warrant against the local superintendent of the Nokomis Coal Company related to unsafe conditions. St. Louis Labor did not say what the new charge was. The Post-Dispatch said it was bootlegging.50

On the night of Monday, 11 February according to St. Louis Labor, a union meeting in Staunton was broken up by a man named Barney Brazier who, using a pistol for a gavel and backed up by fifty-five special deputies, made a patriotic speech and then led the union members in singing The Star-Spangled Banner. Then, between midnight and three A.M. on 12 February, the Vigilance Corps held a "Loyalty Round-Up," going to about one hundred homes to hold patriotic exercises involving men of dubious loyalty. Oberdan and his lawyer were arrested by police but turned over to the mob, which tarred and feathered them.51 The Post-Dispatch said that the door-to-door vigilantes introduced some variety into their efforts by obliging those victims who could play musical instruments to perform The Star-Spangled Banner.52

In Staunton, patriotism displaced union autonomy, and that patriotism, at least in the jaundiced eyes of St. Louis Labor, was promoted by a solidly middle and upper class group. (Almost all of a group of twenty special deputies the Socialist paper identified by occupation were business and professional men.)53

A little more than two weeks after the Staunton affair, at the end of February, Robert Paul Prager went to work at the Donk mine in Maryville.54 At about the same time, patriotic tension began taking on an institutional form in Collinsville. On 7 March a small group met to form a "neighborhood committee of the state council of defense," the Herald reported, adding, "The primary aim of the committee is to promote loyalty and suppress disloyalists."55

An organizational meeting featuring the singing of patriotic songs and an "inspirational speech" by Thomas Williamson was held on 27 March, at the Orpheum Theatre and hundreds of memberships were said to have been taken out.56 The day after Prager was lynched, the Herald announced that six hundred applications had been made for membership. On 12 April, the Herald announced that the organization had fifteen hundred members.57

On 6 April, Frank Armstrong of the Chicago Daily News reported from Collinsville that the strongest cause for "the development of a murderous frenzy" was the belief of the miners that Prager was a German spy and "was going to blow up the Maryville mine four miles north of here. ... A singular thing in this tragedy is that thus far no person in Collinsville or Maryville has come forward with statements alleged to have been made by the victim to prove disloyalty against him." Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, Armstrong noted, "Moses Johnson of Collinsville, district board member of the United Mine Workers of America, says he knows Prager was a spy."58

The patriotic frenzy whipped up in the organizational campaign had collided with Robert Prager's problems with the UMW and become a murderous frenzy. The drunken crowd that hanged him probably included many people who were willing to believe that he was a German spy, but the men who started the affair earlier that day may have believed that Prager was a spy of a different sort-a spy for the coal operators.

Prager had been a skilled baker-highly skilled, according to Mrs. Bruno-but had suddenly become a laborer in a coal mine. Johnson and Fornero, in a statement issued the night of 7 April, accused Prager of having lied when he had claimed to have worked in mines in Germany.59 They said (not very credibly considering the evidence of Prager's loyalty that would become known later) that Prager had stated "that Germany was fighting for a righteous cause and would win," and yet they added the ambiguous statement that their investigations had "led us and other parties and officials to believe that he was either a German spy or a man who would be injurious to the mining industry and unsafe in the mines" (emphasis added).60

When Johnson testified at the coroner's inquest, he relayed a statement by a mine examiner at the mine where Prager had worked that Prager had come to him asking questions about the workings of the mine, saying he intended to become a mine manager: "Among other things he asked to know were the state laws and the organization laws regarding mine managers, something about the air controls in mines and about explosions and gases." Prager's interest in explosions, by this account, is what had excited the suspicion of the miners.61

If Prager was not planning to blow up the mine (and there is not so much as the shadow of a reasonable suspicion that he was), then his statement to the mine examiner suggests that he had a genuine ambition to join management-an ambition a wiser man might have been more reticent to express under the circumstances. That fits William Jokerst's characterization of Prager as "the kind of fellow that I think wanted to get ahead. ... He was wanting to do more than just be a laborer."62 The miners who knew Prager at the mine in Maryville-the same mine which had returned to operation one conspicuous day later than the other mines in the Collinsville area-had more reason to question Prager's loyalty to his fellow workers than his loyalty to his adopted country.

Why did Moses Johnson protect Joe Riegel by making himself the chief witness for the proposition that Prager was disloyal and dangerous? Riegel was one of the men Johnson had brawled with on Main Street only seven months before. By focusing attention on the mob's gruesome patriotism, however, Johnson effectively washed out the stain left on the loyalty of the miners during the autumn strikes by newspaper writers, Dr. Garfield, and even some of their own union officials-Johnson among them. By defending the mob, Johnson was defending the union, restoring his own authority, and staving off community division.

Johnson denied on 6 April that miners had been responsible for the hanging, but this was not credible and he may not have expected it to be credible. According to the Post-Dispatch, he said, "I was in the crowd at the city hall before they took Prager out. ... I know it wasn't a crowd of miners. There might have been some miners."63 One might ask what Johnson was doing there, and what he did after Prager was brought out.

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.

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.

14 Carl Monroe, interview with author, 22 October 1989.

15 Irving Dilliard, interview with author, 22 October 1989.

16 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 15 May 1918, 1.

17 The Miner's Institute, although apparently little used, was still an impressive structure in 1989. A cornerstone-laying ceremony was held in October 1917 with district UMW president Frank Farrington as the featured speaker. (Herald, 5 October 1917, 8.)

18 Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty, 9.

19 Herald, 8 January 1976, 5.

20 William Jokerst, interview with author, 22 October 1989.

21 United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Vol. III (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1923), 265.

22 Herald, 20 April 1917, 1; 5 October 1917, 1.

23 Herald, 8 June 1917, 1.

24 St. Louis Labor, 13 April 1918, 1, 4.

25 United Mine Workers Journal (Indianapolis), 2 August 1917, 12.

26 Herald, 3 August 1917, 1.

27 Herald, 10 August 1917, 1.

28 Daily News (Chicago), 11 August 1917, 8.

29 Herald, 17 August 1917, 1.

30 Herald, 7 September 1917, 1.

31 Daily News, 10 September 1917, 1.

32 St. Louis Labor, 22 September 1917, 5.

33 Herald, 20 April 1917, 1; Herald 5 October 1917, 1.

34 Herald, 28 September 1917, 1.

35 Herald, 5 October 1917, 1.

36 Herald, 12 October 1917, 1.

37 Herald, 19 October 1917, 1.

38 The New York Times, 17 October 1917, 22.

39 Herald, 19 October 1917, 1.

40 Herald, 6 July 1917, 1.

41 Times, 19 October 1917, 7.

42 Times, 20 October 1917, 7.

43 Herald, 26 October 1917, 2.

44 Herald, 30 October 1917, 4.

45 Herald, 23 November 1917, 2.

46 Herald, 2 November 1917, 1.

47 Herald, 1 February 1918, 1.

48 Herald, 14 December 1917, 1

49 Herald, 7 December 1917, 7.

50 Post-Dispatch, 13 February 1918, 1.

51 St. Lowis Lafcor, 23 February 1918, 1, 4.

52 Post-Dispatch, 13 February 1918, 1.

53 St. Louis Labor, 23 February 1918, 4.

54 Herald, 5 April 1918, 1.

55 Herald, 8 March 1918, 1.

56 Herald, 29 March 1918, 1.

57 Herald, 6 April 1918, 2; Herald, 12 April 1918, 2.

58 Daily News, 6 April 1918, 1.

59 The Maryville local of the UMW later fined three members fifty dollars each after a three-man trial committee including James Fornero decided that they had misrepresented Prager's mining experience. The three men had signed Prager's petition for membership in the local. The Herald said Prager had only twenty-eight days of previous coal mining experience. Herald, 19 April 1918, 1.

60 Post-Dispatch, 7 April 1918, 4.

61 Herald, 12 April 1918, 1.

62 Jokerst interview.

63 Post-Dispatch, 6 April 1918, 1.

64 Herald, 12 April 1918, 1.

65 Herald, 27 April 1918, 1.

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