Bloody Williamson

by Paul M. Angle

  At the conclusion of the service five thousand people, more than had ever attended a funeral in Williamson County, passed by the coffin and viewed the body.

  Shortly before the Cagle funeral Galligan was removed from the Herrin jail, and for twenty-four hours his whereabouts were unknown. At the end of the day Mayor Anderson was still behind the bars. Though several companies of guardsmen now patrolled the streets, no one had yet interfered with the man who held all power in his hands. That night Louis LaCoss of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat summarized the situation in a dispatch to his paper:

  Young performed his duties in the Police Department as usual tonight. He dined in his room in a hotel adjacent to the City Hall and walked back without escort to his office. Two vicious-looking automatics, however, were girded to his thigh.… His deputized officers, none in uniform, but each provided with a telltale star of substantial proportions, still patrol the streets, and the familiar command of “keep moving” was heard tonight, both from them and the soldier squads.

  * Strictly speaking, a committee of the Williamson County Law and Order League. But the Law and Order League and the Klan were co-operating so closely as to be virtually indistinguishable.

  † I have not been able to find out who recommended Young to the Williamson County Klan. In its issue of September 2, 1924, the Herrin Semi-Weekly Herald, official Klan organ, asserted that Roy A. Haynes “recommended that Mr. Young come to Williamson County.” But in a telegram to the St. Louis Star, September 3, 1924, Haynes stated flatly: “I did not send S. Glenn Young nor have I recommended him at any time to any one.” According to John Smith, Herrin Klan leader, “a Senator recommended Glenn Young to us as a man who could show us how to proceed.” John Whitesides, a leading Klansman of Marion, said the committee that visited Washington got in touch with Young “accidentally.” Young himself, in a statement to the Associated Press, February 11, 1924, stated: “Four years ago, while I was a federal prohibition enforcement officer, I raided Herrin and parts of Williamson County single-handed, and because the people in this county who are desirous of law enforcement were pleased with my work they sent for me.”

  ‡ On March 14, 1924, the Williamson County grand jury reported: “We further find that during the so-called raids by the Ku Klux Klan … numerous people were robbed, beaten, abused and in many instances imprisoned secretly without any legal process and wholly without justifiable cause.” And on February 11, 1927, Harold G. Baker of East St. Louis, United States District Attorney, wrote of the Klan raids to the Attorney General: “There is no doubt in my mind but what the rights of citizens and the rights of property were totally disregarded in many cases.” Baker was not in office in 1923–4, and had no reason for prejudice. His opinion was based on a careful study of files in his office.

  § A boy, operated on for appendicitis the afternoon of February 8, died the following morning—undoubtedly from the shock of the night’s events.

  IX

  THE KLAN WAR

  February 1924–May 1924

  A city of fear. That is Herrin. Fear of the neighbor next door. Fear of the man across the way. Fear of the fellow one passes on the street. Fear of the businessman, of the worker, of the farmer, of the doctor and lawyer. Fear begotten of fear. Cleveland News in the Literary Digest, September 13, 1924.

  IN A LITTLE more than three months S. Glenn Young had made himself the dictator of an American county of which he was not even a legal resident. Who, and what, was he?

  Only the barest outline of his early life can be established today. He was born on a farm near the little town of Long Island, Kansas, on March 4, 1887, and named Seth Glenn in honor of a great-uncle. His father, a prosperous farmer, also owned an implement store in Long Island. The mother died while the boy was very young, so he spent much of his boyhood and youth in the homes of relatives. He attended Long Island High School and Western College at Western, Iowa—a small college no longer in existence—but did not remain at either institution long enough to graduate. In 1911 he decided to study medicine and enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Milwaukee (later absorbed by the Marquette University School of Medicine). He married in the same year.

  Evidently Young left medical school after one year and went to work as a nurse. In 1918 he became an agent of the Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice. For several months he tracked down draft dodgers, mainly in the mountainous regions of the southern states. He made a record as an energetic, fearless, and resourceful officer.

  A change in organization led to his resignation, but a year later he obtained an appointment as a special agent in the newly created Prohibition Unit of the Treasury Department, the agency charged with the enforcement of the Volstead Act. On June 25, 1920, he took the oath of office, and started to work at a salary of $1,800 a year.

  Young was assigned to southern Illinois. He soon became a conspicuous figure, partly because of a striking Belgian police dog that accompanied him everywhere, and partly because of a series of flamboyant feature stories that appeared in the East St. Louis Journal during the latter part of August. In these he was pictured as a “noted sleuth … one of the youngest, nerviest and most successful of the army of secret workers which enforces government edicts.” Before coming to southern Illinois he had operated for three years under the War Department—so the author asserted—and for seven years as an agent of the Department of Justice. Prior to that he had been a Texas Ranger and a deputy United States marshal in western Kansas! While serving as a government agent in the southeastern states he had made approximately 3,000 arrests, and had been forced to kill twenty-seven desperadoes.*

  Young, the feature writer revealed, had been the subject of hundreds of columns in newspapers and magazines. “Has the publicity made him egotistic,” he asked, “or, in plain, everyday English, big-headed? I say absolutely no. It has had no more effect on this modest hero than a bang-up selling-talk of a live wire salesman would have with a deaf and dumb man.…”

  The author concluded with a personal description that contrasted happily with his several columns of unwitting fiction. “The officer is five feet, seven inches tall and weighs 144 pounds.… He is strongly, but not heavily built, and is an average man in size only. He has slightly bowed legs, superinduced by many days spent in the saddle. His arms are long and his hands well kept, with very long fingers. His eyes are full and prominent and of a peculiar shade of bluish gray.”

  Young was in the prohibition service a bare four months before he became involved in serious trouble. With two Granite City police officers he raided a house in Madison, a small town near East St. Louis. They found a still, mash, and a small quantity of whisky. During the raid Young learned that Luka Vukovic, a relative of the man whom he had just arrested, lived next door, so he took one of the officers and went to investigate. According to Young’s report, he saw Vukovic drinking from a milk bottle. Suspecting that the bottle contained whisky, he decided to enter in spite of the fact that he had no warrant. No one responded to his knock, so he and the police officer forced the front door.

  Inside the house the officers found a twenty-five gallon keg of liquor. Suddenly Vukovic appeared, pointed a pistol at Young, and pulled the trigger, but the weapon missed fire. Young drew his gun, shot several times, and killed Vukovic.

  Young was exonerated by a coroner’s jury but indicted for murder by the Madison County grand jury. The Prohibition Unit suspended him on December 20, 1920, pending the result of its own investigation. On the ground that he was a federal officer at the time of the offense, the case was taken from Madison County and set for trial in the U.S. District Court at Springfield.

  A few days before the trial began, Young’s wife filed suit for divorce. Her petition alleged that he was subject to violent fits of temper, that on one occasion he had thrown her down and kicked her, that his course of cruelty toward her had begun soon after their marriage, and that for a long time he had failed to support her and their twin daughters. The divorce was granted
on July 1.

  At Young’s trial, which began on June 6, 1921, the prosecution presented only two witnesses—the deputy coroner, to identify the body, and Vukovic’s widow, who testified that her husband had had no gun, that Young had shot him in cold blood, and had then planted one of his own guns beside the dead body. Young took the stand and claimed self-defense. The case went to the jury on the evening of June 10. After an hour’s deliberation, it brought in a verdict of not guilty.

  Young was a free man, but any elation he may have felt at his acquittal must have been dampened by the knowledge that he had no job. Two weeks earlier he had been dismissed as a prohibition agent, with the dismissal dated December 10, 1920, when he had been suspended.

  His discharge was the result of an investigation, conducted by two special agents, that the Prohibition Unit initiated after he killed Vukovic. In that case the agents concluded that Young had acted in self-defense, but that he did not exercise the caution and discretion to be expected of a government officer when he entered the house without a search warrant. In other instances of alleged improper or unlawful conduct the agents found Young guilty. He had, as charged, presented a fictitious claim for auto hire; he had inspired the East St. Louis Journal articles, which were held to be “improper newspaper publicity”; he had continued to represent himself as a prohibition agent after his suspension.

  In the course of their investigation the government agents uncovered irregularities beyond those specified at the outset. They learned that, in August 1920, Young had confiscated a roulette wheel, 500 poker chips, and $157.50 in cash from a gambler at Tamms, Illinois, and had never turned the property over to the agent in charge, although repeatedly ordered to do so. They learned that while he was acting as a Department of Justice agent he had borrowed four hundred dollars from a woman who lived in Aiken, South Carolina, and had never paid the debt. And they learned that while he was in the active service of the Prohibition Unit he and a young woman had frequently registered at hotels as man and wife.

  The only conclusion in Young’s favor that the special agents arrived at came as the result of their review of a rape charge on which he had been arrested in early December 1920. In that episode the local grand jury had refused to bring an indictment. The investigators also found the charge baseless.

  But one favorable verdict could not offset half a dozen adverse ones. Young had been in trouble constantly by reason of his lack of discretion and good sense.

  This opinion [the special agents concluded] is strengthened by our personal observation of Agent Young, having found him to be of a belligerent nature, prone to make threats of violence, unwilling to accept advice and apparently convinced that he is a law within himself. Agent Young is of a boastful and garrulous disposition, officious and in no sense lacking in his efforts to impress others with his official importance.… The evidence overwhelmingly shows Agent Young to be not only entirely unfit to be in the government service but a distinct and glaring disgrace to the service.

  While the investigation was in progress dozens of Young’s supporters—district attorneys, U.S. commissioners, ministers, Anti-Saloon League officers, and lay workers in the cause of prohibition—appealed to the prohibition commissioner in his behalf. He was “unostentatious in bearing and diligent in the performance of his duty,” “admired and trusted by all law-abiding people,” “faithful and efficient,” “a terror to evil doers.” And so forth.

  The testimonials had no effect, but when Young himself, after his dismissal, complained to the commissioner that the agents who had investigated him were prejudiced, that official reopened the case. Two other agents reviewed the evidence and interviewed the original investigators. In September 1921 they reported that Young’s charges were without foundation and recommended that the case be closed.

  Six months later Richard Yates, Congressman at Large from Illinois and an ardent dry, asked the prohibition commissioner, a new appointee, to reconsider the Young case. A Congressman is not to be disregarded, so the commissioner pulled out the file and went through it. He could find no reason, he informed Yates, for reopening the investigation.†

  Thus the man who, on the evening of February 10, 1924, ruled Williamson County in the name of law enforcement and good government bore on his official record black marks for recklessness, dishonesty, boastfulness, arrogance, and immorality.

  In Herrin, troops were still disembarking as late as Monday, February 11, almost three days after the first Klan bullets shattered the windows of the hospital. In all, 1,700 soldiers patrolled the streets and manned machine guns at strategic corners. The ranking officer of the Illinois National Guard, Major General Milton J. Foreman, was in command.

  As his first official act General Foreman issued a proclamation prohibiting all except duly authorized officers of the law from carrying firearms. The order continued: “Only such persons as are legally elected or appointed will be permitted to exercise the functions of deputy sheriff, police officer or other peace officer and all appointments of special deputy sheriffs and special peace officers heretofore made are revoked and annulled.” Young, Foreman told newspaper correspondents, had no official standing. “We do not understand that Young occupies any position justifying him in administering law and order in the State of Illinois.”

  Nevertheless, Young continued to occupy the office of the chief of police until February 12, when John Ford returned to resume the position.

  By this time the regular authorities were emerging from the various jails in which they had spent the weekend. Ford and Crain, whom Galligan spirited away on the night of the 8th, were turned loose at Belleville. Galligan and four deputies came to light in the Champaign County jail at Urbana; Acting Sheriff McCown and a detail of guardsmen brought them back to Marion. Mayor Anderson of Herrin was freed from the county jail at Marion.

  The release of the mayor and twenty-three others resulted from the verdict of the coroner’s jury in the inquest over the death of Caesar Cagle. After examining fifty-four witnesses the jury concluded, on February 13, that “Caesar Cagle came to his death … by gunshot wounds at the hand of one Shelton, described as tall and slim, and one Shelton, described as heavy set and sleepy eyed.” With the verdict, all those whom Young had jailed on the charge of murdering Cagle were released. The two Sheltons—Carl and Earl—were not in custody.

  While the coroner’s jury was still hearing witnesses, General Foreman initiated a movement that he hoped would bring peace to the troubled community. In conferences with officials and other leading citizens he urged them to take the lead in rescuing the county from disgrace. Good-hearted men, he told them, must dispel the antagonisms and hatreds that had brought about virtual mob rule. A county couldn’t be run with rifles and machine guns, and it wasn’t the state’s business to do it even if it could be done.

  As the result of his plea, a group of representative citizens met at Marion on the 13th and constituted themselves the Citizens’ Committee. The next day the members, thirty-five or forty in number, spent several hours in separate conferences with Klan leaders and Sheriff Galligan. Their deliberations took on urgency from the call that Judge E. N. Bowen of the Herrin City Court‡ issued for a special grand jury to investigate the events of February 8 and 9. “It’s about time the real citizens of this county ran things,” the judge asserted. “Far more important than any faction’s desires or ambitions is the right of law-abiding people of Herrin to enjoy peace and quiet, to have in this city a decent place in which to live and bring up families.… This is not something for Williamson County to do, or for the State of Illinois and its troops to do. It’s our task, and we’re going to do it.” The Herrin post of the American Legion, the Rotary Club, and the Lions Club all promised their co-operation.

  But difficulties appeared at once. The grand jury then in session returned a number of indictments against prominent Klansmen for alleged offenses committed during the recent raids, and their arrest did not allay the prevailing tension. Even worse, in its effect, was
the public controversy over Young’s status. By what authority, newspaper correspondents wanted to know, had he conducted the wholesale liquor-raids? They had the statement of the assistant prohibition commissioner that Young had not been connected with the service since his dismissal in 1920, and a denial by the director for the Illinois district that he had any authority from the government for the Williamson County raids. On the other hand Arlie Boswell, Young’s lawyer, insisted that the raider had full authority for what he had done, although Boswell refused to reveal from whom that authority stemmed. On one point there was no longer mystery: Young was being paid, and handsomely, by a number of leading Klansmen. Those who should have known stated that he had received between five and seven thousand dollars for his services since early November, and his admirers had also given him a Lincoln touring car. Law enforcement under Klan auspices, it is evident, was more lucrative than being a prohibition agent at $150 a month.

  Would Young continue as the Klan’s enforcer? He himself announced that his work was “finished temporarily,” and that the county was now “fairly dry.” He intended to go to Washington to help frame injunctions against the bootleggers whose places he had raided, and then he planned to reside permanently at Marion. The decision to withdraw from the enforcement crusade, though apparently his, had actually been made for him. Sam Stearns and the other Klansmen who had put up the money that he had received were shocked by his recklessness, and had notified him privately, after the mass raid of February 1, 1924, that he would no longer be paid for his work. They declined, however, to repudiate him publicly, and when anti-Klan leaders, conferring with the Citizens’ Committee, tried to make his dismissal one of the conditions of peace, Stearns and other Klansmen issued a manifesto in which they declared that he continued to enjoy their confidence. “S. Glenn Young has the support and good will of every law-abiding citizen of Williamson County,” they asserted “… and we recommend him to the world as a perfect gentleman, honest, true and up-right in all his dealings, but a terror to all law violators.”