Bloody Williamson (24 page)

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.”

The insistence of anti-Klansmen that Young be dropped was matched by the Klan’s demand that Galligan resign as sheriff. He refused. “I will co-operate,” he declared, “with any body of citizens looking to the establishment of peace and orderly government in Williamson County. I will compromise. I will agree to any reasonable suggestions as to the management of my office and the enforcement of law, but I will not resign.”

In this impasse the Citizens’ Committee could do little except
issue pious pronouncements calling on the populace to abstain from violence. Even so, General Foreman decided that the prospect justified the release of most of the troops. On February 15 all except five companies were sent home. A few days later the two factions effected a compromise. By its terms, the war against the bootleggers would be conducted by the sheriff in the future. On his part Galligan agreed to replace his field deputies with new men nominated by the committee, the understanding being that neither Klansmen nor Knights of the Flaming Circle would be approved. The county board promised funds for the two additional deputies whom the sheriff insisted he needed, and for raising the salaries of the new appointees to a decent level.

Galligan immediately appointed the men who had been agreed upon, and then telegraphed to the governor requesting that all troops, except one company to be stationed at Herrin for the time being, be recalled. The governor complied.

On March 3 the special grand jury summoned by Judge Bowen held its first session, but its deliberations were eclipsed by the greater spectacle that opened in the United States District Court at Danville the same day. There more than two hundred residents of Williamson County, all arrested in the wholesale liquor raids, prepared to stand trial. Long before court convened the defendants, their friends and relatives, Klansmen, and curious spectators filled the courtroom and the corridors of the federal building. Deputy marshals kept a close watch for guns, but the crowd was orderly. Only Young, daily more arrogant, raised a disturbance by throwing an epithet at Charlie Birger, one of the more notorious defendants, when he met him in the corridor. A deputy marshal prevented trouble. And when the Klan leader tried to enter the courtroom wearing his automatics he discovered that in a federal court he was no exception to the rules.

As soon as court convened the defendants, in a long line, passed slowly before Judge Walter C. Lindley. Special Prosecutor
Lawrence T. Allen, assigned to handle the liquor cases in place of District Attorney W. O. Potter, who was known to be violently anti-Klan, read the specific charges to each defendant and asked him whether he pleaded guilty or not guilty. Usually the response was not guilty. The few who entered guilty pleas were fined from fifty to three hundred dollars.

After the first day the court settled down to the tedious business of selecting juries, presenting evidence, and awaiting verdicts. Interest waned, to be aroused only when the case of some conspicuous defendant was decided. Thus there was gratification in the Klan camp when Ora Thomas, reputed to be head of the Knights of the Flaming Circle, pleaded guilty and drew a fine of five hundred dollars and a four months’ jail sentence. There was even greater satisfaction when Judge Lindley passed the stiffest sentence of all—fines totaling $2,500 and one year in jail—on Charlie Birger. By the end of the term Special Prosecutor Allen had brought 178 defendants to trial, and had convicted the great majority. Most of the violators were fined $200, $250, or $300, and some were also sentenced to a month or two in jail.

But before the liquor trials at Danville ended Herrin had resumed its place as the focal point of interest in the Williamson County “trouble.”

On March 14, after a nine-day session, the grand jury of the Herrin City Court presented its findings to Judge Bowen. In connection with the killing of Caesar Cagle and the attack on the Herrin hospital it returned ninety-nine indictments. Ninety-five involved men who had participated in the hospital riot. Leading the list was S. Glenn Young, whose offenses against the peace, the grand jury found, included parading with arms, false imprisonment, conspiracy, kidnapping, assault with attempt to murder, assault with deadly weapons, falsely assuming an office, robbery, larceny, riot, and malicious mischief. No other person was charged with quite so many infractions of the criminal law, but it appeared that a goodly number of Herrin’s
prominent citizens would be headed for jail if the indictments resulted in convictions.

From the ranks of the anti-Klansmen the grand jury picked two men—Carl and Earl Shelton—and indicted both for the murder of Caesar Cagle. In addition, it returned indictments against Carl Shelton for assault with a deadly weapon and assault with attempt to murder.

The grand jury concluded its work by adopting a scathing report. Characterizing the events of February 8 and the days which followed as a “Reign of Terror” resulting from acts of “oppression and persecution by the so-called Ku Klux Klan” it paid its respects to that organization and its hired law-enforcer in biting phrases. The attack on the Herrin hospital, “entirely unlawful and without any justification whatever,” was “the most amazing display of mob violence” the jurors had ever known. Young was a usurper, who could not have acted legally as Chief of Police because he had not resided in the state and county one full year, as the law required. “It seems … clear,” the jury concluded, “that it was the purpose of the said S. Glenn Young and those acting in concert with him, to overthrow the civil authority in Herrin and in Williamson County, seize and imprison the Sheriff and Mayor and take upon themselves the task of government without any legal authority whatever.”

The grand jury’s action infuriated the Klan. To show their resentment, members of the order staged a protest parade. At nine o’clock on the morning of March 17 some three thousand people gathered at the Christian Church in Herrin. The Protestant ministers stepped out in front, then came veterans of the Civil War in automobiles, and after them a band. The rank and file followed—professional men, merchants who had closed their stores for the morning, women pushing baby buggies, others carrying small children—“all,” as the
Marion Republican
put it, “marching with determined step and each with a small American flag in their button hole or pinned on their dresses.” In the
rear rank marched S. Glenn Young, John L. Whitesides, and Arlie Boswell, the color guard of a huge American flag.

The paraders, calling their demonstration a “religious protest” against the “unrighteous verdict” of the grand jury, marched and countermarched through the business district. From a window in his office Judge Bowen watched impassively.

The parade over, many of the marchers dashed to the City Hall to sign the bonds of the men under indictment. Guardsmen with fixed bayonets—now an accepted feature of Williamson County courtrooms—looked over all who entered to see whether they carried pistols. As man after man pushed his way to the judge’s table—Young, Stearns, Carl Neilson, John Ford, Abe Hicks—the crowd cheered. It was understood that the bonds might total four million dollars, and men whose property aggregated three times that sum came forward to pledge their lifetime savings.

Late in the afternoon, with the business of signing bonds still far from finished, Judge Bowen announced that there would be a recess until March 20. Young mounted a chair and barked to those who were present:

“I want all you fellows to be here Thursday, so we can finish this up!”

The response, “We’ll be with you, Glenn!” was almost smothered by cheers and handclapping.

Noting the enthusiasm, amounting almost to hysteria, an observer would have said that S. Glenn Young had reached the climax of his career. Yet anyone who came to that conclusion would have been wrong. In sober fact, the man’s position was anything but enviable. The Klan leaders who had been paying him from their own pockets determined to put into effect their tentative decision of a month earlier, and cut off his salary. Cheers are sweet, but they do not obliterate for long the imminence of a dozen criminal prosecutions or the fear of a jobless future.

There is reason to think that Young was downright desperate. On the night of April 15 someone in a fast-moving automobile fired into the home of Sam Stearns. Stearns and his family escaped injury, though Ross Lizenby, his bodyguard, was hit in the leg. Months later two of Young’s henchmen, then serving jail sentences for bank robbery—of such were the legions of the Lord composed!—confessed to Lizenby that Young had framed the shooting in an attempt to force his own rehiring, and that they had fired the shots from Young’s car. Even Stearns believed that Young instigated the attack.

But Young was soon provided for. Certain members of the Klan in East St. Louis had been proved guilty of acts of extortion in connection with Klan-supported liquor raids, and in consequence state officers of the order revoked the local charter. Young, who had joined the Klan during the spring—he had not been a member at the time of the big liquor-raids—was put in charge for the purpose of re-establishing the district’s respectability. Accompanied by four Williamson County ministers, he drove to East St. Louis on April 25 to take over the duties of his office. To the 1,400 Klansmen who greeted him he announced: “East St. Louis is a rotten city and has a bad reputation all over the state. It is run by a bunch of corrupt politicians. I am still a resident of Williamson County, and that county is the cleanest in the entire state now.” To which the mayor of the city replied, in an interview published on the same day: “If the city is rotten it is because of the Klan and not the city officials being corrupt.… As for cleaning up the city, I think he [Young] will only get it dirty.”

Young’s departure should have brought peace to Williamson County. The Klan, however, was too sure of its righteousness. In the primary election of April 8, 1924, its candidates had swept the field. The next night thousands celebrated the victory by staging a motor parade that visited Herrin, Johnston City, and Dewmaine, and returned to Marion to burn a huge cross—the first such demonstration in almost a year. Four days later ten
robed Klansmen marched into the Marion Methodist Church, knelt in silence while a young woman who accompanied them sang a stanza of “The Fiery Cross,” and then presented the pastor with twenty-seven dollars and a letter commending him for his good work. On May 1 several thousand attended a Klan barbecue at Herrin, burned two crosses, and initiated two hundred men and women. Three weeks later, crowds thronged to a “Klantauqua” at Marion, and for three days listened to Klan orations relieved by entertainment in the Chatauqua manner.

The pattern was that of the summer of 1923—silent visitations upon churches, ghostly gatherings in the light of flaming crosses, new recruits by the hundred. But in the late spring of 1924 there was this difference, best stated in the words of George Galligan: