Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

that the Democrats were trying to frighten black voters by false charges of colonization and by challenging the right to vote of thousands of legitimate black voters in cities like East St. Louis. He announced, “A bold attempt to disenfranchise Negro voters in the North as well as in the South is the latest scheme of the Wilson campaign managers.” He further noted that the conspiracy, although clearly illegal, was proceeding without interference from Democratic federal prosecutors, who were interested only in Republican crimes. 22
    Woodrow Wilson won a narrow victory on November 7, carrying the South and the West while losing almost all of the Northeast and the North Central states. His victory was greeted in Washington with rebel yells. Wilson took St. Clair County by a few hundred votes, although his defeated Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, carried the state of Illinois. TheDemocratic machine kept all its seats on the East Side Levee and Sanitation Board, with its hundreds of thousands of dollars in county, state, and federal flood-control funds sitting in interest-free accounts in politically favored banks. Democratic mayor Fred Mollman was safe—he would not be up for reelection until the spring of 1917. And the powerful local congressman William Rodenberg, closely aligned with the East St. Louis political machine, won reelection. Rodenberg was a Republican, but that really didn’t matter. At the end of the day, the politicians from both parties in East St. Louis would get together and carve up the pie once again.
    A couple of weeks before the election, to insure the machine candidates got the church vote, Mollman and police chief Payne had closed a few shady establishments. Immediately after the election, those barrel houses, juke joints, and brothels reopened, and a full panoply of whores went back to work in time for the victory celebrations. 23
    After the election, it became clear that Democratic charges of thousands of illegal black voters in southern Illinois—and as many as three hundred thousand nationwide, according to Wilson’s attorney general—had been grossly exaggerated. The November 1916 election in East St. Louis seems to have been no more dishonest than usual, perhaps ironically in part because all the lies and false rumors on the front pages of newspapers alerted poll watchers of both parties and both races. After all the furor and all the challenges, the bipartisan Board of Election Commissioners ended up striking only 86 blacks from the registration rolls. 24
    Mayor Mollman himself, a Democrat with significant black support, later made peace within the bipartisan machine by downplaying his party’s inflammatory preelection charges that Republicans had “imported” thousands of black voters to southern Illinois. What the Republicans actually did, he said, was work hard to register those blacks who had already established residency. As for the newcomers, most of them came looking for work but “in numbers larger than could be utilized,” he said, in what may have been his first public hint that some of the employment practices of the local captains of industry might be problematic in the long term. 25
    Be that as it may, the repeated charges of “Negro colonization” in the weeks leading up to the election strengthened the feeling of many East St. Louis whites that their community was under siege by thousands of blacks who were up to no good.

CHAPTER 6
The May Riot

    On the first Sunday of 1917, prodded by a disapproving visit from stiff-necked federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis of Chicago, East St. Louis mayor Fred Mollman and police chief Ransom Payne began enforcing the ban on Sunday drinking. What’s more, Mollman closed down completely, if not permanently, about fifty of the city’s more notorious saloons. More than half of those saloons happened to be places with predominantly black patrons, which could have presented