It should be remembered that Williamson County in 1922 was in the throes of lawlessness. The Herrin Mine Massacre occurred in this year, Prohibition and bootlegging were in full swing and gangsters were in full control of prostitution, alcohol distribution and gambling houses. Numerous local, county and state officials were known to be on the take or under Klan control and many of the counties citizens were fed up with local authority’s lack of control. Williamson County was ripe for the Klan’s picking.
National wire services in 1922 and 1923 carried several stories about KKK activities throughout the country, collectively providing an indication of the Klan’s increasing strength. Perhaps because they attached no importance to the articles, perhaps because Williamson County’s own story occupied so much space locally, the Daily Republican and other area newspapers did not use the stories. In 1923, the Ku Klux Klan was on their doorstep, and its hooded presence could no longer be ignored.
That presence was first manifest in area churches, usually during evening services, when several hooded members would appear, hand the minister a note and a small sum of money, and then leave quietly. The substance of these notes was that the Ku Klux Klan supported the work of Protestant churches in the community and stood for “the highest ideals of the native-born white Gentile American citizenship,” which they held to be:
‘the tenets of the Christian religion; protection of pure womanhood; just laws and liberty; absolute upholding of the Constitution of the United States; free public schools; free speech; free press and law and order.’
During one Sunday evening service in April, 1924, the Klan visited the First Baptist Church in Marion. Dressed in their traditional attire complete with hoods, they marched down the aisle and knelt at the altar. After a brief period, they placed an offering on the table and marched out the other aisle.
Oldham Paisley, editor of the Daily Republican, reported the Klan visits as accurately as possible, but they were never announced, and background information was difficult to obtain. The white-sheeted figures at first presented an enigma to the community and the press, since the area had not experienced even the slightest manifestation of the Ku Klux Klan for sixty years in the Vendetta era.
Oldham was able to deduce from sparse clues, however, that the Klan in Williamson County was provisional, not chartered, and probably only recently organized. He said on May 20, 1923, that the Klan’s church visits were “the first indication that Marion held within its environs, Klan of the mysterious order.”
Sheriff George Galligan believed the Klan had been organized shortly after the Herrin massacre, chiefly to work for the convictions of those persons indicted. The basis of his theory was that S. Glenn Young, their major leader in later months, had been a guard at the Lester strip mine and had left only a few days before the tragedy occurred. There is little indication, however, that any movement for conviction of the indicted union miners was under way at any time in Williamson County. It is also known that the membership of the Klan in Williamson County included large numbers of UMWA union miners.
Paul Angle maintained in Bloody Williamson that the county had provided a fertile field for establishment and growth of the Ku Klux Klan. The area was predominantly fundamentalist Protestant and fervently patriotic, and these factors contributed to prejudices and intolerance. They also contributed to fanatical support of Prohibition laws. Herrin had a ready-made scapegoat in its Italian miner community, as these people were “foreigners,” Catholic, and “habituated to wine”; many of them had become bootleggers after passage of the Volstead Act.
Sheriff Galligan was not strictly enforcing Prohibition, and the Williamson County Law Enforcement League, organized to help stamp out bootlegging and gambling, had condemned him, publicly announcing that other means would have to be found to enforce the law. Many citizens believed that the Klan offered a way to clean up Williamson County and redeem it from its shame.
Whatever the reason for its success, the Ku Klux Klan was already more firmly entrenched in the county than anyone except the Klan itself, realized. On May 25, 1923, five thousand Klansmen gathered in an open field near Marion and initiated two hundred members. This may have very well been at the Rascal Ridge School which was located roughly where the VA hospital now stands and is known to have been frequented by the Klan.
The Daily Republican article on the event on May 26 said it was “believed to be the first initiation of the Ku Klux Klan within the confines of Williamson County since the days of the Bloody Vendetta.” The reporter who covered the “weird impressive ceremony” said the type of men who were present seemed “a refutation of the charge sometimes made that the Klan is nothing but a bunch of hoodlums.” It was indeed apparent that some of the county’s most respected citizens were aligned with the KKK.
A mass law and order meeting was held on the public square in Marion on August 20, 1923, with more than fifteen hundred voices “raised in protest against vice and corruption in Williamson County.” A rousing cheer went up from the crowd when one speaker, the Reverend P.R. Glotfelty, Methodist minister from Herrin, promised the county would be cleansed of iniquity, even if they had to do it themselves. ( For photos, see the post August 1923 Lawlessness Appeals on the Square.)
Glotfelty was adamantly opposed to two things—Catholicism and violation of Prohibition laws—and maintained that intentions of Herrin Catholics to build a new church were evil because most of the members of that parish were Italian bootleggers. He vowed publicly that the Catholic Church would never be built. The church was built anyway, of course, and was completed in 1926.
Ten days after the mass meeting in Marion, on August 30, a headline in the Daily Republican asked, “Is There an Anti-Klan Organization in Williamson County?” The story, a report of two demonstrations in Herrin, indicated that there definitely was, and “the most frequent report was that those parading were members of the Knights of the Flaming Circle.”
From that time on, the stage was set for battle, which began verbally. Oldham and W.O. Paisley agreed that the best course for the Daily Republican was to cover each side as thoroughly as possible and allow readers to make their own decisions. Oldham said later that this policy probably kept him alive and his family safe, since the rivalry between the Klan and its opponents was both bloody and bitter.”
Meanwhile, a committee from the Klan-controlled Williamson County Law and Order League had been to Springfield and Washington, D.C., seeking aid from Illinois Governor Len Small and the U.S. Commissioner of Prohibition. They were rebuffed by Governor Small, who told them to go home and elect someone who would enforce the law if the present sheriff did not. The commissioner in Washington said that he did not have men to send to Williamson County to conduct raids, but he promised aid if evidence collected locally warranted it.
In Washington, by means which have never been disclosed, the group met S. Glenn Young, a former member of the Prohibition Unit of the Treasury Department, and persuaded him—probably without much effort—to undertake the purge of Williamson County. Young discreetly failed to mention that he had been in the county before as a guard at the Lester strip mine in 1922. He returned in November, 1923, and within a month had bought hard liquor at more than a hundred “soft drink parlors”—evidence he took back to Washington and used to persuade the Commissioner of Prohibition to deputize him and such men as he might select to raid the places where liquor had already been purchased.
Little is known about Young’s life, although several versions of it, most of them his—abound. He testified in open court on different occasions that he was born in South Carolina, Kentucky, and Kansas. He claimed to have been a Texas Ranger and a Deputy United States Marshal in western Kansas before working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for seven years, during which time he said he had made approximately three thousand arrests and had been forced to kill twenty-seven criminals for resisting arrest.
The first two claims have never been verified. The last was refuted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1947. According to Hoover, Young had been employed by the Bureau for only five months, and to have compiled the arrest and shooting record he claimed, he would have had to arrest twenty men a day and kill one or more a week.
Young had been a Prohibition agent for four months, but was dismissed for unwarranted killing of a suspect. Although he was acquitted of the murder charge, the required review of his conduct yielded other charges of immorality and fraud while acting as an agent and of keeping for himself confiscated gambling equipment. He had also deserted his wife and twin daughters and had been sued for divorce as a result.
Young’s raids in Williamson County began on December 22, 1923, as he and his deputized Klansmen, accompanied by three federal officers, struck more than a hundred roadhouses in Marion and Herrin as well as bootlegging establishments throughout the county.
Two more mass raids were made on January 5 and 7, 1924, some of them on private homes without warrants. The county was abuzz with rumors of planted evidence, rough treatment, and robberies at the homes of the Italian and French immigrants who were the chief victims of the raids, so much so that the consular agents of both nationalities protested to the U. S. State Department.
Only one Klansman was arrested for violation of Prohibition laws during this period, not by Young’s raiders, but by a deputy sheriff and two other officers. He was State Representative Wallace A. Bandy; and in an argument over his case, Young badly beat a Marion restaurateur, who promptly had him arrested for assault and battery. The trial was held on January 8, 1924 and tension hit fever pitch when Young and several of his supporters entered the courtroom wearing side arms and carrying a machine gun they used on their raids.
Young was acquitted, but was soon charged with four of his men on indictments connected with the raids. Violence of some kind appeared imminent. Sheriff Galligan wired the Adjutant General for troops and got them, despite vigorous protests by Klansmen. Galligan also attempted to persuade saloon keepers to close voluntarily until danger of trouble abated, but these efforts failed miserably, as did his attempt to disarm Herrin citizens by having gun permits revoked. The sheriff finally agreed to meet privately with any citizen who thought he had evidence of illegal activity and rapidly made eighteen raids of his own, hoping to convince the public that he was sincere in trying to enforce the law. Satisfied that he had regained control of law and order, Galligan agreed to removal of the militia after eight days, and most of the troops left Herrin on January 15 and 16.
On February 1, Young conducted his biggest raid ever and led a parade of 125 hostages around the public square in Benton before they were arraigned before the U. S. Commissioner there. Armed with pearl-handled automatics and a sub-machine gun, Young strutted in front of the queue. This display of arrogance only aggravated the hostility between Klan and anti-Klan factions.
The antagonism between these groups stemmed from a variety of differing opinions and motives. Those who aligned with the Ku Klux Klan included ministers and other “religious” persons with special interests in clean living and with prejudices against Catholics, some who saw the Klan as an outlet for a special brand of fanatic “Americanism,” some to whom the ritual and mystery of the hooded order especially appealed, and many who were disgusted with what they considered to be a lack of law enforcement that followed on the heels of the Herrin massacre.
Law and order was the touted maxim of the Klan, which purported to be “cleaning up” Williamson, Jackson, Franklin, Saline, and Gallatin Counties—a circle with Williamson County at the center. An example of the area’s corruption was the Franklin County mining community of Zeigler, which despite its tiny size, had fifty-two illegal saloons and plenty of business for the trainload of prostitutes from St. Louis, who disembarked on every mine payday—to deliver them at Zeigler, the passenger train had to back onto a railroad spur that had been constructed to one of the large shipping mines.
Marion and Herrin each had more than a hundred roadhouses and “soft drink parlors” where illegal whiskey was sold, and at many of these establishments, prostitutes were available. Nearby Carbondale had deserted the principle of its founders that no intoxicating liquors be sold or given away there.
The opponents of the Ku Klux Klan were not necessarily opposed to the concept of law and order, although most members of the Knights of the Flaming Circle stood to profit heavily if Williamson County failed to come to such a state of legal grace. Among those, would have included members of the Shelton gang of outlaws who stood to gain by the Klan’s loss.
Other members of the anti-Klan faction opposed the tenets of the KKK or feared the consequences of its vigilante action. Unlike Klan allies, who more often than not joined it, Klan opponents did not flock to the Knights of the Flaming Circle. Nonetheless, neutrality was rare, and as Oldham Paisley wrote in his diary, there was “high feeling in the county”.
Open warfare broke out in Herrin on February 8, when an anti-Klansman was wounded and a Klansman was killed. The first shooting occurred at an anti-Klan meeting and was generally blamed on one of two members of Herrin’s pro-Klan police force who had attempted to break in on the meeting; both had already been disarmed when the shooting occurred, however.
Sheriff Galligan, fearing a riot was imminent, put in another call for troops and then took the two policemen to the Jackson County Jail in Murphysboro to keep them from being lynched. While he was gone, the second shooting occurred on a Herrin street. Caesar Cagle, a Herrin constable and former bootlegger who had reformed and joined the Klan, was seriously wounded and died minutes after he was taken to Herrin Hospital. I would later be determined that members of the Shelton gang were responsible for the shooting.
The anti-Klansman who had been wounded earlier was under treatment there. In less than an hour, the word of Cagle’s death had spread, and hundreds of Klansmen converged on Herrin, set up patrols at city limits, and organized a siege of the hospital, blasting the building with protracted gunfire. Patients inside the hospital were forced to lay on the floor to escape the bullets.
Oldham Paisley was in Herrin that night, sent there by a Colonel Culbertson, representative of the Illinois Adjutant General, to find out what was happening. Oldham arrived at the city limits before the Klan cordon was established. Otherwise, since he did not know the password, he would not have been able to enter the city. He drove to City Hall and asked for Mayor Mage Anderson, an anti-Klan ally, not knowing that the building and for all practical purposes, Herrin itself—had been taken over by members of the Klan:
“When I asked for Anderson, I was carried bodily from the room and taken outside for questioning. The Klansmen wanted to know who I was and what I wanted to know. I said if they would appoint a committee, I would tell the committee, but I would not explain to the whole group, thinking they would harm me if I did. They appointed a committee and I told them Colonel Culbertson had asked me to come. They asked me to telephone Culbertson and tell him everything was under control and no National Guard troops were needed.
From there I went to the Canary Hotel to a public telephone booth to call Culbertson in Marion and tell him about the experience. I told him the Ku Klux Klan was in control of the town and I could not tell if any trouble was brewing or not, although I certainly thought it was. While I was talking to Culbertson, a group of men came in and asked for me. I don’t know what they wanted, but I assumed they had decided that they were not happy with my story. I sat down in the bottom of the telephone booth until they left. They soon went elsewhere to look for me, so I went out and sat in my car in front of the hotel and kept my ears open. When I found out the only way I could get out of town satisfactorily was to tell them I was going to transport some more Klansmen in, I left and started home.
A short distance from there, a group of men with rifles and shotguns stopped me and asked what I was doing. I told them I was bringing some Klansmen over, and they said, “Go ahead and get some more,” so I got out of there and went back to Marion to report to Culbertson. Of course, I was still shaking when I got there. He (Culbertson) had already managed to get hold of (Colonel Bob) Davis in Carbondale and troops were on their way to Herrin. If I had stayed there, I probably would have seen the Klan firing on the hospital.”
Herrin was under nominal control of the National Guard, but under actual control of the Ku Klux Klan. S. Glenn Young had declared himself acting chief of police, as the chief was in jail in Murphysboro, and had armed Klansmen wearing crude stars cut from tin cans patrolling the streets.
Young had Mayor Mage Anderson, Sheriff Galligan, and thirty-eight other persons arrested for the killing of Caesar Cagle. He continued to serve as police chief until February 12, when the regular Klan police chief got out of jail and returned to Herrin.
The following day, a coroner’s jury ruled that the death of Cagle had been at the hands of Carl and Earl Shelton, members of the Knights of the Flaming Circle who were soon to be embroiled in Williamson County’s gangster war, and not at the hands of any of those persons Young had arrested. A special grand jury, in session at Herrin, indicted the Sheltons on March 14. The jury also listed ninety-nine indictments of Klansmen who had participated in the firing on Herrin Hospital, some of them prominent Marion and Herrin businessmen. Fifty-five indictments were issued against Young as well as a criticism of his assumption of control on February 8, Klansmen made bonds totaling more than four million dollars for all those indicted.
Although the Klan did not fail to come to Young as defense in providing his bond with that of other indicted comrades, his job in Williamson County was in jeopardy. His exorbitant demands for money were draining his supporters, who were rapidly tiring of his grand style. The Klan was on the verge of stopping Young’s salary, and he knew it. He decided to leave, at least temporarily, and went to East St. Louis to “clean it up there,” although he continued to maintain a home in Williamson County and wrote W.O. Paisley that he intended to live there permanently except when needed elsewhere and that he resented stories in the Marion newspapers which reported that he had left the county.
Just before Young’s departure, KKK candidates swept the field in primary elections of April, 1924, and celebrated the victory with a motorcade through Herrin, Johnston City, Dewmaine, and Marion, where a huge cross was burned-—the first in almost a year. From then on, the Klan in Williamson County reverted to its old, less terrifying tactics, burning crosses, conducting ghostly initiations, visiting churches in white regalia, and rallying in meadows and corn fields.
In May, 1924, it conducted a three-day Klantauqua at Marion, modeled on the old Chautauqua programs, at which lecturers expounded on Klan tenets and goals and recruited members. Two hundred men and women were initiated at a Klan barbecue in early May.
Later that month, Glenn Young and his second wife were fired upon from a passing automobile. His knee was shattered; his pretty young wife was blinded by shotgun pellets, most of which she took full in the face. Too badly injured to state their personal views, they were ironically taken to a Catholic hospital in Belleville. Klansmen in Williamson County, despite their earlier decision to cut off Young’s salary, vowed to avenge the attack and assaulted two men seen in a side-curtained touring automobile like the assailants had used. One was killed, the other slightly wounded.
In ensuing months, the Klan and Knights of the Flaming Circle resumed warfare, and six men were killed on August 30 in a clash between the two factions at Smith’s garage in Herrin, known to be a Klan headquarters. Three Klansmen, a sheriff’s deputy, and two passersby, one of whom had tried to play the role of the peacemaker died. The Daily Republican went to press with a full story, ninety minutes after the shoot-out occurred. A riot was averted only by the speedy arrival of National Guardsmen.
On September 12, 1924, Glenn Young returned to Williamson County and the atmosphere was tense. A week earlier, Young and nine other Herrin residents had been named in indictments on charges of impersonating federal officers; and several anti-Klansmen, including Sheriff Galligan, had been placed under bond to await grand jury action on the August 30 riot, along with nine prominent members of the Klan.
The day after his return, Young was officially expelled from the Ku Klux Klan, although the action by the Illinois Grand Dragon, Charles G. Palmer, had little effect on Young’s popularity among Klansmen in Williamson County.
Sheriff Galligan had just dismissed two deputies whom he had discovered were card-carrying Klansmen and appointed in their places rabid anti-Klansmen. One of these new deputies was Ora Thomas, thought to have been one of the original organizers of the Knights of the Flaming Circle; and at the time of his appointment, thirteen indictments stood against him for anti-Klan activities.
In November, Klan candidates took most offices in county elections, and with this new power, the Klan decided that Young was too boisterous, reckless, and violent to advance the causes of the KKK any further. Members contributed one thousand dollars to induce him to leave Williamson County. Young left, but he stayed away only three weeks. He returned, ostensibly to write a book about his life and exploits. He and his family lived on gifts from a few fanatical admirers, the majority of the Klan having turned against him.
Weeks passed without incident, and the militia finally left Herrin. A month later, on January 24, 1925, Oldham was called out of bed to the European Hotel in Herrin, where Ora Thomas and Glenn Young had just died in a gunfight.
Thomas had gone into the hotel cigar store, where he often waited for a taxicab to take him home. He heard voices in the back room, and he entered with one hand on the gun in his pocket. Several men gathered there were watching Glenn Young browbeat a frightened miner, whom Young accused of retelling the story of his alleged activities as a strikebreaker during the Lester mine troubles.
Upon seeing Thomas, one of the group of men slipped out through a rear door. His action alerted Young, who then whirled to face Thomas. In the gunfight that followed, four men were killed—Young and Thomas and two of Young’s personal guards. The militia returned to Herrin.
On January 27, the coroner’s inquest covering the Young-Thomas shootout, decided that Young and Thomas had killed each other and that the other two men were killed by parties unknown. Sheriff Galligan disagreed with the verdict, saying that Young’s pearl-handled pistols had discharged only two bullets, both of which pierced the ceiling, and that Thomas had shot all three of the other victims. Galligan also said that the coroner’s jury showed itself to be Klan oriented when it recessed to attend Young’s funeral. Oldham also disagreed with the verdict, as did most people in Williamson County, but it was the only one that could offer appeasement to both factions.
Ora Thomas was buried near the potter’s field in Herrin Cemetery. The funeral was held on the front porch of his home, since his widow refused to ask her minister, a Klan member, to conduct the services.
In contrast, Glen Young’s funeral was an extravaganza with a church full of flowers and a long cortege; the service was concluded by reading of the Klan burial ritual by the light of a burning cross. It was followed by an enormous procession of Klansmen in full Klan regalia down Herrin’s streets. Young’s body was placed in an imposing mausoleum on the other side of the Herrin cemetery from Ora Thomas’s grave.
The Paisleys, despite their opinions, continued to treat the Klan war events as straight news. Like many county residents, they were hopeful that six weeks of religious revival, marked by tent services in Herrin and conducted by a fiery, young evangelist, would have lasting effect. In the revival spirit, and because he said his evidence was flimsy, State’s Attorney Arlie 0. Boswell, a Klansman, moved to drop remaining cases stemming from Young’s activities, including several against anti-Klansmen. Williamson County seemed to be moving toward peace again.
On March 19, 1925, a tornado struck Egypt, killing five hundred persons and demolishing Murphysboro, about twenty six miles west of Marion. That devastation and the reconstruction it necessitated were the biggest stories of the day. Oldham regretted the deaths and damage but at the same time was personally pleased that some news event had occurred which could take precedence over the internal struggles of Williamson County. He wanted to view the tornado as an omen that the Ku Klux Klan had been swept from the area and from the columns of his newspapers.
The Klan was indeed for all practical purposes dead except for a final convulsion, which resulted in six more deaths and brought the total number of deaths during the Klan era to fifty-two. It occurred in April, 1926, and was primarily spurred by the realization that the Ku Klux Klan still had a remnant of power.
Tension was first noted on April 6 in an election for Herrin township officers and again on April 10 in an election for members of the Herrin school board. Klansmen succeeded in electing members or sympathizers to nearly every office. Candidates for county and state offices were to be nominated on April 13, and ominously, Herrin citizens were again carrying guns.
The Daily Republican carried interviews with Mayor Marshall McCormick and the Herrin police chief, both of whom expressed confidence that the election could be conducted peacefully despite portents to the contrary. Backed by further reassurances from city officials as late as two p.m., Oldham ran the story on April 13. Shooting broke out in Herrin at 2:35, and the Paisleys put out an extra on the Election Day riots. This time, troops were called the moment the first shots were fired.
The trouble apparently began when a Klan poll watcher offended anti-Klansmen by challenging a number of Catholic voters, including a nun who had lived in Herrin for twenty years. A fist-fight erupted at the polling place, and the watcher retired to his place of business, the garage where the killings of August 30th had occurred. When he emerged later in the afternoon, his neck was grazed by a bullet fired from a passing automobile. Firing then began from the European Hotel, two blocks away, and the garage was riddled, although no one was hit. Shortly after the gunfire subsided, the National Guard arrived.
With militiamen lining the streets of Herrin, anti-Klansmen drove to another polling place and fired on another Klansman. The bullet itself missed its mark, but the man’s face was burned by powder from the charge. That shot was followed by a barrage in which one anti-Klansman was killed and two others were mortally wounded, as were three members of the Klan.
The coroner’s inquest a few days later was quiet, although the customary flamboyant Klan funerals were held the same day. The Daily Republican article on the inquest dwelt on the tranquil atmosphere: “There was everything to indicate, on the surface at least, that peace and rejoicing had come to Herrin with the springtime.”
Again the inquests said that the deaths had occurred at the hands of “parties unknown.”
The Klan war had burned itself out. Through it all, the Paisleys had adhered to their original decision not to take sides and for not doing so lost, at least temporarily, a number of subscribers. According to Oldham, on several occasions, as many as a dozen Klansmen came into the office at one time to stop delivery of the newspaper to their homes because it did not support the Klan. In most cases their wives telephoned to have it started again or purchased the paper on the streets, so that no significant losses were noted.
The Marion Daily Republican ran a total of approximately 540 stories on the Klan and its adversaries during the three years of the Klan conflict.
The Williamson County court house in Marion was the scene of heated controversy during the Ku Klux Klan difficulties of 1923-24. At one time it served as barracks for the National Guardsmen quartered here to keep order in the county.
The State’s Attorney that served at the beginning of the Klan era from 1920 to 1924 was Delos L. Duty who had an office at 210 N. Market. Duty was often shot at and more than once hit by gunfire as he walked from his office to the court house, so he clearly was on the side of law and order. His predecessor, however, was Arlie O. Boswell who served from 1924-28 and was clearly in the pocket of the Klan.
Although the end of the Klan may have been signaled in 1926, they were clearly still around after that time. When St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Marion was being built in late August of 1927, at 908 W. Boulevard Street, it wasn’t even finished before a bomb was exploded on one side of the building causing damage. Clearly anti-Catholic sentiment was still present.
As before, once again, the Klan would slip back into operating out of sight in the shadows, just like it did in the 1870’s.
For more information on the 1870’s Klan in the county, see the post Ku Klux Klan in Williamson County, Part One.
(Data extracted from “Oldham Paisley, A Community Editor and his Newspapers”; Bloody Williamson, by Paul Angle; compiled by Sam Lattuca on 09/20/2013)