Prager, Robert Paul b. 1886 (?); Dresden (?), Saxony d.April 4-5, 1918; Collinsville, Illinois
In an extreme instance of violence directed against German Americans during World War I, a lynch mob murdered a German American worker, Robert Prager, in Collinsville, Illinois, during the night of April 4 and 5, 1918.
Prager’s death occurred amid chauvinistic propaganda campaigns by federal and local officials, as well as the activities of vigilantes against Germans, Socialists, pacifists, and other opponents of the war. Immediately prior to Prager’s death, Congress was debating measures to stiffen the Espionage Act of 1917; soon after his death the Sedition Act of 1918 was passed. Although contemplated before the murder, the decision to dissolve the major German ethnic organization in the United States, the National German-American Alliance (NGAA), was formally taken at a meeting in Philadelphia a week after the lynching.Little is known about Prager, and the circumstances of his murder have never been adequately investigated. Prager was born in 1886, probably in Dresden. Immigrating in 1905 at age nineteen, he worked at numerous jobs until he was arrested on charges of a minor theft in Indiana in 1912. Paroled in 1914, after serving a year in the reformatory, he found employment as a baker in the Midwest. In 1918, he attempted to join the miners’ union in southern Illinois in an effort to secure a job in mining. It is unclear whether his rejection by the union was due to his national origins, vociferous socialism, abrasive personality, or all of these factors. Apparently, he spoke critically about President Woodrow Wilson. As a Socialist with a reputation as a radical, Prager was presumably critical also of the German emperor. The president of the miners’ union denounced Prager as a liar and spy. Prager retaliated by posting handbills in Collinsville and nearby Maryville asserting his own patriotism.
On April 4, 1918, Prager was seized by a group of miners in Collinsville and forced to kiss an American flag before he eluded his tormentors.
Recaptured by a mob later the same day, he was rescued by the local police and placed in jail, ostensibly for his own safety. Late in the evening a crowd abducted him again and took him out of town. The Collinsville authorities made no attempt at rescue this time. Members of the lynch mob questioned Prager for some minutes about accusations that he was a spy and planned to blow up a mine. Late at night he was strung up with a rope on an elm tree and strangled to death. At some point in this gruesome process, he was permitted to write to his parents in Dresden. The social composition of the actual lynch mob remains in doubt. It has been asserted that the participants were all young men of draft age. Were they, like the first crowd that attacked Prager that fateful day, miners?Despite wartime hysteria in the United States, reckless charges of disloyalty against German Americans, and many, mostly patently false, accusations of espionage and sabotage executed by radicals and Germans, the English-language press and most public figures condemned the lynching. Yet it was symptomatic of the era that the condemnation was far from universal, and often ambiguous. Ironically, Prager himself may have been among the superpatriots of the era. After his death a St. Louis baker recounted that he himself had been a victim of Prager’s patriotism. The baker had spent thirty-two days in jail for objecting to Prager’s display of the Stars and Stripes. Prager’s attempt to join the navy in 1917 (rejected because he had a glass eye) and other information suggesting his loyalty to America received only limited public circulation. Despite the efforts of a fair-minded trial judge, the jury acquitted all eleven of the men indicted for his murder.
Walter Struve
See also Espionage and Sedition Act; Illinois;
World War I and German Americans
References and Further Reading
Hickey, Donald R. “The Prager Affair: A Study in Wartime Hysteria.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 62 (1969): 117-134.
Luebke, Frederick G. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1974.
Peterson, Horace C., and Gilbert C. Fite.
Opponents of War, 1917—1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1957.