Bloody Williamson

by Paul M. Angle

  Within two weeks Young made another public display of bad judgment. This time the occasion was a hearing before a justice of the peace at Carlyle, the county seat of Clinton County, in which the assault on him and his wife had taken place. Early in June he had sworn out warrants for attempted murder not only against Briggs but also against Carl and Earl Shelton, who, he charged, were the other occupants of the car from which assassins’ bullets were fired on May 23. The two brothers voluntarily surrendered to the sheriff of Clinton County and were admitted to bail. On June 26 they were to appear at the county seat for a preliminary hearing.

  The biggest crowd in Carlyle’s history gathered for the event. The courtroom was packed, and hundreds were turned away. Fifty deputies, each armed with a shotgun, stood guard. Shortly after two o’clock Young arrived, not alone, or with a small escort, but accompanied by thirty autoloads of Klansmen. Most of the cars were decorated with American flags. Many of the Klansmen carried arms, which the sheriff compelled them to leave in his office.

  It was a spectacular performance, but many saw it as a brazen effort to give notice that the Klan meant to see its own concepts of justice carried out.

  The hearing took little time. Without any show of doubt Young identified Briggs and the Shelton brothers as members of the party that attacked him and his wife on May 23. The justice bound the three men over to the November grand jury, and then released them on bond.*

  No matter how much Young’s swaggering, brash behavior pleased his Klan followers in Williamson County, the practical men who headed the statewide organization knew that they could no longer retain him as an official and employee. In early June, as soon as he was permanently discharged from St. Elizabeth’s,† he was dismissed from his position in East St. Louis. At the same time the Grand Dragon for Illinois, Charles G. Palmer, wrote a public letter to District Attorney Potter in which he stated that Young’s intemperate charges did not represent the official attitude of the Klan and apologized for his “exhibition of impetuosity.”

  Nor was this the only blow. Ever since spring Young had been trying to have the cases pending against him as the result of the liquor raids—robbery, assault, and so forth—transferred to the United States District Court on the ground that he was a deputized federal officer at the time the alleged offenses occurred. Potter, of course, tried to block the move, but he did ask the Attorney General for instructions. That officer and his assistants were no more anxious to defend the Illinois troublemaker than the District Attorney, but they made a thorough investigation of the merits of his contention. Gus J. Simons reported that he deputized Young for the raid on December 22, 1923, but that—and this was contrary to statements given out at the time—he had not deputized him for the raids that were staged on December 31, 1923, January 5, 1924, January 14, or later. Since the alleged offenses had been committed during the later raids, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General, decided that Young’s defense was not a responsibility of the Department of Justice. Accordingly the District Attorney moved that Young’s cases be remanded to the state courts, and Judge Lindley, sitting in East St. Louis, ruled in Potter’s favor on all except two indictments. These, growing out of the raid of December 22, could be tried in the federal courts; all others in which Young was a defendant would have to be heard in Williamson County, where both judges—Bowen and Hartwell—were definitely hostile.

  From this time on Young acted with complete abandon. Two performances in quick succession were typical. One took place on July 31 at East St. Louis, where he had been summoned to appear for a preliminary hearing on an attempted-murder charge. Young arrived with an escort of hundreds of Klansmen, who proceeded to take over the Labor Temple. Instead of appearing in court he sent for the justice of the peace to come to the Temple for the proceedings. That official supinely obeyed. After being bound over to the grand jury, Young ordered the corridors of the building cleared while he made out his bond, and his followers sprang to do his bidding. Then he emerged to receive the cheers of his private army.

  The other incident occurred in Marion two weeks later. Learning that a charge of carrying concealed weapons had been filed against him there, he appeared, late in the afternoon, to give bond. Three carloads of his henchmen, armed with pistols, rifles, and a portable machine-gun, accompanied him; he himself wore his pearl-handled automatics. The group strode into the clerk’s office as if they were officers of the law. When Young saw that the information against him was sworn to by Ora Thomas, he cursed the clerk for issuing the capias. The violent argument that followed attracted a score of spectators, who watched in fascination even as they looked for cover in the event that someone pulled a pistol.

  The next morning Young and his gang appeared again. As the little caravan circled the public square Galligan leaned from the window of his office and called out derisively: “Hello, Young!”

  Young stopped his car and yelled back: “Come out here and say that, you dirty crook!”

  Parking near the sheriff’s office, he exchanged profane epithets with Galligan for several minutes. Again a cluster of bystanders watched expectantly for an outbreak of gunfire.

  Tension, in fact, had reached a point that made everyone fearful of another eruption. The primary cause, aside from Young’s inflammatory antics, was the session of the Herrin City Court scheduled for August 18. Twelve cases growing out of the killing of Cagle and the riot that followed were set for trial at that time.

  During the first days of the term, several cases against Klansmen were dismissed, and in one or two the defendants were acquitted. Then, on August 25, the judge called a larceny case in which Young was one of three defendants. His attorneys asked for a continuance on the ground that he had gone to Atlanta, Georgia, for medical treatment, and supported their motion with affidavits from two physicians of that city. State’s Attorney Duty, prosecuting, contested the motion. Judge Bowen found for Duty and ordered Young’s bonds, totaling thirty-nine thousand dollars, forfeited.

  The tension tightened. Klansmen sent hundreds of telegrams to Governor Small urging him to intervene in Williamson County. The sheriff, according to many of those who sent wires, had deputized a large number of gunmen so as to dominate the Herrin court while Young’s cases were being tried. Small made a blanket reply in an interview at Springfield: it was the sheriff’s duty to preserve order, and the State of Illinois had already spent as much as it intended to in the turbulent county.

  But the Klan had other ways of exerting pressure. One of these was tried in late August, when the Klan held a big picnic at the county fairgrounds. The day of festivity came to a close with a parade consisting of floats, bands, a ladies’ drum corps, and hundreds of cars decorated with flags and white crosses. The parade over, five thousand people assembled to listen to the speakers and to participate in initiation ceremonies for both men and women.

  Galligan, infuriated by the performance, gave out a bitter interview:

  “It’s a shame that the Ku Klux keep stirring up trouble.… Instead of letting things get quiet they stir up trouble with this parade. Two men can’t get together on the street but what they start talking about the Klan. This business is ruining our lodges, it’s hurting the churches, it hurts neighborhoods—even brothers won’t speak to each other because of this Ku Klux business. Until the Ku Klux Klan is forgotten there will be no peace in Williamson County.”

  On the day this interview was published the case of the People vs. Carl and Earl Shelton for the murder of Caesar Cagle came up for trial. By midmorning of the next day the jury was completed. But instead of introducing testimony, Duty moved that the case be dismissed. He took this course, he explained, because the sole witness who had connected the Sheltons with the Cagle killing had disappeared, and therefore the state had no case. Besides, Tim Cagle, father of the dead man, had become convinced that the two defendants had nothing to do with the murder of his son.

  As soon as Duty finished Tim Cagle rose and addressed the court. In a voice trembling with
emotion he said that he approved what the State’s Attorney had done. Then he pleaded for peace among the warring factions. He recalled the days of the Bloody Vendetta, in which he confessed that he had been involved. The participants in that long-drawn-out feud had been good men; so were many of the principals in the Klan war. But the fighting must stop. “Let’s get it settled,” the old man begged. “We have a great country here and my God, let’s be great in it!”

  Judge Bowen granted the State’s Attorney’s motion, and the Sheltons walked from the courtroom free men.

  Half an hour later Galligan, special deputies “Bud” Allison and Ora Thomas, the Shelton brothers, and other enemies of the Klan drove to John Smith’s garage in Herrin, stepped out of their automobiles, and entered the establishment. All were armed. They intended to recover the Dodge car that Jack Skelcher had been driving on the day of his death, and that Smith had been holding ever since. Now that the murder charge against the Sheltons had been dismissed, the car would not be needed as evidence. The show of force was called for—so Galligan thought—because the garage was a Klan gathering-place.

  Galligan asked for Smith. When told by one of the several men who were loafing around the place that the garage owner had gone home to dinner, Galligan said that he had come to get the Dodge, and demanded that it be produced. An attendant started to comply with his demand, but with infuriating slowness. Galligan ordered him, profanely, to get a move on. The attendant replied, also profanely. Someone in the sheriff’s party undertook to quicken the garageman’s dragging steps by punching him in the ribs with the barrel of a pistol. A scuffle followed.

  The noise attracted a passerby named Chester Reid. Stepping inside the garage door, and seeing that a fight was about to break out, Reid called to the men to put up their pistols. Two or three of the sheriff’s men, coming up to talk to the newcomer, noticed a car passing slowly and ran out to stop it. Recognizing the riders as Klansmen, they jerked them out and ordered them to line up on the street.

  Someone fired. An instant later volleys rang out inside the garage and on the street in front of it. When the shooting stopped six men were dead or dying, and several others were bleeding from wounds.‡

  Three of the dead men were Klansmen—Green Dunning, Dewey Newbold, and Charles Wollard. Reid, the peacemaker, lost his life; so did Otto Rowland, another innocent bystander. Allison, the sheriff’s special deputy, was the sixth casualty. Herman Phemister, one of the sheriff’s friends, was badly wounded; Carl Shelton was shot in the hand.

  Galligan and the surviving members of his party placed the dying and wounded men in cars and took them to the Herrin hospital. That done, the sheriff telephoned to the Adjutant General and asked that troops be rushed to the city. Fearing an attack on the hospital, he ordered special deputies from all over the county to report there as soon as possible. At the same time, the Klan was mobilizing at the Methodist Church two blocks away. Fortunately, forty men of the headquarters company of the 130th Infantry arrived in trucks from Carbondale before the two groups clashed. As soon as their machine guns were set up on the hospital grounds the danger of open civil war ended. That evening a full company from Salem reinforced the first militiamen. On the surface Herrin was quiet, but the bulges of concealed weapons showed in the light summer clothing of many men.

  The presence of troops gave assurance that for the moment at least there would be no gunplay, but not even soldiers can keep people from talking. So the battle of the Klan continued with words. From Atlanta, Young wired to John Smith: “If the boys need me I will come, if I have to come on one leg.” “We’ve fooled with these Klansmen long enough,” Galligan told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, “and you can say for me we’re ready to fight it out.” The Rev. I. E. Lee, Herrin Baptist minister, told the same reporter that the election of a new State’s Attorney and a new sheriff offered the only solution of the county’s trouble. Calling on Duty for a comment on Lee’s statement, the reporter noticed that the State’s Attorney shook hands with his left hand while he tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal his automatic behind his back. All the county needed, Duty said, was a thorough cleaning-up by the National Guard. If the commanding officer would seize the four arsenals of the Klan in Herrin, the principal source of trouble would be eliminated. Not to be left out, the Ministers’ Association of Williamson County issued a long statement, reviewing the history of local law-enforcement, or the lack of it, and concluding with a prescription similar to that of the Reverend Mr. Lee:

  The imprisonment of innocent men upon unfounded charges must cease. The persons guilty of these outrages must be brought to justice without favor or partizanship. Honest witnesses must not be so cowed that they will fear to give evidence. The courts must dispense justice, punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent. To do that we need a States Attorney who will enforce the law and a Sheriff who will apprehend the real criminals. We have neither.

  Duty, shown this pronouncement, made the kind of comment that always infuriated the crusading preachers: “Every time they get up in their pulpits they ring in the Klan. They stir up trouble and hatred, and the people who listen to them come out inflamed.”

  In a courthouse guarded by militiamen armed with automatic rifles and hand grenades, a coroner’s jury held its inquest on the deaths of those killed in the Smith garage riot. Witnesses contradicted each other. Charles Denham, Herrin merchant, swore that while the riot was in progress Duty, Judge Bowen, and Jane Lassiter, the coroner’s secretary, drove past the Smith garage and that Duty and Bowen fired into his car. Miss Lassiter swore that at that time she and Duty, in the latter’s car, were well on their way to Marion. Mrs. Chester Reid identified John Smith, the garage owner, as the man who shot her husband; others swore that Smith did not arrive at the garage until fifteen or twenty minutes after the shooting. Dr. Black, some witnesses testified, fired at the rioters; others asserted that he drove up hastily and immediately began to work with the men who had been shot.

  The jurors, impressed by Mrs. Reid’s testimony in spite of contrary evidence, found that Smith killed Reid. They also concluded that Allison and Dunning killed each other. The other three men met death at the hands of parties unknown. Smith was ordered held for the grand jury.

  The implication of Smith in the murder of Reid made Klansmen boil with anger. So did the appearance of Ora Thomas at the Herrin hospital four days after the riot, even though he came only to pay a visit to the wounded Phemister. As word of his presence spread, groups of Klansmen formed, and the outlook became ominous. Captain H. L. Bigelow, commanding the sixteen militiamen who remained in Herrin—all others had been sent home two days earlier—learned what impended and ordered Thomas to leave the city. Thus a clash was averted. But passions had no chance to cool. On September 4 word came from Danville that a federal grand jury had just indicted Young and nine other Herrin residents on charges of impersonating federal officers. On the same day, in Herrin, Galligan, Ora Thomas, Carl, Earl, and Bernie Shelton, and other members of the sheriff’s faction were put under bond to await the action of the next grand jury in connection with the Smith garage riot; so were nine prominent Klansmen. Herrin seethed with apprehension.

  Young did not help matters by returning from Atlanta. On September 12 he and his wife registered at the Ly-Mar Hotel in Herrin; immediately afterward, accompanied by a large party of Klansmen, he drove to Benton to give bond under the federal indictments.

  The next day he was formally expelled from the Klan. (In the action taken against him in the summer he had only been relieved of his position as a Klan employee.) Charles G. Palmer, Illinois Grand Dragon, gave notice of Young’s expulsion in the Illinois Kourier, the official Klan paper. Young, Palmer asserted, had an “inordinate craving for personal publicity,” a fondness for “ostentatious displays of firearms and braggadocio,” and a tendency to take the law “into his own hands, shoot at the drop of a hat, and give utterance to the most incendiary thoughts.” He had performed “splendid service” in Williamson County,
but even there he had been well paid for his work.

  Young’s expulsion from the order had little effect on his popularity with the rank and file of Williamson County Klansmen. That became evident a few weeks later when he appeared, unannounced, at a Klan meeting in Marion. Wild cheers broke out as he hobbled to the platform on two canes, and applause rocketed through the auditorium again when he declared that for the first time in his life he was going to vote Republican. “If you want to have the illegal sale of liquor, disreputable women, and disorder in the county,” he told the audience, “vote the Democratic ticket on election day. If you want law enforcement, vote the Republican ticket.” Hundreds rushed up to shake his hand when he finished.

  Three days before Young’s dramatic appearance Galligan announced that he had dismissed the deputies whom he had appointed by agreement with the Citizens’ Committee. One of his new appointees, he revealed, was Ora Thomas, who would take the place of Allison, killed in the Smith garage riot.

  If Galligan had lain awake nights to devise means of driving the Klansmen to fury—and perhaps he had—he could have thought of no better way than to give Thomas a permanent appointment. The hatred they bore the new deputy made their animosity toward the sheriff a pale emotion. A resident of the county since boyhood, Thomas had worked in the mines until the United States entered the first World War. He saw service in France, and was wounded in action. After the war he went back to coal mining, but soon drifted into shady occupations. The fact that he was with “Whitey” Doering, a convicted mail-robber and member of Egan’s Rats, a notorious St. Louis gang, when Doering was killed in November 1923, gave rise to the report that he too belonged to that unsavory mob. Klansmen believed him to be the organizer of the Knights of the Flaming Circle, and he was certainly a leader of the violent anti-Klan faction. Caught in two of Young’s big raids, he had only recently been dismissed from jail after serving one of Judge Lindley’s stiffer sentences. As late as October 4—ten days before his appointment—he had been indicted for murder in connection with the Smith garage riot. In fact, thirteen indictments stood against him at the time Galligan made him a permanent deputy.