Content area
Full Text
There is no mystery about how Robert Paul Prager died in the spring of 1918, and not much doubt about who was responsible. Prager was hanged from a tree, and a man named Joe Riegel confessed that he led the mob that did it, although he later retracted his confession. He and another ten men were tried for killing Prager, but acquitted. The motivation for the lynching was set in large type when a local newspaper topped its first story about the lynching with the headline, "Anti-German Mob Hangs Man Here."1
Academic historians have put this case forward as the most extreme example of the results of ethnic (or political) polarization during World War I, and interpreted the response of certain politicians and journalists as a significant reflection of insensitivity to civil liberties. Local historians have understood the lynching as a natural disaster, growing out of drunkenness and other eternal verities of human nature, which might have happened anywhere under the circumstances.
While each of these interpretations has at least some merit, consideration of the deeper context of the Prager case suggests a different meaning. Prager unquestionably died at the hands of drunken, hysterical men because he was German. But when they killed Prager, they were also killing their own fears of being accused of disloyalty, fears rooted in a bitter and divisive labor struggle. The events that put the lynching in motion, as well as the attitude of the community afterward, were rooted in a successful struggle by United Mine Workers (UMW) leaders to balance the demands of a militant rank-and-file with the need to demonstrate patriotism.
The lynching took place in Collinsville, a southern Illinois coalmining town near St. Louis. Historian Frederick C. Luebke has provided an account of the lynching that can scarcely be improved upon. He began his 1974 book, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I, with an entire chapter about the lynching, entitled "Death in Collinsville." Relying mainly on newspaper accounts, Luebke wrote that Prager had been born in Dresden, Germany, and had come to the United States in 1905 at the age of nineteen. He was a drifter who spent a year in an Indiana reformatory for theft. He was living in St. Louis when the U.S....