Robert Prager
Robert Prager | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | February 28, 1888 |
| Died | April 5, 1918 (aged 30) |
| Occupation | Miner |
| Known for | German-born coal miner lynched in the United States during the patriotic hysteria surrounding World War I |
Robert Paul Prager (February 28, 1888–April 5, 1918) was a German coal miner living in Collinsville, Illinois, who was lynched by a mob. Eleven men were tried for his murder but were subsequently acquitted. Prager was killed because of anti-German sentiment during the First World War and because he was accused of holding socialist beliefs.[1] He was also erroneously accused of planning to blow up the coal mine.
History of the incident
Prager early life
Robert Paul Prager was born in Dresden, Germany on February 28, 1888. He emigrated to the United States in 1905, at the age of 17. An itinerant baker[2] who had spent a year in an Indiana reformatory for theft, he was living in St. Louis when the US declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.[3]
Prager showed strong patriotism for his adopted country after President Woodrow Wilson asked congress to declare war on April 2, 1917. Prager took out his first citizenship papers the day after Wilson's war speech, registered for the draft and tried to enlist in the US Navy. He would also have a St. Louis baker, whom he lived with, arrested after he objected to Prager continuously displaying the American flag from his window.[1]
Prager was rejected by the Navy due to medical reasons. After moving briefly to other towns in Missouri and Illinois, Prager landed in Collinsville, IL in the late summer of 1917. He took a job baking for an Italian baker named Lorenzo Bruno. In early 1918 in Collinsville, Prager learned of the high wartime wages miners were earning and began working in a laborer's position at the Donk Brothers Coal and Coke Co. Mine #2 in nearby Maryville, IL. But Prager was rejected for permanent membership as a coal miner in United Mine Workers of America Local 1802, perhaps due to his argumentative personality or socialist beliefs.[2]
Wartime patriotism and paranoia, nationally and in Collinsville
Largely due to efforts of the federal government, many U.S. residents were whipped into a patriotic frenzy during World War I. The Committee on Public Information (CPI) ostensibly sought to control American attitudes and win favor for U.S. involvement in the Great War, which had raged in Europe since 1914. From buttons to brochures to posters, the CPI touched every form of media it could to increase patriotism and support for the war effort. The CPI also controlled the release of news and photographs to the newspapers and magazines. Meanwhile, the Espionage Act of 1917 made it a federal crime to do anything which might interfere with the military or even military recruitment, such as making statements which might discourage potential soldiers from registering for the draft or enlisting. The Espionage Act also prohibited mailing of materials which might harm the government's war efforts.[2]
Patriotic events from the June 5, 1917 National Draft Registration Day to the March 27, 1918 organizing meeting to the Collinsville Neighborhood Committee of the State Council of Defense were well attended and increased the loyal fervor in the community. A number of Collinsville men had enlisted, while many more were drafted to report for military service starting in September of 1917. Yet there were some indications the community did not fully support the war effort, including failure to meet Liberty Bond sales quotas for both bond drives in 1917. Collinsville would suffer its first war death in November, 1917, when Leighton Evatt would die from pneumonia in France.[2]
War charity events flourished in Collinsville as early every club or organization raised funds to support the soldiers or the military effort. The Red Cross was the leading war support organization, and would have nearly 400 members by war's end. Though there were complaints about fuel and food conservation measures, most Collinsville residents complied with the guidelines rather than risk the wrath of super patriots who might question their loyalty.[2]
Collinsville war time labor background
Coal mining was the lifeblood of Collinsville in 1918, with seven mines in or around the city. More than half the city's male working population was employed at the mines, which also drew in a number of itinerant miners with no familial anchors to the community. Many of the miners were also immigrants or had at least one parent who was an immigrant, mostly from European nations. There were five locals of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) in the Collinsville area and the miners dominated the community.[4] Radical elements in the UMW unions caused a number of wildcat strike actions at Collinsville area coal mines in the summer and fall of 1917.
Almost concurrently with the wildcat strikes, a unionization strike at the St. Louis Lead Smelting and Refining plant (Lead Works) in Collinsville also energized many of the coal miners and other union members in the community. The strike turned violent at times, with Collinsville police officers and Madison County sheriff's deputies, mostly former miners themselves, siding with the striking workers from St. Louis Smelting and Refining and the coal miners who supported the unionization efforts. Strike-breaking employees going to and leaving the Lead Works were harassed by the union men and law officers on local streets and in streetcars.[2]
The strike at the Lead Works bore some similarity to the East St. Louis Race Riots earlier in 1917. Tensions in East St. Louis were fueled by industrial interests which recruited black workers to break strikes in that community. White workers in Collinsville objected to the use of "imported" workers as had occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, as many of those workers who came to Collinsville to fill the non-union jobs at St. Louis Smelting and Refining were black.[2]
The wildcat coal mine strikes and unionization strike at St. Louis Louis Smelting and Refining served to radicalize and empower many of the Collinsville coal miners, as their actions in 1917-1918 were largely unimpeded by community leaders or local law enforcement.
Lynching
On April 4, 1918, Prager was confronted by a group of miners and warned away from Maryville. UMW leaders Moses Johnson and James Fornero, who feared for Prager's safety, tried to get the Collinsville police to put him into protective custody, but they declined. The two men instead took Prager back to his home in Collinsville. The next day, Prager returned to Maryville, where he prepared a document attacking Fornero. He posted copies of this document around the town and returned to Collinsville that evening. He was captured at his home by a mob, who paraded him around. However, Prager was rescued by a policeman, Fred Frost, who put him in the jail. The mayor, John H. Siegel, calmed the crowd for a time, and it was decided to close the town's saloons early. However, the officer who was sent to close the saloons brought the news that "a German spy" was being held in the jail.
A mob gained entrance to the jail and found Prager hiding in the basement. The police stood aside as the mob marched him to an area referred to as Mauer Heights. Before the lynching, he was allowed to write a last note to his parents in Dresden, Germany: "Dear Parents I must on this, the 4th day of April, 1918, die. Please pray for me, my dear parents." He was then hanged in front of a crowd of two hundred people at 12:30 am on April 5, 1918.[5]
Trial and reaction
On April 25, the county's grand jury indicted eleven men for murder, and the trial commenced on May 13. The judge refused to let the defense try to demonstrate Prager's disloyalty, and 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 his part to newspaper reporters and a coroner's jury. In its concluding statement, the defense argued that Prager's lynching was justified by "unwritten law." When the defense was finished, the judge declared a recess. After deliberating for 45 min (some accounts give 25), the jury found the defendants innocent. One juryman reportedly shouted, "Well, I guess nobody can say we aren't loyal now".[6]
A week after the trial, an editorial in the newspaper the Collinsville Herald by editor and publisher J.O. Monroe said that, "Outside a few persons who may still harbor Germanic inclinations, the whole city is glad that the eleven men indicted for the hanging of Robert P. Prager were acquitted." Monroe noted, "the community is well convinced that he was disloyal.... The city does not miss him. The lesson of his death has had a wholesome effect on the Germanists of Collinsville and the rest of the nation."[7]
A New York Times editorial said, "A fouler wrong could hardly be done America," which would be "denounced as a nation of odious hypocrites," as a result. However, the Washington Post declared that, "In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country."[7]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ a b Hickey, Donald R. (Summer 1969). "The Prager Affair: A Study in Wartime Hysteria". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society: 126–127.
- ^ a b c d e f g Stehman, Peter (2018). Patriotic Murder: A World War I Hate Crime for Uncle Sam. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books. p. 124-126. ISBN 9781612349848.
- ^ Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty; German-Americans and World War I. Northern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-87580-514-0.
- ^ Stehman, Peter (2018). Patriotic Murder: A World War I Hate Crime for Uncle Sam. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books. p. 47-68. ISBN 9781612349848.
- ^ Weinberg, Carl (2005). Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-8093-2635-8.
- ^ Schaffer, Ronald (1991). America in the Great War. Oxford University Press US. p. 26. ISBN 0-19-504904-7.
- ^ a b Peterson, H.C.; Gilbert C. Fite (1986). Opponents of War, 1917–1918. Greenwood Press Reprint. ISBN 0-313-25132-0.
Further reading
- Donald R. Hickey, "The Prager Affair: A Study in Wartime Hysteria," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 62, no. 2 (Summer 1969), pp. 117-134. In JSTOR
- E.A. Schwartz, "The Lynching of Robert Prager, the United Mine Workers, and the Problems of Patriotism in 1918," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 95, no. 4 (Winter 2003), pp. 414-437. In JSTOR
- Carl R. Weinberg, Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
- Peter Stehman, "Patriotic Murder: A World War I Hate Crime for Uncle Sam." Lincoln, NE; Potomac Books, 2018.