Bloody Williamson by Paul M. Angle Read Free Book Online

the
Chicago Journal of Commerce
ran a box on its front page headed: “Ten Days Since Herrin,” or: “Fourteen Days Since Herrin,” calling for the indictment of those who had taken part in the rioting. On June 29 that same paper reprinted several columns of editorials under the heading: “Press of Nation Demands Justice for Murders That Disgrace State,” and added its own assertion that “forty-seven states of the Union are looking to Illinois to administer justice to all responsible for the murder of workingmen, the torture of wounded, the desecration of the dead and the defiance to law and order on the part of the Miners’ Union at Herrin.”
    As time passed without any apparent action, one organization after another demanded that something be done. The Chicago Association of Commerce passed resolutions urging that the offenders be brought to justice and that the officials whose negligence contributed to the disorders be disciplined. The Board of Directors of the National Association of Manufacturers chided the American Federation of Labor, in session when the massacre took place, for its failure to rebuke the mine workers, and called on every loyal American “to join in demanding the protection, by state and nation, of these fundamental rights of the citizen, that no man shall live his life by the consent of others, and no official shall refuse or neglect to guard these living truths of the day’s work.” In a letter to Governor Small the president of the National Coal Association charged that Williamson County officials had done little or nothing to punish the rioters, urged that the state use its law-enforcement agencies, and offered the Association’s resources to the prosecution. The Illinois Manufacturers Association sent its members a communication headed, “The Home of Lincoln Threatened with Disgrace,” in which itasked that they write or wire the governor requesting him to place Williamson County under martial law so that residents having knowledge of the events of June 22 could offer their evidence without fear.
    In early August the National Coal Association distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of a thirty-eight page pamphlet entitled
The Herrin Conspiracy.
On the outside front cover were several excerpts from newspaper editorials, concluding with this from the
New York Sun
of July 6: “Until this coal mine butchery is legally avenged Americans can no longer boast that in the United States the Constitution is supreme.” The body of the publication was a reasonably objective account of the massacre and the events leading up to it—there was no need to color the facts—but its final paragraphs drove home its real point:
    More than a month after the massacre scarcely a visible effort has been made to discover or punish perpetrators of the crime.…
    Shall the assassins of innocent American citizens go unpunished?
    It cannot be possible that Illinois will not take further official cognizance of these infamous acts, as the first and last tribunal of the country, our American citizenship, will demand that lawlessness, murder and massacre are not and never shall be permitted to undermine the security not only of the nation’s industries, but the very lives and homes of our people.
    Prominent Americans made the same demands. At Marion, Ohio, on July 4, 1922, General John J. Pershing alluded to the Herrin massacre without naming it, called it wholesale murder that was as yet unpunished, and asserted: “… it is imperative that public opinion should demand that the strong arm of the law, under fearless officials, take positive action.” On July 13 Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, told delegates to the Elks’ National Convention that Herrin was “as atrocious a massacre [unclear]. as is contained in our annals” andreminded his audience that poor man and rich man were equal before the law. Reversing the usual emphasis, he declared: “The offender of great wealth