In
“Get
right or get out” I recalled episodes from Illinois’ recent past in which
fearful Illinoisans confronted the Other. I mentioned an incident in Litchfield
involving Jehovah’s Witnesses. Here are the details.
After World War II, paranoid fantasies of subversion and
revolution focused on new sets of exotic newcomers. Because they put loyalty to their creator above loyalty to the state,
Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to salute the U.S. or any flag. Not sharing such
principled fervor, many an anxious patriot in the 1940s ascribed them to
sinister motives. They contrived to convince themselves that members of the
sect were in fact agents of the Nazi state bent on advancing in some
undescribed way a planned invasion of the U.S. by Hitler’s forces.
The Witnesses traditional proselytizing forays into
new communities were met by mob violence in forty-four states during 1940. One
of them was Illinois. In June of that year, some one hundred Witnesses drove to
Litchfield in Montgomery County from St. Louis to distribute literature house-to-house. The men were beaten in
the streets while police looked on; when women also were threatened, the county
sheriff, whose chivalry apparently was more generous than his commitment to
civil liberties, ordered sixty-four of the one hundred Witnesses taken to the
jail for protection. A large American flag had been brought to the front of
the jail; some of the male prisoners were forced to salute or kiss the flag as
they entered the jail, others were brought out of the jail to do so. Those who
refused had their arms twisted until they were forced to their knees. Meanwhile
twelve
of the cars were totally wrecked. The arrival of a company of state police from Springfield
prevented worse, and the Witnesses were returned to St. Louis by bus.
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2016.
