lynching of Robert Prager, the United Mine Workers, and the problems of patriotism in 1918, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Winter 2003 by Schwartz, E A

The hanging was widely condoned. Luebke noted that the Edwardsville Intelligencer in the county seat called it "unlawful and unjustifiable" but argued that a traitor would be dealt with just as summarily in Germany. The mayor sent a telegram to a senator arguing that Prager's death was due to the failure of Congress to pass effective laws against disloyalty. Luebke said this was "a commonly held point of view, repeated endlessly in the newspapers."3

On 25 April the county grand jury indicted twelve men for murder. Luebke said that "as the trial got underway on 13 May, suspicion and fear were common among the citizens of Madison County, many of whom were of German birth or descent." The process of picking a jury went so badly that the state's attorney complained that Sheriff Jenkin Jenkins was not summoning jurors properly. A judge gave the job of summoning jurors to a special bailiff in place of the sheriff. The judge declined to allow the defense to try to demonstrate Prager's disloyalty. The case for the defendants amounted to three claims: no one could say who did what, half the defendants claimed they had not even been there, and the rest claimed they had been bystanders, even Joe Riegel, who had confessed to newspaper reporters and a coroner's jury. In its concluding statement the defense argued that Prager's lynching was justified by "unwritten law." Luebke reported that when the defense was finished, the judge declared a recess, "the familiar strains of the The Star-Spangled Banner filled the courthouse," played by a detachment of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center band, "on duty in Edwardsville for recruiting purposes. The players stood in the rotunda of the building, allegedly escaping a brief downpour of rain. Someone urged the group to perform, assuring them the court was in recess and that no disturbance would be caused." After deliberating forty-five minutes, the jury found the defendants innocent. Luebke blamed the hanging and subsequent lack of punishment for the perpetrators on the tension of three years of neutrality, on Prager's "unattractive and indiscreet" character, but most of all on Prager's status as a German.4

In their 1957 book Opponents of War, 1917-1918, H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite gave a condensed account of the lynching that is generally consistent with Luebke's description. They took more note of negative responses to the hanging than Luebke, however. Among those responses was a New York Times editorial arguing that "a fouler wrong could hardly be done America," which would be "denounced as a nation of odious hypocrites" as a result. But they also quoted the Washington Post as responding that, "In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country"-a quotation that would later be used by David M. Kennedy in his brief account of the Prager lynching in the 1980 book Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Kennedy's one-paragraph account, in which he unaccountably blamed Missourians for hanging Prager, was drawn entirely from Opponents of War.5