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officially told them that those fellows out at Lester’s mine were to be treated like any other strikebreakers I should say it was about the same as saying, ‘Hike out there to the mine and clean ’em out.’ I don’t believe that John Lewis gave the matter enough thought, or may be he didn’t know how bad conditions were down here.”

III
MASSACRE: THE AFTERMATH
    June 1922–October 1922

    Where whole communities openly sympathize with ruthless murder of inoffensive people in the exercise of the right to earn a livelihood, and where wholesale murder goes unpunished, it is imperative that public opinion should demand that the strong arm of the law, under fearless officials, take positive action.
General John J. Pershing, July 4, 1922.
    N O EPISODE in the history of American industrial warfare has ever shocked public opinion more violently than the Herrin Massacre. In country weeklies as well as metropolitan dailies, in papers all the way from Maine to California, editors flayed Herrin, Williamson County, and union labor. The events of June 22, 1922, constituted “the most brutal and horrifying crime that has ever stained the garments of organized labor”; the massacre was “hideous,” an “archdeed of savagery,” a succession of “bestial horrors”; those who took part in it were “unspeakable moral Turks.” “In justice Herrin, Illinois, should be ostracized,” wrote the editor of the
Journal
of Augusta, Maine, in a denunciation representative of hundreds, “shut off from all communication with the outside world and [the people] left to soak in the blood they have spilled … until they learn that this affair is everybody’s business.”
    In the Senate of the United States, on June 24, Henry LeeMyers, Democrat, of Montana, read several newspaper accounts of the Williamson County killings and then declared: “German atrocities of the World War horrified this country from one end to the other; but I doubt if any German atrocities were perpetrated … that were more horrible, more shocking, more inexcusable, than the atrocities of which I have just read.…”
    Two days later, in the House of Representatives, Wells Goodykoontz of West Virginia, a Republican, took the floor to say of the massacre: “There were no palliating facts, no mitigating circumstances. No crime ever committed could have been more inhuman or revolting in its nature.…”
    If the people of Williamson County had any hope that such reprobation as this might soon lose its virulence, that hope was shattered by the coroner’s jury. After deliberating for a few hours the six jurors, three of whom were union miners, found that all the men killed on June 21 and June 22 except one—Jordie Henderson, a union miner whose death was attributed to Lester’s superintendent—were killed by unknown parties. They also found “that the deaths of the decedents were due to the acts direct and indirect of the officials of the Southern Illinois Coal Company,” and recommended that an investigation be undertaken to fix the blame upon those officers.
    The verdict started a new wave of denunciation. Again Senator Myers took the floor, this time to refer to the Herrin killings as “anarchy pure and simple, ruthless defiance of the Federal government and State government … defiance of all constituted law and authority.…
    “What is worse,” he concluded, “than the commission of the crime itself is the fact that the united populace of the county where it occurred appears to approve of it. The populace of Williamson County, Illinois, appears to be unitedly and one hundred per cent disloyal to the United States and its Constitution.”
    Newspapers, equally bitter, saw similar significance in the finding of the coroner’s jury. The people of Williamson County, the
Chicago Tribune
asserted,
    have recognized the conventions by holding an inquest and returning a verdict. Apparently that will be satisfactory to them. The fact that there has not been