Never Been a Time (34 page)

It was not until the next day that she discovered that her daughter had somehow escaped the mob, and had made her way to St. Louis.

Defense lawyer Alexander Flannigen, whose inflammatory rhetoric had helped trigger the May riot, subjected the woman to what the
Post-Dispatch
called “a severe cross-examination.” The result, the
Post-Dispatch
observed, was that “the woman retold her story to the jury, not wavering in her identification of the two men.”
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Dow and Hanna were found guilty of murder and sentenced to fifteen years in the state penitentiary. Robinson pled guilty to conspiracy to riot and was given five years in the state penitentiary. After the convictions in the early trials, with sentences that were considered surprisingly harsh even if they stopped well short of the maximum, white defendants began scrambling for plea bargains. The process was given more urgency when the state announced it would go to the grand jury with perjury charges against witnesses who provided alibis that were proven to be false.
⁶

After two months of legal delays, riot instigator Richard Brockway finally came to trial in mid-November. Witnesses testified that the hulking Brockway had warned a crowd in front of the police station on the morning of July 2 that “niggers” would “take the town” unless they were stopped; had told a policeman, “We're going to kill every nigger in East St. Louis in a minute”; had urged rioters to “go down there” in the South End “and get those niggers and burn their shacks”; and had told the crowd at the Labor Temple to go home and get weapons and come back ready to do battle. But the prosecution could not find anyone willing to testify under oath that Brockway had murdered anyone. Brockway was convicted of conspiracy to cause rioting and was sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary.
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By December, tragedy had turned into sad farce. Former night chief of police Cornelius Hickey and five other policemen were set to go on trial for failing to perform their duties during the riot. Then, someone lost the original indictment. Judge Crow, a political hack who had been known to fall asleep on the bench after drinking lunch, discovered that the indictment was missing and quickly dismissed the charges before someone found it. Crow and fellow circuit judges also dismissed the charges against Mollman.
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The farce continued into the next year.

Six policemen, including Hickey, had also been charged with murder or conspiracy to riot by the grand jury. Three of them, including Hickey, were charged in the July 3 shootings in which one black man was shot to death, another was seriously wounded, and part of a black woman's arm was blasted off. Dan McGlynn, a city hall and courthouse regular and a member of the chamber of commerce's reform group, the Committee of One Hundred, was one of the defense attorneys for the policemen. By the time Mc- Glynn was through working deals, seven months had passed since the riot and an extraordinary arrangement had been worked out with the prosecution, which seems to have been dubious that it could find twelve white men who would convict any white policemen of crimes against blacks during the July riot. The murder charges would be dropped on the condition that any three policemen among the six charged with various felonies would plead guilty to the single charge of rioting. On February 5, 1918, the six policemen drew numbers from a hat to choose which three would plead guilty. Judge Crow fined them a total of $150. All six men pitched in and paid the fine. The
St. Louis Argus
was outraged, suggesting that the “lottery” had effectively set the price for a license to kill or maim blacks in East St. Louis at $50.
⁹

By then, a number of other cases, including ones in which whites allegedly had murdered blacks, had ended in plea bargains and minor sentences. In the end, as the cases against whites dragged on for months, with many of them being dismissed for lack of evidence, only nine whites were actually sent to prison, most of them on lesser sentences than those received by the twelve convicted and imprisoned blacks. Whites who pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, no matter how serious the original felony charges, usually got off with $50 fines or short terms in the county jail.
¹⁰

The prosecution in the riot trials had been severely handicapped by the fact that very few white East St. Louisans would admit under oath to having seen anyone of the Caucasian race do much of anything illegal involving blacks on July 2 in downtown East St. Louis, even though the main intersections were packed with thousands of white people. A visitor asked the Reverend George W. Allison how it was possible on the night of July 2, when the town was lit by fires as if “by a blazing sun,” everybody in town was “as blind as a bat to the destruction of human life?” Allison replied, “They are afraid to
come to the front… afraid of their lives and property … here in town are cowards.”
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The House Select Committee to Investigate Conditions in Illinois and Missouri Interfering with Interstate Commerce Between These States, also known as the Special Committee Authorized by Congress to Investigate the East St. Louis Race Riots, opened hearings on the morning of October 18 in the federal courtroom of the Metropolitan Building in downtown East St. Louis, about three blocks east of the epicenter of the riot. The committee had five members. Two were from Illinois: George Foss, fifty-four years old, a Republican; and Martin Foster, fifty-six, a Democrat. John Raker, fifty-four, was a California Democrat who had grown up in Illinois. Henry Cooper, a sixty-seven-year-old, eleven-term Republican, was from neighboring Wisconsin and was old enough—and fiercely moralistic enough—to have been an abolitionist as a boy. The fifth member was Ben Johnson, a crusty fifty-nine-year-old Kentuckian who, it later became apparent, chose to think the riot was mainly the fault of black ne'er-do-wells who would have been better off staying in the paternalistic South.
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The first witnesses represented business and industry, and they said, yes, interstate commerce definitely had been interfered with by the July 2 riot, getting that constitutional formality out of the way on the first day. On the second day, witnesses began answering questions about the real reason the hearings were being held.

Business blamed labor for the riots, and labor responded by blaming business. Robert Conway, general manager of the Armour meatpacking plant, charged the riots were inspired by “agitation on the part of the disturbing element among the Aluminum Ore Company strikers.” He said, “There was common talk around town here that they were going to drive the niggers out.” Labor leaders begged to differ; they placed the blame on Con-way and the other meatpackers and industrialists who kept hiring untrained blacks to replace experienced whites and flooding the city with African Americans.
¹³
As the hearings proceeded in the federal courtroom, outside, in the fading October sun, men in white robes and hoods paraded slowly up and down the street or stood silently, arms folded in front of them, their expressions hidden by gathered cloth. Congressman Henry Cooper decided the
costumes looked very much like the ones worn by the hooded nightriders in the movie
The Birth of a Nation
, and took the occasion to decry the “curse” that movie had put on the nation, the “terrible passions” it had aroused.
¹⁴

In fact, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan was on the rampage across the South and lower Midwest, and racial hatred was not its only cause. On October 28, men in white robes and hoods kidnapped a pacifist minister in Cincinnati, took him across the Ohio River into Kentucky and, in a dense wood, horsewhipped him nearly to death. They acted, they said, “in the name of Belgian women and children.” A couple of weeks later, seventeen members of the International Workers of the World who had been accused of plotting terrorism in the oil fields were kidnapped from police custody in Tulsa, Oklahoma, stripped, tied to whipping posts, flogged with a cat of nine tails, and tarred and feathered by a gang of sixty men in black robes and hoods. They called themselves the Knights of Liberty. The leader shouted, “In the name of the outraged women and children of Belgium,” as he spread hot pitch on the bleeding backs of the pacifistic Wobblies. The city attorney of Tulsa refused to file any charges. The assaults were among many across the country as American troops began dying in Europe and self-proclaimed patriots who had stayed home assaulted and in some cases lynched their fellow citizens who opposed the war or made statements judged unpatriotic.
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At the congressional hearings, witness after witness testified that East St. Louis had become, as one man put it, “a rendezvous for thugs, yeggmen, pickpockets and thieves” over the past decade. The Reverend George Allison and labor leader Harry Kerr accused slum landlords like Thomas Canavan and his partner, Locke Tarlton, of helping to cause the riot by charging blacks such exorbitant rents that as many as three dozen men were crowded into one small house. There were no jobs for these men once the meat and industrial plants had a sufficient supply of strikebreakers, Kerr said, and they crowded downtown and lingered on the streetcars for hours—some of them eating and sleeping there—and they turned to panhandling and some to crime. When Congressman Raker heard descriptions of the sordid, crowded conditions in the black sections of downtown, with prostitutes selling their bodies to a dozen or more men a day and lying with them on filthy mattresses in shacks without indoor plumbing, he exclaimed, “Why it would keep a frog busy trying to stay healthy down in that hole!”
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G. E. Popkess, Paul Anderson, and other reporters blamed the riots on a
complex array of factors, from simple racial prejudice to rampant crime among both blacks and whites, manipulation of blacks and whites by both labor and management, and corruption and ineptness that began with Mayor Mollman. James Kirk, owner and editor of the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
, said “The graft, rottenness and corruption which we have endured here is beyond the power of words to describe.”
¹⁷

On November 8, in the midst of the hearings, the committee was given a dramatic demonstration of one reason there were so many unemployed young men in East St. Louis. Eleven black men who had arrived in East St. Louis earlier in the week were brought in to testify that they had been brought up from Mississippi on a pass by a railroad straw boss. They had been promised $2 a day and board, plus a trip home every two weeks, to lay and raise track for the Alton and Southern Railroad, a belt line that ran to the Aluminum Ore Company plant and was owned by it.

When they arrived, they discovered the pay was actually $1.40 a day, less than some of them had been making in Jackson; the meals were bread and molasses with a small piece of pork fatback; and the sleeping quarters were a bare railroad car where they had to pay $4.50 for a set of comforters for a bed. The foreman threatened to throw them in jail if they tried to leave. Some of the men walked away in anger anyway and were scrambling for jobs to make enough money to buy a ticket home. One of the workers, Lee Cox, said he discovered in the railroad yards that the straw boss brought gangs up every week, and many men walked off the job when they found out they had been cheated.

The straw boss was located. He told the congressmen that there had been some misunderstandings about pay and board. But, he said, labor agents had been bringing trainloads of blacks to East St. Louis for more than a year, and he had learned, “The more you pay one of them, the better you feed him, the less work you will get out of him.”
¹⁸

As the congressional committee was hearing about the weekly importation of blacks to East St. Louis by the railroads, importation that continued despite the worst race riot in decades, word came to the United States from the Russian capital of Petrograd that armed Bolsheviks had stormed the Winter Palace of the tsars, deposed the provisional government that had held shakily to power since the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas in March, and taken over the government of Russia. To follow were a bloody civil war
and a dictatorship that would last three quarters of a century, murder millions, and imprison millions more.

On November 16, after lengthy testimony by Paul Anderson on the suspicious links between levee board funds in the Illinois State Bank and a personal slush fund maintained by Locke Tarlton, president of the levee board, the committee adjourned the hearings. In its final report, the committee asserted that, long before the riot, “Sodom and Gomorrah were model Christian communities in comparison” to East St. Louis and judged that “No terms of condemnation applied to the men who were responsible for these appalling conditions… can be too severe. No punishment that outraged citizens can wish upon them will be adequate. In many cases they deserve the extreme penalty; in every case they merit the execration of a despoiled and disgraced community.”

The committee decided that “the men who were responsible” for the riot, in great part, were “the politicians of both political parties who found East St. Louis respected and prosperous, and in a few years robbed its treasury, gave away valuable franchises, sank it into the mire of pollution and brought upon it national censure and disgrace.” The committee also castigated the chamber of commerce and “the owners of great corporations… who live in other cities [and] pocket their dividends without concern for the dishonesty and neglect that wasted the taxes, and without a thought for the thousands of their own workmen, black and white, who lived in hovels, the victims of poverty and disease.”

Industrialists, including the railroads and the Aluminum Ore Company, the committee charged, “pitted white labor against black” and “stirred the fires of racial hatred until it finally culminated in bloody, pitiless riot, murder and wanton arson.”

The report ran for twenty-four pages, detailing the horrors of July 2 and 3, the carloads of whites speeding through black neighborhoods firing guns, the fatal shooting of the two policemen, the bullet-riddled car sitting in front of police headquarters as a call to arms, the broad-daylight attacks on innocent men, women, and children in the streets of downtown East St. Louis. The committee reported that 312 buildings had been destroyed by fire. “It is not possible to give accurately the number of dead,” the committee decided. “At least 39 Negroes and 8 white people were killed outright, and hundreds of Negroes were wounded and maimed.”
¹⁹
(The St. Clair County coroner
fixed the number of dead whites at nine, and it is generally accepted that at least thirty-nine blacks and nine whites were killed in the riot.)
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