Today marks the centennial of the lynching of Robert Prager, a German immigrant murdered in Collinsville, Illinois, by a drunken mob who believed, falsely, that he was a German spy. Prager’s lynching was the high-water mark of the anti-immigrant and anti-German hysteria that gripped the nation during World War I. A century later, Prager’s brief life and tragic death remind us of the complex hatreds unleashed by World War I. As the nation commemorates the Great War’s achievements during this year’s centennial, the war’s dark domestic consequences deserve remembrance as well. Prager’s lynching is a sobering reminder of how quickly the tensions of immigration, ethnicity, and nationalism can slide into mob rule and murder.
Born in Dresden in 1888, Robert Prager immigrated to the United States at age seventeen. He was a drifter, moving often in search of work. He spent a year in an Indiana prison for theft. By 1917, he was living in St. Louis, likely drawn by the city’s booming, sooty industry and large German-American population.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Prager sought a job in a southern Illinois coal mine. Production was expanding to meet wartime demand and wages were high. An unsubstantiated rumor spread among fellow miners that Prager was a German spy who planned to blow up the mine. Except for his German accent, there was no reason to suspect Prager of disloyalty. Yet in an atmosphere rife with labor conflict and suspicion of immigrants, even a rumor of disloyalty could spur vigilantes into action. Superpatriots forced Prager to kiss the American flag to show his loyalty, a common practice during the war. They warned him to leave town to avoid further harm. He refused. Either due to stubbornness, or a simple desire for fair treatment, or the need for a decent paycheck, Prager printed an appeal to fellow miners and posted it near the mine.
Inflamed by the German immigrant’s actions, a group of miners roused Prager from his boarding house on the evening of April 4 and ordered him to leave town. Prager agreed. But once he was out of his room, the mob draped him in an American flag and paraded him down the town’s Main Street. Such patriotic harassment was common during the war and city officials ignored it at first. As the crowd grew, police took Prager to jail for his own protection. But the flag-waving mob stormed the jail and removed Prager while police looked the other way. The mob marched Prager to the river bluff overlooking St. Louis, beating him and forcing him to sing the Star Spangled Banner repeatedly.
At the river bluff, the mob sent a car to find tar so Prager could be tarred and feathered, another common punishment for those suspected of wartime disloyalty. When the car returned without tar, the mob decided to lynch Prager with a towing rope. The noose was placed around Prager’s neck and the men hoisted him from the limb of a large hackberry tree. They forgot to tie Prager’s hands, however, and he pulled himself up. The men lowered him to the ground and allowed him to write a letter to his family in Germany. In German, Prager wrote, “Dear Parents, I must this fourth day of April, 1918, die. Please pray for me, my dear parents.” After praying in German, Prager calmly returned to the hanging tree, men placed the noose again around his neck, and the mob murdered him just after midnight, in the first few minutes of April 5.
Eleven men were put on trial for Prager’s murder. Anti-immigrant rhetoric permeated the trial and few witnesses were willing to speak candidly for fear of appearing disloyal. Lawyers for the defendants argued the killing was justified as a “patriotic murder.” The jury deliberated for only ten minutes before returning a not guilty verdict. Meanwhile, a band in the courthouse played patriotic songs.
Although Prager’s lynching was especially tragic, Prager was only one of many Germans caught up in the wave of vigilantism that swept the nation during the war. Bands of superpatriots enforced 100 percent Americanism by assaulting immigrants, firing them from their jobs, and forcing them to display their loyalty at gunpoint.
Prager’s lynching was forgotten, perhaps intentionally, in the years after 1918, when Americans threw themselves into the Roaring Twenties. Many in Collinsville hesitated to talk openly about the lynching in later years since members of the lynch mob became prominent citizens. Few Americans wanted to remember the vicious treatment of immigrants during the war years.
One hundred years ago today, Robert Prager was tortured and murdered because of his accent. While the United States is not involved in a war on the scale of World War I, it is not difficult to see echoes of 1918 in today’s sharpening polarization, rising anti-immigrant rhetoric, and a general coarsening of our political culture. During World War I, Americans learned “to strike down the thing they hated; not to argue or hesitate, but to strike,” one historian wrote. Today, as our president calls on supporters to “knock the crap out of” critics, online commenters demand swift, violent action against protesters, and partisans on all sides call for action, not deliberation, we again feel the pull toward a culture of retribution and vigilantism. On the centennial of Prager’s lynching by a mob in middle America, we would be wise to reflect on our history.