For years I’ve had an old friend’s words fixed in my head. He was fond of saying, “I don’t understand all I know about that.” At first I thought the comment a sort of paradox. Later I began to think of it as a way of seeing how things are. Growing up, I learned that people do not always try to understand what they take for granted. Take coal for instance, that black vegetable harvested by miners from deep pits, a source of both life and strife to my grandfathers.
Coming of age in Herrin in the 30s and early 40s wasn’t just living in a town whose look, smell, and even taste were determined by coal. For good and ill, coal gave the town its collective health and its livelihood. Much later I came to realize that coal also decided for all of us what we were supposed to believe about America, God, and the working man.
When I was a sophomore in high school I encountered Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and the town of Gopher Prairie. Johnny Tremaine and Tom Sawyer hadn’t prepared me for the pleasure I could find in reading when a book echoed my questions about the life into which I had been born. For years afterward I thought that having read Main Street was the best thing I had done academically in high school. Lewis focused my attention on something called culture and made me think I was destined to be more mature and sophisticated than, I realize now, I ever came close to being. Thankfully. But never once during my schooling, even though Herrin had a historical pageant in 1950 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the town’s founding, was a word said about what went on there during the mid-20s with the massacre and its successive spawn: the rise and fall of the Klan and the prohibition gang wars. These three events had played out on that small stage like a three-act tragedy, but without the intermissions.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Then as a sophomore in college I read Paul Angle’s Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness (1952), a title using the derogatory but popular nickname given the county in which Herrin is located. Angle, then the state historian and later the director of the Chicago Historical Society, describes a half century of regional unrest beginning with a bloody vendetta in the 1870s in Carterville, the neighboring town where my paternal great grandfather settled and where my father was born, and concluding in the 1920s with the three interrelated events of massacre, Klan ascendancy, and gang wars. In a footnote to his chapter on the Klan, Angle makes brief mention of my maternal grandfather: “Ten charges of assault with intent to murder hung over Otis [sic: should be Otice] Maynard, member of the county board of supervisors and uncompromising enemy of [Williamson County sheriff George] Galligan.” It was an isolated and jarring bit of information, mitigated only by the knowledge that the list of those indicted includes dozens of people on both sides of the disputes and that the indictments were all later dropped. Still, I couldn’t dissociate him from the massacre and the Klan activities.
So it was at last from my maternal grandfather that I began to understand what led the miners to massacre. Those words in his priestly cadence were shaped by an absolutism gained from years of contemplating the darkness deep in the bowels of the earth. He became for me one of those who could commit incomprehensible deeds to preserve their painfully acquired humanity. For three decades union coal miners in southern Illinois had made a place for themselves and their families against the odds of early death and employer oppression. Since its beginnings, Herrin had been a coal town, but it was not owned by the company. By the 1920s, 30,000 of 60,000 Illinois miners worked the pits and strips in Williamson and adjoining Franklin County. Like my maternal grandfather, many had grown into manhood during the birth and adolescence of the United Mine Workers of America. Following a nationwide strike in 1897 (when my grandfather at 15 was already a three-year veteran of the pits), the UMW in Illinois grew from 226 members to over 30,000 in one year. Two UMW presidents, John Mitchell and John L. Lewis, had worked in Illinois mines. One of Lewis’s first actions as president was to call the strike of 1922.
One experience from my own preadolescence, illuminated by a comment in Angle’s book, remains fixed in memory. During World War II a shabby, wood-framed building on the corner of my block served as the grocery store for the neighborhood. Its proprietor, an affable Swede by the name of Carl Neilson, always offered me candy for which I didn’t have to exchange war-ration stamps. Like my grandfathers, he had been a miner. In Bloody Williamson, Angle identifies him as the cyclops of the Williamson County Klan, one of Glenn Young’s most ardent supporters. He remained a stalwart in the First Baptist Church, whence he helped carry Young to his grave beneath a whitewashed mausoleum that to this day stands like a monument in the Herrin cemetery. I sometimes think of myself as a child in that grocery store’s cavelike darkness, the cyclops lurking behind the counter, expectant, waiting to wreak destruction.
I have followed that route ritualistically, driving, walking, or jogging it when I visit my people there: the east-west road that leads to the mine, now renamed College and intersecting the scarred red earth growing only pampas grass and dense shrubs on the south where the mine lay and the denuded, seemingly endless stretch of mounded clay that is the city dump on the north; Taylor Crossing a mile away toward town, where the peg-legged foreman of the strikebreakers was the first to be killed; Harrison’s woods, where my grandfather spoke his warning and I later smoked catalpa leaves and dug for sassafras roots without understanding where I was, and which today has been encroached upon by a housing development; 13th Street, where the Southern Baptist congregation has built a new and imposing edifice and where as boys my uncles watched a motley parade of beaten and doomed men from the porch of the house where my grandmother and mother raised them and where much later I was to spend much of my own young life; the school yard, little changed even today, where six remaining prisoners were forced to crawl across cinders before being prodded their final half mile to the cemetery where they were beaten and shot and their throats were cut; and finally the makeshift morgue in a gray cement-block building where the bodies of the strikebreakers were laid out for two days in the late June heat, allowing miners and their wives and children to wreak indignities on the corpses of those who would have taken their jobs.
