Free Bloody Williamson by Paul M. Angle Page B

that Kerr had made in his opening statement:
    The defense was directed against the vicious and unwarranted, brutal and murderous use of a private army of gunmen. If this trial has taught the lesson well that hereafter the weapons of the employers’ private army shall not be directed against human breasts, then the trial with all its sacrifices has not been in vain.… It was the only righteous verdict which could have been rendered against an army of invaders.
    C. W. Middlekauff, for the state, was disappointed but determined. The jury had been misled, he asserted, into considering the case as a controversy between Lester’s strikebreakers and the miners’ union, while the real issue was whether the law of the land should prevail in Williamson County. The prosecution would proceed with the next case. “The issues involved in this whole transaction are important,” he concluded; “the people of the entire United States are interested in their solution. We are desirous of putting it square up to another jury in Williamson County whether they will be ruled by the laws of Illinois or whether the domination of the mob shall prevail.…”
    Over the nation editors echoed Middlekauff’s comments,though without his restraint. “The acquittal … is denounced by the daily press from one end of the country to the other as a travesty upon justice,” said the
Literary Digest
, “the editors rising almost as one man to point the finger of scorn at the town of Herrin and the County of Williamson, in the State of Illinois.” Herrin was “an unconquered province of lawlessness,” “a stench in the nostrils of humanity” that was “about to complete its secession from the United States of America.” The people of the county had proved that they chose “to condone murder and shield assassins,” and were content to leave “the stain of atrocious murder” on the annals of the state.
    Labor papers might—and did—call the jury’s verdict “a vindication of the traditional American right of self-defense” and “a crushing condemnation of the practice of ‘protecting property’ with privately employed gunmen who usurp the police power of the State”; they might assert that it proved that liberty still lived in the United States; they might ask why there was not some punishment that could be dealt out to an “outlaw operator” who invaded “a peaceable and law-abiding county” and goaded it to violence. Editorial opinions such as these converted few readers. The vast majority continued to hold with the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, dismayed but unbowed, when it demanded in its official publication:
    Every man still under indictment should be prosecuted as vigorously as those who have just been acquitted.… Let nothing stand in the way of the prosecution of every man suspected of having any part in that damnable outrage.
    For its second case, the state chose to prosecute those who had been indicted for the murder of Antonio Molkovich, a cook who had lost his life at the powerhouse woods. Perhaps the fact that Molkovich, though of Russian birth, had served in the United States Army during the World War was counted on to nullify some of the prejudice against strikebreakers. The grand jury had returned eighteen indictments for his murder, but onthe first day of the trial the state moved to nol-pros all but six. Otis Clark and Bert Grace again stood in jeopardy; with them, at the table for the defendants, sat Hugh Willis, Phillip Fontanetta, Oscar Howard, and James Brown, a Negro.
    When the trial began on February 12, 1923, the appearance of the courtroom contrasted sharply with what it had looked like when the first trial opened three months earlier. The same cracked plaster threatened to fall at any moment; the same flyspecked picture of the President stared from the wall, the same battered cuspidors stood in corners, but instead of hundreds of spectators a mere handful lounged in boredom while a winter rain beat