The Hanged Prussian

[porphyry]

On April 3 of 1918, Robert Prager, an American citizen of German origin, denied work as a coal miner in Maryville, Illinois because the other miners thought he looked like a spy, spoke out at a socialist meeting against Woodrow Wilson. The next day he was kidnapped by a mob from his house at 208 Vandalia Avenue in Collinsville, wrapped in an American Flag, made to kiss it, and to run up and down the street waving two hand-held flags. He was taken into protective custody by the police. The next day there was a demosntration against him in front of the City Hall in Collinsville, and the mayor ordered all the saloons closed to calm things down. Hundreds of people who had never heard of him in this way came to learn of him and hate him at once. That evening a mob of between 300 and 400 people broke into the city hall, and marched Prager out to Mauer Heights on the St. Louis Road and hung him from a tree.

This act caused a sensation and was widely reported. Here are some contemporary newspaper reports:

http://web.viu.ca/davies/H324War/Prager.lynching.1918.htm

I had never heard of this incident, but ran across it by accident looking around the web for Ponsonby's book on WWI propaganda. The strange thing is that the street we just moved onto is known as the Mauer Heights neighborhood. So he was hung on the corner one block from where I am sitting to type this. I would say that the tree was long ago cut down.

Comments

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Apart from its horrific content, the other shocking thing is that I actually knew something you didn't!

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Though, mind you, at the start of Wilson's Red Scare there was something real to fear. Did you know that German Imperial agents actually carried out terrorist acts to sabotage American arms production destined for the Western Allies before America's declaration of war? And that they did recruit agents from among the locals to execute these attacks, including American Irish IRA sympathizers, and pro-German German-Americans? So it was not objectionable that Wilson took actions to prevent enemy infiltration -- in fact, such was his Constitutional duty as President.

What was more than a little crazy -- and oppressive -- was the way in which Wilson defined the "enemy" (anyone who opposed the war for whatever reason), the unconstitutional and successful attempts at prosecuting mere "sedition," and (most directly relevant to the lynching of Prager) the deputization of thousands of unqualified people to search out treason, and the tolerance of private illegal acts against persons suspected of treason.

If Prager really HAD been a German spy, the last thing that the US Government should have wanted would have been to lynch him, as spies often have useful information. Of course, Prager wasn't.

Wilson may have been prejudiced in favor of lynchings in the first place, given his political sympathies regarding the Ku Klux Klan, and the importance of the Southern Democracy in the national party of the time. That's also part of the context.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

This is a good example of how Wilson's Red Scare was far, far worse than anything that happened in the so-called "McCarthy Era." But of course, the Hollywood Blacklist affected celebrities, and it's far worse for an important person to have his career derailed than for a nobody to get murdered ...

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

You mean celebrities like Oppenheimer?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Robert Oppenheimer actually DID pass atomic secrets to the Russians, so the revocation of his security clearance and his summons to testify before the HUAAC was hardly unreasonable. He was not subjected to any actual legal penalties as far as I remember. This is in sharp contrast to what happened to people suspected of far less serious activities during Wilson's Red Scare: there were arrests, beatings, prison sentences and deportations, all under the color of Federal authority.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

You recall incorrectly. Oppenheimer never passed anything onto the Russians. He was attacked because he had wanted to turn nuclear weapons over to the UN (Truman's original policy) and because he opposed the development of the H-bomb on the grounds that it was completely useless.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

You recall incorrectly. Oppenheimer never passed anything onto the Russians. He was attacked because he had wanted to turn nuclear weapons over to the UN (Truman's original policy) and because he opposed the development of the H-bomb on the grounds that it was completely useless.

From "Treason Still Shadows J. R. Oppenheimer," by Nigel West in Insight on the News: (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_38_18/ai_93457400/).

In 1994, former Soviet General Pavel Sudoplatov published his memoirs, Special Tasks, in which he stated that Robert Oppenheimr had conspired with Fermi and Szilard to pass atomic secrets to the Russians. He also claimed that there had been numerous other traitors in the Manhattan Project, aside from the well-known treason of Klaus Fuchs.

Until Sudoplatov alleged Oppie had been an active spy who helped place others inside the U.S. secret wartime Manhattan Project that produced the atom bomb, the controversy had lapsed into speculation. But had Sudoplatov engaged in mischiefmaking, or perhaps been encouraged to embroider his recollections? As the debate continued, respected historian Allen Weinstein turned up a document in Moscow that looked like a smoking gun and included it in The Haunted Wood, his account of Soviet espionage in the United States. The memorandum, dated February 1944 and addressed to Josef Stalin's intelligence chief, Vselovod Merkulov, identified Oppenheimer by the code name "Chester" and explained that he had been a secret member of the CPUSA who had been cultivated by the Soviet military-intelligence service (GRU) since June 1942.

This confirmed that Oppenheimer had been a member of a secret Communist Party USA cell.

It is in this atmosphere of denunciation and counteraccusation that the Schecters have turned up another smoking gun, and reproduced it in Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History. This time it is a five-paragraph memo from Merkulov to Lavrenti Beria, dated Oct. 2, 1944, on "the state of work on the problem of uranium and its development abroad using the contacts of Comrade Zarubin and Kheiffets." It confirmed that in 1942 Oppenheimer, as an unlisted member of the Communist Party, "informed us about the beginning of work" on a U.S. atomic bomb and then "he provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources, including a relative of Comrade Browder."

That is a fairly decisive statement: it shows that Oppenheimer did pass secrets to Soviet spies.

I could find you more on this: generally speaking, my experience has been that every historical text, post-1994 (availability of Venona Intercepts and Soviet-era documents), which has gone into the subject in detail confirms Oppenheimer as a traitor. The sources that don't simply repeat in a sort of "we all know better" fashion the claim that Oppenheimer was the victim of a "witch hunt," but never directly address the evidence to the contrary. Thus, it would be unreasonable for me to assume that Oppenheimer's reputation has somehow been cleared, a room full of people going "la la la, I can't hear you" does not constitute exoneration!

I trust that you're acknowledging the larger point, though, that Wilson's Red Scare was far more arbitrary and widespread than the fear of Soviet spies in America in the late 1940's and early 1950's? Wilson empowered civilian deputies to hunt "Reds" and "traitors" and classed everyone from out and out Communists to mere pacifists as being such; in many cases (as referenced in your original post) people who were merely foreign-born, had foreign names, or foreign accents were persecuted including the application of illegal physical force, for no better reason and under color of law. Nothing like that, as far as I know, happened in the late 1940's and early 1950's, and then the Soviet infiltration was real.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

You believe what some retired Russian officer says?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Yes, because it's supported by the Venona Intercepts, and is consistent with Oppenheimer's known political leanings. Eisenhower of course had access to the Intercepts, and perhaps even more evidence than has yet become uncovered by historians, and hence the US government's revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance was a fairly mild and reasonable reaction to his Communist sympathies and probable treason. Oppenheimer was fortunate he didn't do time in prison: the main reason why he (and others like him) were spared was probably to avoid revealing how much of the Soviet secret communications we had been reading.

It's a known historical fact that Eisenhower strove as much as possible to avoid a hysterical reaction to the discovery of Communist penetration of the government under FDR and Truman; in fact, Eisenhower was politically-inimical to some of the anti-Communists, particularly Senator McCarthy. Under neither Truman nor Eisenhower was there any mass deputization of sedition-finders, nor tolerance for illegal private measures against accused traitors.

By contrast, under Wilson there was an active persecution of anyone who was even suspected of opposing American participation either in World War I (after Wilson's declaration of war had changed reality by making being pro-war good, whereas before that declaration Wilson had boasted of America being "too proud to fight") or in the Archangel Expedition against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. People were not only lynched, with no legal consequences to the murderers, but the US Government's own deputies arrested people on the flimsiest grounds, beat confessions out of them, and imprisoned or deported them. (Since in some cases they were being deported to the Soviet Union, this could amount to a death sentence).

Wilson was much more oppressive during and after World War One than were Truman and Eisenhower during and after the Korean War. For that matter, he was much more oppressive than were FDR and Truman, during and after World War II. Wilson was, in many respects, one of the least "liberal" of American Presidents.

Why are you desperately trying to avoid this conclusion?

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Grim stuff.

I can't think of anything witty to say about this.

[vonjunzt.livejournal.com]

A shocking and interesting piece of local history. I would wager you felt learning that much the same way I felt when I learned that every day as I walked to the University of Texas I walked past the site of one of the Servant Girl Annihilator slayings.

One of the book topics I've long toyed with would be a piece called American Massacres. It would be a social history of different massacres around the U.S., explaining how they came about and why the perpetrators often went unpunished. I've thought of including not just Indian massacres but also incidents like Ludlow, Mountain Meadow, Tulsa, and the like. I'll probably never write it, of course, but this sort of incident, though not technically a massacre, would belong in there.

!

[jouis-sens.livejournal.com]

Rarely was an exclamation point ever so entirely warranted. I can't believe you live on the very street. I'm glad you pointed this entry out, I do enjoy coincidences (which have been oddly scarce of late). I'd been working a piece on Wilson's CPI over the summer and there you were, reading Ponsonby. Then the healthcare=socialism=communism=Hitler insanity hit, unexpectedly justifying my endeavor, but ruining my August. America has quite the knack for spoiling my fun.

Re: !

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I was working on an article on a de Maupassant story and drew some comparisons between his dehumanization of the Bosch and Ponsonby's work.

That business you mention didn't surprise me at all. One of my hobbies is laughing at the websites of creationists and anti-vaccinationists, so I was well prepared for the emergence of that group.

Re: !

[jouis-sens.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I imagine we'd get on quite well in the academic dimension. As for the entertaining web presence of the Very Ridiculous People, you might be surprised to learn that not only is the big blue marble God-made, it also apparently does not, in fact, either rotate or revolve. Naturally I was quite relieved to hear it.

http://www.fixedearth.com/