Bloody Williamson

by Paul M. Angle

  3. That the sheriff would receive his full salary for the remainder of his term.

  4. That the county board would take steps to revoke all gun permits and to induce citizens with arms in their possession to surrender them.

  5. That in the future all raids should be made by regularly constituted or elected county officers.

  All who were present signed the document embodying these provisions.

  Back in Marion, the supervisors met to ratify or reject the work of their committee. They invited the public to attend the meeting and the public accepted—widows whose husbands had been killed in the feuding, men who had argued the questions at issue with a pistol in each hand, graybeards who had participated only to the extent of talking endlessly on the courthouse square. And the public let its feelings be known. Abe Hicks, the Herrin justice of the peace who had issued pistol permits by the wholesale, wanted to know what assurance of protection law-abiding citizens would have if they turned in their arms. Klansmen objected to Randall Parks on the ground that he was a second cousin to Delos Duty. The payment of Galligan’s salary during his absence rubbed many the wrong way. “I don’t care if Galligan goes to Niagara Falls and jumps off,” one objector said. “I don’t want him to go to Cub-y and drink that Cuban whiskey at the taxpayers’ expense. I don’t want him to go to Hiwaya or any of them places!”

  In the end it was a speech by Attorney General Carlstrom, who had come down from Springfield for just such a contingency, that was decisive. After everyone had spoken he took the floor. Deferentially, but with impressive earnestness, he told his audience:

  “I hope we can go back to the day when confidence is placed in the courts and processes of the law. Only then can we remove the necessity of an armed camp in this county. I don’t want to be understood as making a threat, but if it should be necessary to declare martial law here values of property will go down below the present level and the county must bear the cost. Martial law would bankrupt Williamson County.”

  In spite of his disavowal it was a threat, and the supervisors knew it. They retired, argued for a seemly interval, and returned to announce that they had ratified the agreement unanimously.

  A few days later Galligan departed. Before leaving he gave a statement to the newspapers: he had signed the abdication agreement in good faith and intended to live up to it, but if the other party failed to keep its word he would consider himself relieved of all obligations and would return.

  Three months later, without advance notice, he walked into the county jail and announced that he was resuming his office. He had missed his friends, he told startled reporters, and wanted to come home. Yes, he said in reply to inquiries, he had seen the governor a few days ago, and had encountered no serious objection to his return. For his part, he believed that the recent township and municipal elections (in which anti-Klan candidates had been successful) proved that the people were tired of strife and that there would be no more trouble.

  Galligan’s return might easily have touched off another explosion had it not been for the fact that Herrin was about to turn to a familiar but neglected help in time of trouble—the old-time religion.

  For several weeks Harold S. Williams, a young evangelist whom “Gypsy” Smith had converted only two years earlier, had been conducting a series of revival meetings at Cairo. The Rev. John Meeker, who had heard of his phenomenal success, asked him on what terms he would come to Herrin. Williams made only one stipulation: that he should have the full co-operation of the other ministers. Meeker assured him that that would be his as a matter of course. Yet when the minister returned to Herrin and talked with his fellow preachers, he found them apathetic.

  Then Hal W. Trovillion, editor and publisher of the Herrin News, intervened.

  If your Bible has all the pages in it, [he wrote in a letter to the evangelist], if the Commandments are there intact, if Paul’s great essay on Love is there, if the Sermon on the Mount is there and you preach these things—come on to Herrin posthaste.… If you can accomplish only a few little things, you will have done great good to Herrin—make us believe that God is Love—that we should really love our neighbors, not hate them nor carry guns to kill them with, if you can only get people who have known each other for ten and twenty years to simply greet one another when they pass on the streets with a brief “good morning,” surely you will have accomplished a thing which we have all failed to bring about with long and patient effort.

  Trovillion reinforced his plea with a check and the promise of the full support of his newspaper. Williams agreed to come.

  The first of the revival meetings took place on the evening of May 24, 1925. On behalf of the thousands who packed the gymnasium of the Herrin High School, Mayor McCormack welcomed the evangelist and his party. Williams won his audience immediately. Three of the four Protestant ministers—all except Story, who was absent—pledged their support. The manager of the Hippodrome and Annex theaters offered the Annex for noon-day prayer-meetings.

  For the next six weeks practically every business house in Herrin closed daily for prayer meetings, many of which were held in stores. A big poster advertising the revival, hanging from a coatrack in the European Hotel cigar store over the very spot where Young fell, indicated the spirit that permeated the town. At the evening services more than a thousand citizens, including a sprinkling of gunmen, feudists, gamblers, and bootleggers, declared themselves ready to embrace Christ’s way of life. Even Galligan attended frequently. On one of his visits Williams asked those who were present—and they numbered some five thousand—to recognize the sheriff as the symbol of law and order in Williamson County. The audience rose and cheered, and several hundred men, including some of Galligan’s inveterate enemies, pressed forward to shake his hand.

  While the revival meetings were in progress, State’s Attorney Boswell made a contribution to the growing wave of good feeling by asking that 145 pending cases, all of which had originated in the activities of S. Glenn Young, be stricken from the docket. To support his motion he pointed out that in several of the cases that had already been tried juries had been unable to arrive at verdicts, and admitted that in those which remained the evidence was so flimsy that convictions could not be expected. His motion was granted.†

  Another event that had a mollifying effect was the suspension of the Herrin Herald, Klan newspaper. As the revival drew to a close the Herald’s creditors forced it into bankruptcy, and the sheriff—with relish, one may be sure—attached the property.

  After the last of Williams’s services, when cool judgment had supplanted emotional fervor, all appearances indicated that the revival had accomplished its purpose. Local citizens, even Klan leaders, assumed that the Klan was dead. Hal W. Trovillion, taking stock, expressed the belief that “we are now set well back on the road,” and that “the church houses are rechristened once more as the House of God.” A group of Illinois legislators came to the opinion that the Golden Rule had replaced the blue-steel pistol as the arbiter of honor. And a staff correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, visiting Herrin to investigate the remarkable transformation that had been reported as having taken place there, concluded that Williams had really worked a re-formation—that he had “taken the guns out of Herrin’s hip pockets and replaced them with clean handkerchiefs,” and had put a “kindly smile” on the faces of people who had worn “grouchy frowns” for years.

  Yet those who knew Williamson County best had reservations. Its people held grudges. A resident still had to be careful of what he said about the Bloody Vendetta, although half a century had passed since that feud had come to an end. Even Trovillion, justly proud of his part in arranging the Williams revival, inserted a warning in the pamphlet, “Persuading God Back to Herrin,” that he published to record the community’s attempt at regeneration: “It may not all be over yet—the volcano may not only send up smoke from time to time but it may again spout destruction and death.…”

  The volcano did, in one final, convulsive eruption.r />
  The occasion was a series of elections held in April 1926. The first, for township officers, took place on the 6th; the second, for members of the Herrin school board, was held four days later. In both, the results proved that the Klan had come to life and had succeeded in electing members or sympathizers to almost every office. By the 13th, when candidates for county and state officers were to be nominated, the old familiar tension was again apparent. Klansmen strutted about Herrin with chips on their shoulders; anti-Klansmen sullenly oiled automatics and filled cartridge belts.

  On election day tempers were taut, nerves jumpy. Nevertheless John Smith, a watcher at one of the polls, recklessly challenged a number of Catholic voters, including a nun who had lived in Herrin for twenty years. Anti-Klan watchers objected violently, then fists flew. Special deputies rushed up and separated the disputants, and Smith retired from the polling-place to his garage.

  Commenting on the incident in its afternoon edition, the Marion Post asserted that the fight had aroused little excitement in Herrin, and that no further outbreaks were expected. But it warned: “There is a funny feeling in the air … and we advise people to stay away from the crowds that swarm after a little excitement during the pitch of election battle. Both Klan and Anti-Klan are reported heavily armed now for any new developments.”

  The involvement of John Smith gave reason for apprehension. Somehow this garage owner, a relative newcomer—he had lived in Herrin since 1918—had attracted to himself the same fervent hatred that the anti-Klan forces had lavished on Young. Yet he was a man of altogether different mold. Smith was mild-mannered where Young swaggered, cheerful where Young was dour—his bright blue eyes twinkled with almost every word—facile and pungent in his soft Kentucky speech, and neither a church member nor an advocate of prohibition on principle. The only qualities he shared with Young were stubbornness and the ability to inspire loyalty. He knew himself to be a marked man, and for months had had armed guards stationed in his garage night and day.

  Early in the afternoon Smith made his second mistake of the day—he left his garage for the street. As he emerged, a car filled with anti-Klansmen drove past. One of its occupants—“Blackie” Armes, a known gangster—fired at him. The bullet grazed Smith’s neck, and he ran back to the garage.

  As if the pistol shot were a signal, firing began from the direction of the European Hotel, two short blocks away, and bullets shattered the windows and chipped the walls of Smith’s building. Armed men deployed from cars parked near by. Others worked their way up on foot, all the while pouring a steady rain of bullets into the garage. Now and then a shot was fired in reprisal, but the defenders—Smith’s guards—were too badly outnumbered for effective counterfire.

  After fifteen minutes the attackers stopped shooting. Those who had come in cars drove away with motors roaring, those on foot ran. Not a whole pane of glass remained in the building, the outside woodwork was splintered and torn, and many cars in storage were badly damaged. Miraculously, no one had been hit.

  Shortly after the attacking party withdrew, twenty guardsmen arrived from Carbondale by truck. (Someone had called for troops as soon as the first shot was fired.) The soldiers, with rifles loaded and bayonets fixed, formed in line before the garage.

  The militiamen had hardly taken their positions before the gunmen returned to the attack. Parking their cars a block or so away, they started forward on foot. When they saw the troops they hastily re-entered their automobiles and drove off.

  This time, however, they proceeded only as far as the Masonic Temple, where one of the polling-places was located. The drivers stopped in the middle of the street, keeping their engines running. Men armed with rifles and pistols stepped out and walked toward the poll watchers and loungers, mostly Klansmen, who stood on the Temple lawn. Approaching John Ford, one of the newcomers said to another:

  “Here’s one of the sons-of-bitches we’re going to kill.”

  He fired and missed, although he was so close that the powder of the charge burned Ford’s face.

  A burst of gunfire answered the initial shot. The gunmen, knowing that the troops would arrive in a minute or two, ran to their cars. In seconds they were out of sight.

  All the cars, that is, except a Buick coupé. Its driver lay limp against the steering-wheel, dead; the man beside him was mortally wounded. Four others, all dying, lay on the lawn. Three of these were Klansmen—Mack and Ben Sizemore, brothers, and Harland Ford, John Ford’s brother. The fourth was a gangster named Noble Weaver, from West Frankfort. In the Buick were Orb Treadway, of Harrisburg, and the same Charles Briggs who had escaped with a minor wound when Jack Skelcher was killed. Both were enemies of the Klan.

  The day after the riot John Smith told a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he was about ready to give up. Twenty-four hours later he made the decision.

  “They would get me next time,” he said. “I’m going to leave, to keep from getting killed, and to keep from killing anyone.

  “In all the liquor raids,” he added, “I never shot anyone. The raiding ended more than a year ago, and today I wouldn’t start a raid if they put a saloon next door to me. But the liquor gang has kept after me, and today my business is ruined, for people are afraid to come to my place to trade.”

  That same day he sold his business and left for Florida.

  Automatically, Herrin tendered the three dead Klansmen the same flamboyant funeral that had been the last reward of their predecessors who had lost their lives in the “trouble.” Once more there was an overflow crowd, a profusion of flowers, flag-covered caskets, and crosses of red roses. And once more one minister after another proclaimed that the dead men had fallen in line of duty and exhorted the living to carry on the fight for the rigid enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment.

  This time, however, neither the funeral dramatics nor the exhortations of the ministers had any inflammatory effect. The coroner’s inquest, begun on the day the riot victims were buried, caused no ripple of excitement. A reporter for the Marion Republican noted the absence of ominous signs with some wonderment: nothing indicated “that three days before, the bustle of traffic on the streets had been punctuated by the crack of pistol shots and the moans of dying men.” His story continued:

  School children with their books under their arms passed without so much as a casual glance at the armed militiamen who slowly stalked the principal streets. Women were downtown shopping early, dressed in their spring attire. The bright spring sunshine glistened on the polish of the automobiles that slipped through the traffic of trucks and pedestrians. Everywhere there was a stir as if the city had awakened from a period of lethargy. There was hardly parking place for automobiles downtown. Crowds gathered on the street corners, clerks rushed across the streets bare-headed, smiling and waving to friends passing by. There was everything to indicate, on the surface at least, that peace and rejoicing had come to Herrin with the springtime.

  Even a resumption of raiding was taken in stride. Perhaps the spectacle of Boswell and Galligan conducting raids jointly, as they now proceeded to do, stunned the entire populace.

  Early in May the grand jury met to investigate the election-day riots. Its members had before them the verdict of the coroner’s jury: “Death by gunshot wounds at the hands of parties unknown.” After remaining in session for more than two weeks the jurors came to the same conclusion. Not one of three hundred witnesses could or would name a single living participant in either the Smith garage battle or the Masonic Temple riot. The grand jury found no indictments, and adjourned.

  Six weeks passed without the hint of a disturbance. Then Judge W. W. Duncan of the Illinois Supreme Court, who lived in Marion, called a meeting of the mayor and aldermen of Herrin, the county officials, and every factional leader of consequence. He had the promise of the state authorities, he informed them, that the troops who had been on duty since election day would be kept in the county until he was satisfied that peace had been established permanently. He was convinced that
that time had come, but before notifying the governor of his decision he demanded that all who were present pledge their word that they would use every effort to control the troublemakers. All promised.

  The governor responded to Duncan’s notification by sending a telegram to every newspaper in the county. If, he warned, local officials failed to maintain order, and if it became necessary to send the militia in again, he would declare martial law.

  Two weeks later, on July 16, 1926, the one company that had been on duty piled its machine guns and equipment into baggage cars and left for home. The Klan war was over.‡

  No war, however, ends with the firing of the last shot, or even with return to normal living. Costs always exceed gains, leaving a balance for the future to pay.

  On the surface, the Klan cleaned up Williamson County. Open liquor-selling, open gambling, open vice were stamped out. It was soon to be demonstrated, however, that the bootlegger was still in business, though operating more warily and in the face of greater hazards than before. For this partial victory, twenty lives and a maiming-for-life were only a down payment. Long friendships had been broken, and the common ties of church, lodge, and labor union broken. Reunion, moreover, would come with agonizing slowness. Galligan wrote with prescience when he predicted: “The old hatreds will live on, through this generation, and into the next, for Williamson’s blood is liberally tempered with the old mountaineer stock and Williamson’s people are slow to forget, loath to forgive.” Even today in Williamson County a man is more likely to be described as a “Klucker” or “anti-Klucker” than as a Republican, or a Methodist, or a Mason, and the terms still carry a residue of animus or approbation.

  Years would pass before the Italians of Herrin would consider themselves a part of the community in which they had formerly been at home. From the beginning of the crusade, the Klansmen denied, with some truth, that they were primarily anti-Catholic or anti-foreign. Yet, since most of the Italians were winemakers, and many of them bootleggers as well, they suffered the same consequences they would have if the Klan had been moved by religious or racial prejudices. The result was resentment and a cleavage that seriously retarded their amalgamation with the older stock.