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Bill Warner never knew how close he came to dying.
After clocking out at the Mount Olive, Ill., waterworks around midnight, he
decided to walk home by way of the Union Miners Cemetery. Entering the
graveyard, he ambled past the tombstones, pausing to gaze from afar at the
silhouette of a shrouded monument. He then strode to within a couple of
feet of the cloaked obelisk and again stopped in his tracks. Warner had no idea that every move he made was being
watched by eight men, each aiming a shotgun in his direction, finger on the
trigger. Nor would the former coal miner ever learn that his near-death
experience would become part of the region’s storied labor history. Decades later, after Warner had died of natural
causes, Joseph Ozanic Sr. recounted the incident from the perspective of
one of the gunmen lurking in the shadows. Unbeknownst to Warner on that
long-ago night in the autumn of 1936, he had walked into a trap set by
members of Local 728 of the Progressive Miners of America, the owner of the
cemetery. “The good Lord must have been with him,”
recalled Ozanic, former PMA state president. “Had his curiosity got
the best of him to the extent that he might have tried to raise the veil up
to see that marble, eight shotguns would have hit him from eight
directions.”
Warner had likely made his nocturnal pilgrimage to
pay an advance tribute to the woman for whom the monument would be publicly
dedicated less than a week later. On Oct. 11, 1936, an estimated 50,000
people jammed the cemetery to honor legendary labor organizer Mary Harris
Jones, better known as Mother Jones. Ozanic and his comrades had staked out the cemetery
for several nights before the ceremony because they had heard rumors that
the rival United Mine Workers union, under the autocratic rule of John L.
Lewis, planned to blow up the monument. Their vigilance was warranted.
Bombings, shootings, and other violence were common during the labor strife
of the 1930s, when the two unions battled for supremacy in the
central-Illinois coalfields. The tale of graveyard guard duty is buried among
thousands of pages of transcribed interviews conducted by the Office of
Oral History at Sangamon State University (which has since become the
University of Illinois at Springfield) in the 1970s and 1980s, now
available online. The recollections of the miners and their family members
provide an invaluable historical context for understanding the struggles
they endured.
This weekend the town of Mount Olive will hold
its third annual Mother Jones Festival to honor the area’s labor
heritage. The festivities will include a homecoming parade, carnival rides,
and an arts-and-crafts show. A memorial service at the Mother Jones
monument is also scheduled. Those who attend may also pay their respects to
Ozanic, who died in 1978 and is buried nearby. As evidenced by his anecdote, the Mother Jones
monument not only symbolizes labor’s struggles but actually became a
part of them. Before her death in 1930, at the age of 100, Jones
— an avowed foe of Lewis — had requested that her remains be
buried in the Union Miners Cemetery with the martyrs of the Virden
massacre, who died in 1898 during an earlier strike against Illinois coal
operators. When the PMA decided to rebury Jones’ body in front of the
monument, the UMW sued to stop the exhumation of her unmarked grave. Six years after she died, Mother Jones still
commanded the attention and respect of organized labor. Lewis — fearing the labor matriarch’s
iconic influence — had UMW attorneys file a restraining order that
painted the PMA members more or less as ghouls. “He sought to make it
appear that we were going to unearth graves and scatter bones of the dead
in our cemetery,” recalled Ozanic. “Of course, we countered in
court and proved that he was a damn liar. . . . And then we proceeded. We
raised the funds and everything was set up, and oh, Jesus, what a deal it
was! It really shook him and rocked old John L. and his corrupt outfit like
nothing else.”
The PMA and its women’s auxiliary had somehow
managed to raise more than $16,000 in the middle of the Great Depression to
build the 20-foot-tall granite shaft, which bears a bas-relief of Jones and
is flanked by bronze statutes of two coal miners. The outlay represented a
lofty sum for the cash-strapped union, most of whose members had been on
strike since the PMA had organized itself, in 1932, to oppose Lewis’
despotic control over the UMW. Through the monument, the PMA and its supporters had
won a major publicity coup by attaching their democratic labor movement to
the memory of Mother Jones. But the victory was short lived: Within two
months of the monument’s unveiling, a federal grand jury in
Springfield charged 41 PMA members with conspiracy to disrupt interstate
commerce and impede mail delivery in connection with 23 bombings and six
attempted bombings of railroad property between December 1932 and August
1935. The trial, which took place a year later, lasted more
than a month and featured 388 witnesses. With each passing day’s
testimony, tensions welled higher. The judge, at one point, threatened to
clear the courtroom because of outbursts by PMA supporters. In another
instance, a defense attorney tussled with a Springfield police detective in
the third-floor corridor of the courthouse. The courtroom drama garnered front-page headlines in
both of Springfield’s daily newspapers for weeks. Lengthy accounts
detailed legal strategies, summarized testimonies, and noted the many
prosecutorial objections sustained by the bench. Outside the courtroom,
however, larger forces played a critical role in the fate of the
defendants. Lewis began his career in the Illinois coalfields,
but by the 1930s he was vying for national power. With the UMW as his base,
he bolted from the American Federation of Labor to head the Congress of
Industrial Organizations, which was then organizing millions of American
factory workers. To secure future influence in labor matters, the UMW also
contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the presidential campaign
of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The UMW’s generosity may partly explain the
Roosevelt administration’s interest in the case. After a year-long
FBI investigation, the Justice Department dispatched U.S. Assistant
Attorney General Welly K. Hopkins to Springfield. He used the newly enacted
federal anti-racketeering law for the first time to try the case.
Ultimately three defendants received early acquittals
from the judge. The court released another individual for lack of evidence
and excused yet another because of poor health. Despite the vast amount of
evidence and the overall complexity of the case, the jury deliberated for
just over three hours before delivering the verdict on the remaining 36
defendants. All were found guilty as charged and sentenced to federal
prison. The guilty verdicts, delivered in December 1937,
presaged the gradual decline of the PMA. A few years later, Roosevelt
pardoned all of the convicted miners, but not before they had served their
prison sentences. By then the PMA had suffered more setbacks in its efforts
to negotiate contracts with coal operators in Illinois and elsewhere. In
each case, federal labor rulings always favored the UMW over the PMA. With
its membership rolls dwindling, the upstart union no longer could challenge
Lewis’ omnipotence. On its face, justice appeared to have been served.
The violence alleged to have been perpetrated by the PMA had been punished
by the rule of law. A photograph in the Illinois
State Journal, which appeared the day after
the verdict, shows the prosecution team smiling, as they read all about
their victory in an extra edition of the same newspaper. In the photo, lead
prosecutor Hopkins is resting his arm on the shoulder of George A. Stevens,
the FBI agent who investigated the case. To Springfield labor historian Carl Oblinger, the
outcome of the trial was as staged as the photograph. “It was a
charade,” he says. “There was nothing connecting the PMA guys
to conspiracy.” On the contrary, Oblinger says, a conspiracy was
perpetrated against the PMA. The historian bases his opinion on FBI memos sent to
the attorney general prior to the grand-jury investigation in the fall of
1936. He discovered the documents recently while conducting research at the
National Archives, in College Park, Md. Oblinger, who headed the
oral-history project at Sangamon State 20 years ago, is the author of the
1991 book Divided Kingdom: Work, Community, and
the Mining Wars in the Central Illinois Coal Fields During the Great
Depression, reissued by the Illinois
Historical Society three years ago. Since then Oblinger has continued to
sift through historical records to better understand the events that
culminated in the trial. “The United Mine Workers, Peabody Coal, and the
federal government — through the FBI — had this already taken
care of before the trial began,” Oblinger says. “The most
obvious collusion was allowing the UMW goons into the grand-jury room. . .
. The witnesses were specifically picked by the UMW and brought to the
grand-jury room for dramatic but not substantive value. They were
actors.”
If the story of the Illinois mining wars ever hit the
big screen, the opening scenes might take place in the Taylorville law
office of Reese & Reese, where Daniel G. Reese, the firm’s senior
partner, shares cramped quarters with son Lindsey.
One afternoon last month, the 79-year-old former
mayor of the town sat behind his cluttered desk and reminisced about one of
his earliest childhood memories: the repeated bombing of his parents’
home in 1933. “Oh yeah, I remember all of it,” Reese
says. “I was about 5 years old. In fact, I was in the house when they
bombed it both times. They bombed the garage and blew up the car. They also
bombed the front porch. . . . ” Reese recalls talking to the National
Guardsmen who patrolled around his house after the explosions occurred. He
also remembers seeing the roadblocks set up by the state militia on the
edge of town. He recalls listening to radio broadcasts that reported
shootings on the streets of Taylorville related to the labor conflict.
Reese remembers the taunts of schoolmates, too. More than 70 years later, the elderly attorney still
isn’t sure whom to blame for the bombings that rocked his childhood
residence at 120 N. Madison St., but he is quite clear about who
wasn’t responsible. “Obviously they didn’t represent the
Progressive Mine workers,” he says. It’s a reasonable deduction. His father, Leal
Reese, also an attorney, represented the PMA in 1933. Reese downplays the bombings, saying that he believes
that they were only meant to send his father a message, not to kill or
maim. He tends to blame the violence of the era more on human nature than
on anything else. In hindsight, Reese says, the idea of two labor
unions’ fighting each other makes no more sense than religious
warfare. Besides, it all happened so long ago. The rancor of those bygone
days has vanished and been forgotten, Reese says. Those who were involved
are all dead. It is as if time has served as an anodyne. And then a name
pops into the conservation that jars his memory. “That’s it — Argust! Everybody has
always told me that if it hadn’t had been for Argust we
wouldn’t have had this darn fight,” Reese says.
“Everybody says he was at fault.” He is referring to the late
Ward C. Argust, Peabody Coal’s division superintendent in
Taylorville. From 1922 to 1937, Argust oversaw the coal
company’s Midland tract, which included four mines in Christian
County. The mine superintendent also took part in the contentious contract
negotiations with the UMW in 1932. Illinois miners went on strike April 1
of that year over wage and manpower issues. The union wanted a reduction in
weekly work hours to stave off job losses resulting from mechanization. The
coal operators rejected that proposal and additionally sought to slash
wages from $6.10 to $5 a day, though the miners had accepted a substantial
wage cut two years earlier. With the bargaining at an impasse, UMW District
12 leadership reluctantly requested that Lewis intercede. Asking for his
help was an extraordinary concession in itself because union miners in
Illinois had long valued their autonomy and resented the international
president’s heavy-handedness. In July, Lewis pushed for acceptance of the coal
operators’ latest proposal, which varied little from the original
offer. Illinois miners again turned down the contract. Lewis immediately
called for another vote on what was essentially the same package in early
August — but before the ballots could be tallied they were stolen off
the street in Springfield. Lewis then declared an emergency and signed the
contested contract without the consent of the rank and file. All hell broke loose. Union miners rebelled. Mass demonstrations erupted in
mining towns throughout central and southern Illinois. In late August,
thousands of unarmed miners set out from Gillespie to rally support in
southern Illinois. Their caravan was ambushed near Mulkeytown, in Franklin
County. Several miners were wounded by sniper fire. Rather than quell the
dissent, the surprise attack spurred further militancy. On Sept. 1, 1932,
272 delegates — representing more than 30,000 miners in the state
— convened at the Colonial Theater in Gillespie and voted to break
with the UMW and form the Progressive Miners of America. In Taylorville, Argust watched the unrest escalate,
and 12,000 striking miners converged on the city on Aug. 18. To his
chagrin, the mass picketing temporarily shut down production in
Peabody’s profitable Midland tract, including Mine No. 58. In his
later testimony, Argust identified several of the defendants in the PMA
bombing trial as leaders of the protest that continued for days:
“They blocked all the roads. I saw the mob that marched in. I saw the
picket lines. I saw men in the park, on the public square in Kincaid, and
along the highways and roads leading to the mine properties. On many
occasions, men were around my house yelling.”
Argust’s hired thugs would soon strike back
with more than words. Today the land above the abandoned Mine No. 58, on
the outskirts of Taylorville, is the site of Midwest Recycling, a scrap
yard that harbors everything from an airplane fuselage to mangled bicycle
frames and trashed computer monitors. The tipple is long gone, the
mineshaft covered over. Vestiges of the old railroad tracks are barely
visible in a path now traveled by salvagers driving pickup trucks and
tractors. A junkyard dog eyes visitors warily as they walk by a couple of
old brick buildings that were part of the original mining operation. Inside
one of the structures is a tag board that hundreds of coal miners once used
to keep track of who was working underground. The boards doubled as places
for miners to keep their pistols during working hours. The sidearms that coal miners toted around for
self-protection back in those days, however, were peashooters compared to
the arsenal that Argust kept in the supervisors’ washhouse at Mine
No. 58. Vernon Vickery worked at the washhouse from November
1932 until April 1935, according to testimony he gave on behalf of the
defense in the bombing trial. Under questioning by chief defense counsel
A.M. Fitzgerald, Vickery explained that he took orders directly from
Argust. “We used the washhouse to store dynamite, arms,
ammunition, and machine guns,” Vickery told the court. The witness
said that he and the mine superintendent had exclusive access to the
weapons cache and that he was instructed by Argust to distribute the
dynamite “only to those that I knew as okay, which consisted of his
regular bomb squad.”
Like Vickery, the “bomb squad” members
were ex-convicts who had in many cases gained early release from prison
through the intervention of Peabody officials. Vickery further testified
that Peabody employed out-of-state strikebreakers, paid informants to spy
on PMA activities, and bankrolled armed goons, including himself, to beat
up striking miners. Vickery also said that Argust took over the Christian
County Sheriff’s Department, hiring and deputizing between 100 to 150
men, who were paid for their services by Peabody Coal. Vickery claimed that Argust ordered the bomb squad to
target private residences, a Baptist church, and Tango Joe’s, a Taylorville saloon
frequented by strikers. He cited other instances in which the bomb squad
intentionally destroyed company property to give the appearance that the
acts of violence were carried out by the PMA. He indicated, for example, that the bombings of the Daily Breeze newspaper office
and UMW office in Taylorville on Sept. 18, 1932, were carried out under
Argust’s direction to force the Illinois governor to call out the
National Guard to help break the strike. Vickery identified the bomber of
the newspaper and union headquarters as Merle Cottom.
In prior testimony, Argust had denied many of these
same accusations — but he did admit under oath to employing as many
as eight “undercover men,” including Cottom. Two of
Argust’s paid informants ended up defendants in the bombing trial.
One of them, John “Jack” Stanley, the president of the PMA’s Taylorville local, had his
own house bombed twice. Vickery testified that on July 23, 1933, he
distributed dynamite to four members of the bomb squad. One bomb exploded
later that night at Peabody Mine No. 7, near Kincaid, he said. Another
explosion, on the same night, damaged the Stanley residence in Taylorville.
Stanley’s bodyguard sustained gunshot wounds in the attack. Stanley
and his bodyguard sued Peabody Coal and two of the bomb-squad thugs.
Stanley testified that he and his bodyguard received out-of-court
settlements from the company after discussions with Argust. The defense
established that the Christian County state’s attorney and his law
partner, who represented Peabody, negotiated the settlement. Outstanding
criminal charges against the alleged bombers were then reduced to
misdemeanors, and one of the men was later issued a UMW union card and
given a job at a Peabody mine in the area. To refute Vickery’s testimony, the prosecution
called on his parents, who described their son as delusional and
untrustworthy. Nonetheless, the prosecution never charged him with perjury.
As for Argust, he fell ill shortly after appearing as a prosecution
witness, which prevented the defense from recalling him. He died in a
Chicago hospital on the last day of the trial.
In the final weeks of the trial, one defendant after
another took the stand and denied the charges. One of the accused, Edris
Mabie, couldn’t speak for himself because he had been shot and killed
in front of the PMA union hall in downtown Springfield on Easter Sunday
1935. Springfield police arrested UMW district president Ray Edmundson and
Fred Thomasson, a former member of Charlie Birger’s gang, for the
murder — but the case was dropped for unknown reasons. Throughout the trial, Fitzgerald, the chief defense
attorney, charged that his clients were the victims of a frame-up. In his
closing arguments, he questioned at length the relationship among Stevens,
the FBI’s lead investigator, and members of the UMW in putting
together the case that led to the indictments. The questions he raised are
the same as those asked now by Oblinger, the labor historian. “If you put all of this together, including
court transcriptions and the depositions, the FBI reports . . . the archive
materials that are connected to this stuff — this [becomes] a larger
conspiracy,” Oblinger says. “It’s not a conspiracy,
really, of backroom secret deals. This is pretty public stuff. A lot of
people knew this. They’re all dead now.”
One of those people, says Oblinger, was his father,
Walter L. Oblinger, who served as an FBI agent in Springfield in the 1940s.
Shortly before he died, the former G-man made a confession to his son. The
labor historian says his father told him this:
“There was collusion in this case, beginning in
1933, between the owners, John L. [Lewis] and the federal government. The
mine owners and the UMW were fighting an economic battle with the PMA in
Illinois to determine who would control the pace of mechanization, the
means of production, and representation of the miners. That’s where
we [the FBI] came in. In 1935, ’36, and ’37, we sabotaged the
PMA with UMW money and muscle, a fixed jury, and a trial based on perjured
testimony, stool pigeons, and intimidation. They [the PMA] didn’t
have a chance. . . . ”
On two flanks of the Mother Jones monument in Mount
Olive are bronze plaques listing the names of 21 PMA members who died
during the mining wars. PMA attorney Fitzgerald asked that those names be
read into the court record on the first day of defense testimony. Among the
martyrs was Fred D. Gramlich, who was shot with a high-powered rifle
through the window of his Springfield tavern on the night of May 27, 1936.
His son Arthur “Art” Gramlich, who was wounded a year earlier
in the Easter Sunday shooting, was named lead defendant in the bombing
trial. In 1972, the younger Gramlich, by then 68 years old,
agreed to be interviewed as a part of the oral-history project at Sangamon
State. The interview took place at his daughter’s dining-room table.
Kitchen clatter can be heard in the background. Gramlich displayed tattoos
on both arms and on the knuckles of his gnarled hands. He had only partial
use of his left forearm as a result of a gunshot wound he sustained decades
earlier. According to the handwritten notes of the interviewer, Gramlich
wanted immediate assurance from him that he wasn’t a FBI agent. After
being convinced, Gramlich chained-smoked for nearly two hours as he
recounted his life. Toward the end of the interview, Gramlich said that
in late 1936 — only months after his father’s violent death
— an FBI agent offered him a $10,000 bribe to implicate his fellow
PMA members in the bombing campaign.
“I couldn’t have hated him any worse
right then,” said Gramlich. “I said, ‘You goddamn son of
a bitch, why don’t you go look and try to find who blowed my old
man’s heart out? He’s dead, but your goddamn stinking railroads
and your mail ain’t dead. I don’t know nothing about it . . .
and you ain’t going to find anything about it.’ ”
According to Gramlich, the agent replied:
“ ‘Well, just the same, we’ll have your ass before
it’s over.’ ”
C.D. Stelzer is a former staff writer for the Riverfront Times, in St. Louis,
and a regular contributor to Illinois Times. His story about Illinois Audubon’s acquisition of
the Lusk Creek Wilderness was published on May 31.
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2007.
