Herrin Massacre nothing but a 'communist plot'
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA["I am not complaining, but it's a hopeless proposition."
Thus said Williamson County State's Attorney Delos Duty after a second jury failed to convict any of the Herrin Massacre defendants. There would be no more trials against the accused. He would drop the charges against the remaining defendants.
The larger world reacted with disgust at the time, but historians have largely given Duty a pass. There was little more he could do.
Homer Butler covered the trials for the Marion Daily Republican as a young man just out of high school. Years later he recognized Duty's endurance against the odds.
"As much an ordeal as his work in the courtroom was the estrangement from many citizens who became hostile toward a prosecutor for doing his sworn duty. The plight of a native son prosecuting union coal miners in a county whose population was more than 50 percent union families was not a pleasant one," wrote Butler.
Where Duty left off the Illinois House of Representatives tried to pick up with a special investigative committee. It found few answers though it did confirm the uselessness of the National Guard colonel sent by the governor prior to the massacre.
Col. Sam Hunter told the committee he had repeatedly requested troops be brought into the county. He could have prevented the massacre if not for the actions of his commander Adjutant-General Carlos Black.
Black disagreed. He told the committee Hunter never requested troops. It might have been left a matter of conflicting testimony except records from the telephone company later verified Black's version of the calls.
The committee's hearings in Marion left the members exasperated as they interviewed members of law enforcement who had not only failed to act the previous June but found their memories failing as well as they testified before the panel.
As the historian Paul Angle later noted, although 60 witnesses appeared two that might have provided answers did not. Mine owner William J. Lester refused to testify. UWMA official Hugh Willis simply left the state and could not be called.
The lawmakers' report backed the grand jury account. They censured Black for failing to take personal charge and "castigated" Hunter as described by Angle.
"We believe that (Hunter) was absolutely incompetent, unreliable and unworthy to perform the duties assigned to him," the committee reported.
Sheriff Melvin Thaxton and his deputies they described as "criminally negligent" and local police "absolutely derelict in their duty."
The committee reported their findings toward the end of May. For all practical purposes the history of the Herrin Massacre had ended and within days a new phase of Bloody Williamson would open.
Around 9 p.m. Friday of Memorial Day weekend hundreds of Klansmen began gathering at the crossroads of the Herrin and Johnston City hard roads. An hour later they began a slow parade down through Marion to a point just west of town where they turned south on what would later become Commander Drive.
There after midnight just south of the old Mission Ridge school on what's now the southwest portion of the Marion V.A. Medical Center grounds 1,500 to 2,000 Klansmen held the first cross-burning in the county since the era of the first Klan following the Civil War. About 200 new members were inducted.
For the next six months the Ku Klux Klan would openly organize and hold rallies. Speakers railed against illicit booze, gambling and other social ills. Opponents formed the Knights of the Flaming Circle to counter. Klan-backed raids would begin in December and six weeks later the Klan War would open with gunfire.
But not all was over between the UWMA and Lester, the owner of the mine at the heart of the massacre. Behind the scenes Lester decided to reopen, but realized that he couldn't so he sold out to his partner and mentor R. H. Sherwood.
"Not long after the massacre Lester came to see him again," Angle wrote in his notes -- now located in the Chicago Historical Society -- after interviewing Sherwood in 1951. "The shovels were not in as bad shape as they appeared to be, and the mine could be put back into operation for a relatively small sum - say $30,000. But Lester couldn't do it - he did not dare return to Williamson County. Sherwood investigated and found that what Lester had told him was true. He formed the Caloric Coal Company, took over Lester's debts and leases, rehabilitated the property, and began operations."
That would have been it, but at the same time Lester planned to sue UMWA in federal court for damages inflicted in the riot. A few months later "in great excitement" Lester telephoned Sherwood.
"What would he take for the mine? He wanted to know right away," Angle noted.
Sherwood put his bookkeeper to work and figured out he had invested about $35,000 in the mine so he told Lester he could have it for $70,000. Sherwood thought something was "fishy about the transaction, but neither Lester nor Bull, his attorney (and Sherwood's also) would give him any information."
The next morning Sherwood found two men waiting for him. One was a CPA and the other an auditor from the union's office in Springfield. They had a certified check. Sherwood gave them a bill of sale.
Unknown to Sherwood, Lester's proposed suit for triple-damages in federal court had spurred the union to action. The only problem was that Lester's Southern Illinois Coal Company no longer owned any interest in the coal mine, it had to get it back.
The union ended up paying $726,000 for the company in a deal both Sherwood and Angle thought to have involved kickbacks of "substantial sums to several union officials."
"Even so," Angle wrote in a footnote to Bloody Williamson," (Lester) made a handsome profit."
In the years after the massacre the union remained committed to rewriting its history. In the summer that followed the trials Frank Farrington, the top man for the UMWA in Illinois, blamed the riot on "the ugly countenance of the American gun man."
It was the guards around the mine that initiated the disturbance, not the miners themselves, he argued.
As that failed to register with the outside world the union began turning the focus on the radicals within its own organization, particularly in Franklin County to the north.
The FBI had been investigating "Wobblies," communists and other radicals in the region's mining communities since World War I, according to early records of the agency that have since been made public.
Five years to the day following the union's initial attack on the Lester mine, Ellis Searles, editor of the United Mine Workers Journal, declared the massacre as "purely a Communist affair."
"The United Mine Workers of America were not responsible for the massacre," he boldly told a conference in Fort Wayne, Ind. "During the mine strike of 1922, 19 paid Communist organizers were sent from Chicago to Herrin and these 19 paid plotters aided by 67 Communists who live in Herrin, fomented and are responsible for the Herrin Massacre in which more than a score were killed."
The "red scare" would be a theme continued by the UMWA into the 1930s when a new larger labor war began in the state between the established UWMA and the breakaway Progressive Mine Workers union, a war more widespread and bloody than the massacre itself.
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