Karl Monroe Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

University of Illinois at Springfield
Norris L. Brookens Library
Archives/Special Collections
Karl Monroe Memoir
M757. Monroe, Karl
Interview and memoir
1 tape, 80 mins., 22 pp.
Monroe discusses Collinsville, Illinois history including a WWI lynching, gangsters and
bootlegging, Cahokia Mounds, and politics.
Interview by Gerald Veach, 1973
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University of Illinois at Springfield
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© 1973, University of Illinois Board of Trustees

Preface
This manuscript is the product of a tape recorded interview conducted by
Gerald Veach for the Oral History Office on February 11, 1973. Linda
Jett transcribed the tape and Chester Rhodes edited the transcript. Mr.
Monroe reviewed the transcript.
In this interview, Karl Monroe discusses some of the highlights of Collinsville
history. Included are a lynching in the World War I period, Ku Klux Klan
acitvities, gangsters and bootlegging, Cahokia Mounds, and many, many
other subjects.
Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that it is a
transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, narrator and
editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is
inherent in such historical sources. Sangarnon State University is not
responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for views
expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge.
The manuscript may be read, quoted and cited freely. It may not be
reproduced in whole or in part by any means, electronic or mechanical,
without permission in writing from the Oral History Office, Sangamon
State University, Springfield, Illinois, 62708.

Karl Monroe, Collinsville, Illinois, February 11, 1973.
Gerald Veach, Interviewer.
Q: We're going to discuss some of the highlights of history in Collinsville
including a lynching in the World War I period and some other material in
connection with the Klu Klux Klan and other interesting events. Karl,
would you tell me about the lynching back in World War I, as much as you
can remember?
A: Well. if I remembered it I'd be older than both of us. I've done a
lot of research on it in the Collinsville ~erald's file and I've discussed
it with some people - - who lived at that time. Simply, what happened was
that an ignorant German born coal miner named ~obert Paul Wager--and
this was one of the first mistakes in the whole thing, his name should
have been pronounced Prauger but everybody called him Prager--came to
Collinsville I think from Dakota and sought a job in the coal mines. He
got a job in Maryville at the mine there and shortly thereafter had some
trouble with the mine union up there about his qualifications as a miner.
Apparently they didn't think he was capable or knew all he should know to
be working underground with them. The framework of this situation was,
going all the way back to 1914--and I did a study on this one time for
the Madison County Historical Society--there was a long succession of
events which piled on top of each other to create an atmosphere of suspicion
and almost hysteria, where good people who meant well were very fearful
of spies and very conscious of their obligation to be super patriotic
Americans and this created an atmosphere in which this broken speaking
person who didn't really talk much English at all was in conflict with
the union there and somehow antagonized a lot of people. He lived in
Collinsville across from the Catholic church on Vandalia Street.
A week before the incident, a prominent lawyer named Tom Williamson, who
showed up later as an attorney in defending the lynch mob, came to Collinsville
and made a flamboyant speech about patriotism and so forth and a council
whose title I forget was formed to form block committees to monitor the
behavior of people. The superintendent of schools in Collinsville,
Charles Doris, was the president of the Collinsville organization. They
thought they were doing a good thing I guess.
Well, at any rate, this was the emotional framework in which this thing
started. It was a, I don't know whether it was a weekend or not, at any
rate, it was in the evening. And somehow or another some men uptown got
the idea that they should get this person that they suspected and make
him prove he was an all American fellow. They paraded him a little bit,
they made him kiss the flag, and a motorcycle policeman and some others
decided that that wasn't so good and they took him to the city jail and
they put him aver there for protection.

Karl Monroe 2
The mayor, a man named Siegel, became nervous about this. They decided
they'd better hide him in the basement where big tiles for the city sewer
system were stored. And he hid in one of the tiles.
Meantime, the mayor being nervous, thought the great thing to do was to
shut down the saloons so the people wouldn't get drunk. Well, they were
already drunk. What he did was drive them out on the street. And they
congregated at the jail. They searched the building. And somebody found
the man in the basement.
Well, they decided they better take him down and tar and feather him. So
they started walking him down toward the west end of town and they sent a
car ahead down to the old trolley storage buildings where the Cahokia
Mounds State Park is now. Well, they had gone down to about a place
called Hard Scrabble which is half way from town to the top of Bluff Hill
when the men came back and reported that they hadn't been able to find
any tar, hadn't been able to get it or something. So there wasn't any
tar to tar and feather him with. So they kept on marching.
Somebody said, "Well we can't tar and feather him, let's hang him." And
with no more trial than that, they took him to a huge tree on the top of
Bluff Hill on Route SO, which was Route 11 then, and they strung him up,
He knew he was in danger and he asked them if he could write a little
note. And he did. He wrote a little note in German to his brother in
Germany which was later delivered by somebody in the crowd to my father
at the newspaper. And it was just a kind of personal thing stating that
he knew he was going to be killed. And I can't remember the details. It
was a rather touching little note, last words.
The crowd numbered I guess several hundred by this time including some
people who were along as, feeling they were in the role as observers
rather than members of the mob. My father was one of them. Publisher of
the newspaper. Another one was the president of the school board, a
German speaking druggist named Eckert. Both of them later on testified
in the trial.
The man was strung up and let down again and the crowd dispersed. The
next, either that night or the next night--the times I'm a little bit
confused on because I wasn't around at that time--my father was working
at the office and a man by the name of Roy Riegels walked in with Prager's
note. He had been in the mob. It apparently was bothering his conscious.
Well, there was a coroner's inquest which my father managed to get more
of than he was supposed to by drilling a hole in the ceiling of the place
and listening in. And Paul Y. Anderson, who later on got a Pultzer Prize
as a Post Dispatch reporter, came out. This was his first big story.
The incident got international attention. The Kaiser made a statement
about it. The Secretary of State had a formal cabinet meeting called
about it. There was a congressional investigation started which never
got anywhere. But the word of it went all over the world and it set
Collinsville back about twenty years in its progress, I think. We got
the reputation of being the only town in the whole United States where an
alleged spy was lynched.

Karl Monroe 3
Subsequently thirteen people were arrested, were indicted. One of them
never was found. Twelve were tried in a weird trial in which hundreds of
jurors were called. The sheriff was removed from his duty of obtaining
jurors and a substitute was appointed to get the jurors. It was a flamboyant,
emotion charged trial which concluded with this Tom Williamson pointing
at my father and Paul Anderson saying, "Let the minions of the Kaiser go
back to Germany and tell him that in America the flag still waves." And
the band struck up down below on the street. And they started parading
around the place. And the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty.
Subsequently, a number of these people came to rather bad ends. One of
them killed himself. None of them prospered except one mildly. And it
seems to have preyed on the minds of some of them. The men that were
indicted were probably no more guilty than a bunch of other people,
except perhaps Riegels, who admitted that he had kind of a part in putting
the rope around the man's neck or something like that. It was a terrible,
tragic incident. When the tree, which was a beautiful big tree, was cut
down about six or seven years ago, I ran a story about the hanging tree
in Collinsville and that was picked up all over the United States. So
much for that.
Q: Good. Collinsville has had an interesting and active past. Seems to
be the center of a lot of things happening. Could you tell us about this
Ku Klux Klan business? Was it strong down here and what can you tell us
about that?
A: There was quite a bit of that around here. I think there was more of
it probably in East St. Louis. You know East St. Louis had a big race
riot in 1918, a good part of the town was burned down and it's had a
long, long history of race problems and bigotry of various kinds. And in
the twenties I guess it was, mid-twenties probably, when the Ku Klux Klan
got going from down south and moved up north and they seized power,
political power, in Indiana and became rather strong in a number of
places. Became rather strong around here for a short time. There was
one incident in which a group of Ku Klux Klanners got into the Methodist
church during a service and made some speeches. This was published in
the paper.
There was one summer when they were pretty big. They had parades. My
father wrote articles in the newspaper against them and they didn't like
that much and threatened him. But nothing ever happened. They had a
tremendous event down at what's now the Cahokia Mounds State Park. On
one of those small mounds on the south side of Route 40, they set up a
huge cross and during the day they had speeches and big crowds. And my
father took me down there. And I well remember it was one of the few
times I'd ever had hot dogs in those early days, picnic style. They were
selling hot dogs and other refreshments. And this was one of my first
experiences with something like that. I was a small boy.
That night I wasn't there, but I was told that they burned this huge cross
on the mound. And that was sort of the high water mark of the Ku Klux
Klan around here. One of their problems was that they didn't have anything
really to do except get people mad at somebody else. They didn't have
any programs of any kind except hatred. And in Indiana, as I say, they

Karl Monroe 4
got into politics. Here they didn't, or if they tried, they didn't
succeed. And the thing went for I guess two or three years and then
drizzled off to nothing much. So much for that one.
Q: Well there's some other stories about this area that I think are
interesting also. We've come up to around the twenties. Collinsville
has been noted for the center for some of the local gangsters of the
area. And Buster Wortman of course was here and several others. And I
think this will bring us into the twenties and thirties if I'm not mistaken.
I'd like to hear something about that, what you can remember.
A: Well, Collinsville had a large Italian population who had come here
to work in the coal mines. Well, the coal mines died off in the twenties
about the same time prohibition was in power, in effect, and some of
these folks who had normally been raising vineyard on their hillsides
east of town because that was their way of life in Italy, made more of a
business out of it than they had before. And a lot of them went into
making bootleg wine. At the same time a lot of stills were set up by
people trying to make a fast buck bootlegging. There were some fortunes
made, I guess, at it. At least some people made a little money at it.
Bootlegging was illegal of course and the people who were doing it bribed
public officials, they bribed federal prohibition agents, they were
outside the law so that their activities couldn't be protected by the
law. So they became targets for other bootleg type gangsters who hijacked
their trucks and tried to steal their stuff, tried to move in on their
territories. And we had the regular things, like you saw on the Untouchables
in the movies. There were rather a large number of murders and attempted
murders right around Collinsville. We had a feeling that this was kind
of a battle ground for some of these gangs.
It was a curious thing. Although these things went on around you they
didn't really affect the law abiding people. I lived on West Clay Street.
Within four blocks of me were the residences of three different people
who were murdered in gang war activities.
Q: Who were they?
A: One of them was the father of the now retired city librarian, a
fellow named Bowers. Another one was a fellow named Colone. And the
third one was Snipe Maddalino. Snipe was the manager of the Collinsville
Park Ballroom which . . .
Q: Was that his real name, Snipe?
A: I don't know what hie real name was. He was known as Snipe. Lou
Colone, who was a brother of the Colone that was murdered, was a deputy
sheriff. Lou was tending bar at Tony Bonelle's tavern which was across
the side street from what is now the school district office. And a
younger fellow named "~oom'' Ciallala who was the curb service man--had
curb service in those days--went outside to provide curb service for a
car that honked. The people told him to get out of the way and he got
behind a tree and always swore he couldn't recognize any of them. And
they cut down on the place with a machine gun. Well, the bullets hit the
adding machine instead of Lou Colone.

Karl Monroe 5
Well, two, three hours later Lou deputized a bunch of people. They went
down to Snipe Maddelino's house. And he sent the rest of them to the
basement to search for weapons and he walked in the bedroom and shot
Snipe dead. He was acquitted by a jury. He said it was self defense.
The man was in bed with no weapon, but I guess Lou was in mortal fear of
life at that point. He was in mortal fear later because he disappeared
from town for about two years. Subsequently came back and was a deputy
sheriff for many, many years.
These incidents took place around us, but they didn't really affect us.
It was a rather odd thing. I didn't feel like I was in danger of gangsters,
although it turned out that some lived right around me. We have a Collinsville
policeman now whose father is still in the penitentiary because he was
hanging around the garage which rented cars to people in those days. And
some fellows came in to rent a car and then they wanted to hire him to
drive, so he drove. And it turned out they were driving to bump somebody
off. He always claimed he was innocent but he didn't make it stick.
He's in the penitentiary yet.
It was sort of wild times. There were a lot of stills and there were
raids. And you'd walk uptown and see a soft drink parlor, which is what
they called saloons in those days. They weren't suppose to sell hard
liquor and they'd be padlocked by the prohibition people. And there were
numerous places like that uptown.
It was an interesting period. The Fleischman Yeast Company trying to
keep its big yeast stock moving--you can't let the yeast die you know--
went on radio with regular programs in which they touted the medical
benefits of eating chocolate flavored yeast. And I was a believer. I
used to save my pennies and buy my little box of yeast and eat chocolate
yeast which tasted very soapy. The Anheuser-Busch Company got into the
diesel business as Busch-Selzer and they tried in various other ways to
keep their nucleus of manpower and buildings from dying off completely.
And one of the things they manufactured was a bad tasting grape flavor
called Grape Bouquet which they would probably be ashamed to admit they
ever produced in these days. It was a wild time.
Q: What about Buster Wortman? He lived in town here a long time and he
was reportedly leader of the underworld at least. Did you know Buster
Wortman at all personally?
A: I never had any conversation with the man. I knew him by sight. I
always thought he was overrated to tell you the truth. No question he
made some money out of illicit operations. But we had a man in town here
named Young who's dead now who owned practically all the dumps along
Route 40, owned the buildings. And he dealt with people who handled
stolen goods and a lot of things like that. And I always suspected that
he was underrated and Buster was overrated. There wasn't any question
that Buster was one of the guys that had a hand in all sorts of rackets,
labor rackets, slot machines, prostitution, numbers racket, anything that
they could make an illegal buck out of. I don't know that they were ever
into drugs very much, although that was coming about the time he was
losing his grip and finally dying.

Karl Monroe 6
The illicit drug business hadn't reached the atage it's In now when he
was in his heyday around here. He was not a good fellow, 1'm afraid.
There was a fellow by the named Cotton Eppleheimer who--and this goes
back to shortly after World War I1 I guess, because I wasn't too familiar
with all these people. I came back to town and I discovered a whole new
generation of gang wars running. But Cotton wasn't much. He was kind of
a punk who was trying to move ahead or something. At any rate, they
found him dead down at ~uster's house one night under quite mysterious
circumstances.
Buster died a natural death but his bodyguard, if you want to call him
that, glorified bodyguard, Elmer Dowling and a couple of other gangsters
were found murdered.
Q: Was that Dutch Dowling and Me1 Beckman?
A: Yes, right. Wortman built a house over in Morris Hills, pretty fine
place which is now occupied by a former member of the school board who
bought it after Buster moved out. And he spent a lot of money in putting
in trees that were practically grown. You don't buy a big tree very
cheaply but he got them cheaply apparently. And he lived over there for
a time.
Then he built a house out east of town on a lake which had been designed
and started by a local contractor. And to get to it there was a--it was
on kind of a high point of ground and it was almost completely surrounded
by low land. And there was sort of a gully which at times had water in
it that came all the way around and they had to put a bridge over that.
Well this came to be known as the house with a moat. It was publicized
many, many times. It was supposed to be for defense and so forth.
No place in the world that would be less defensible because the man that
holed up in that thing was trapped. He couldn't get out the back side
very easy because there was a lake behind him. But anyway, he really
didn't live there very much from what we could find out. He mostly lived
in East St. Louis with a broad that wasn't his wife. I don't believe he
ever occupied that place very much. It looked like a school, very odd
looking building. Big and very expensive.
He didn't pay the people that built it for him, and some of them sued
him. I don't [know] whether they ever got their money or not. Well he
lived there and he formerly lived in Morris Hills. And about ten blocks
north of there upon another hill was where Dowling built his nice place.
Now he was in a situation where he was sort of back in--he certainly
didn't have people driving by the front of his house every day because he
was out on the top of the hill which could only be approached through the
front yard of one of the other hoodlum type persons named Sam Magin who
was a restaurant operator for all their enterprises. He ran the restaurant
at their gambling place in the bottoms, the old Mounds Club. Be ran
restaurants for them in various places. And he had a house at the end of
the street. And then to get to Dowling's house you had to go through
Magin's yard and around in the back. So I guess maybe he thought he was
safer back there. I wouldn't have felt safer there myself because if
somebody wanted to attack, they could sneak up from the back and nobody
would ever know they were coming. But it was a wild time here, I guess.

Karl Monroe 7
Q: There was one story that always fascinated me. J. 0. Monroe, Sr. who
was your father of course and started the Collinsville Herald, was a
state senator for many years and he went through the prohibition business
and also saw the beginning of racing in Illinois and there was a story
connected with legalizing night racing. I'd like to hear that again.
A: Well it didn't legalize it. Be made it illegal. The horses ran on a
mile track. And they were running illegally to start with. The Fairmount
Race Track was started in 1926 and racing was illegal. And then they
legalized racing and they ran by paying off political officials. They
legalized it within a couple of years. I can't remember exactly when.
With parimutual betting which theoretically was investing in the horse
and so it got around the lottery restrictions in the laws of Illinois.
Well, the horse people in order to be sure that nobody came in with a dog
track got a law passed saying it was illegal to run at night. Well, dog
tracks had been established. At one time there were five around here.
There was the Madison Kennel Club about three miles west of Collinsville,
four miles, couple miles west of Fairmount, which ran illegally. And
there was one over at the end of Chain of Rocks Bridge. There was one
called the Cahokia Track that only ran one day and was shut down by the
politicans over there. And then there was a couple on the Missouri side
of the river running illegally. The horse track people didn't want these
dog tracks running. Well, you can run dogs and the dogs ran at night
because you can run dogs on an eighth of a mile track in those days when
lighting was expensive. It still wasn't too expensive to light an eighth
of a mile track, whereas it was too expensive to light a mile track.
So the horse people got a law passed saying it was illegal to run at
night in order to wipe out the dog tracks. Well, my dad said this was
absurd. If it was legal to have parimutual betting in the daytime it was
just as legal to do it at night. So he borrowed a nag from barber Moore
across the way from us, who had a broken down race horse, and theoretically
ran a race at night in our alley back there. Then this fictious race was
reported to the attorney general. And it went directly into a Supreme
Court as a public policy question case. There was some provision that
you didn't have to go through all the intermediate steps. And the Supreme
Court found that the law was constitutional and found him guilty and gave
him a suspended sentence of two days or something like that. I can't
remember how much. They weren't interested in putting him in jail for
running a fictious race. But it did find the thing constitutional and
subsequently they then legalized night racing. That said it wasn't
legal. So then the legislature next passed a law saying it was legal.
The point was made even though the law had been upheld originally.
Dad had another interesting experience which has a little bearing on
history. He was in the state Senate as chairman of the Revenue Committee
when Henry Horner was governor and Horner was scraping the bottom of the
barrel for money. And he came up with the idea of a sales tax.
Well, the agricultural association was dead set against sales tax. They
didn't want any sales tax, and they were at loggerheads. They just
weren't getting anywhere. And finally the agricultural association chief
representative in the Senate--and I believe his name was Simon Lantz, I'm
not sure of that name--came to dad and said, "Look, the governor needs

Karl Monroe 8
the money and he wants a sales tax and we're against the state property
tax. Do you think he'd guarantee not to have any more state property tax
if we'd go for the sales tax?" Dad said, "Well, I don't know but let's
go find out.'' So they walked down the hall and talked to the governor
and he said yes, he'd go for that. And that's the basis on which we
haven't had any state property tax since the mid-1930s. It was in the
constitution, it was in the law all that time that the governor and the
secretary of state and the treasurer I believe, these three were a state
board which was to set the rate and put it on the books for the state
property tax. And they had had a state property tax for years and years.
And after that we didn't have one and we don't have one to this day and
probably never will have one again.
Q: Well back in the early days of circuses, Collinsville Herald was one
of the printers in this area. Would you relate that story?
A: Well, the way it went was my father came here in 1917 with the idea
of converting the Herald to a daily newspaper. Well, it's not daily to
this day. Instead, in the twenties when business got very bad he conceived
the notion of doing poster printing. And due to the fact that we had two
big Miehle cylinder presses to print the newspaper on--it only ran once a
week--he had a lot of time open on those presses. And they were the kind
of presses that you could print posters on. They were big. So he got
into the poster printing business very big and into the streetcar card
business and bus card business in a big way. And one time the Herald and
Globe Poster were the two biggest poster printing businesses in the
middle west. We used to have type that was five feet high. Take two big
boards, wood cut boards, to make one letter. And we rented three old
buildings to store the standard portions of the circus and stock show and
burlesque show and movie advertising billboard material.
We had three or four Singing Sam From Alabama shows out on the road.
They weren't ours but we were stocking the paper for them. And there
were Uncle Tom shows and Darr-Gray stock shows and Mutt and Jeff and all
sorts of road shows.
And we'd get a wire from Little Rock. Send 25 dates, Oklahoma City,
general delivery. So they'd get out that man's material and they'd get
the right dates that they'd specified and usually they'd specify where
they were going to show, in a tent or someplace like that. And they'd
wrap them in a certain way so they could be put up by the bill posters
and send them off. Well about 1930 the absolute bottom dropped out of
that business. The Depression came along so that people didn't have any
money anyway. And radio came along to pull people's attention away from
that kind of entertainment, And talkie movies came along and the road
show business and the circus business both just fell flat on their face.
And from having a big business, the Collinsville Herald ended up with ten
long years, believe it or not, of losing money. Dad had a lot of insurance
and-he managed to keep the business going by borrowing on his insurance
and borrowing everything he could on his building. And finally about
1940, the daylight could be seen at the other end of the tunnel but it
was a bad time. And it was a rather remarkable thing that all three of
these factors ganged up on this rather thriving business all at one time.

Karl Monroe 9
Q: Collinsville started as a coal mining town and that in itself is an
interesting background of information. Could you talk about the coal
mines?
A: Collinsville had coal mines for almost exactly a hundred years. The
first mine was put in 1859 by Peter and Paul Wonderlay. And in 1869 the
Lumaghi family came and started the biggest mine organization here. And
they were the last. Their last mine, Lumaghi Number 4, closed about
1962. So they had a history of about a hundred years. A big period of
coal mining here of course was World War I. We had about two thousand
coal miners in Collinsville. After the war coal mine business got bad.
They had terrible battles starting about 1926 about union contracts. A
lot of coal mines went broke. The Progressives fought the United Workers
and in Collinsville they won.
An interesting sidelight, the big Miners Temple on Main Street, a big
three story theater building which houses a large theater is now occupied
by the BAC theater chain which would buy the building and really fix it
up nice as a theater, but the problem facing them is that they can't find
out who really owns it.
It was built by the United Mine Workers. The members of the United Mine
Workers who became Progressives took it over. The Progressive Mine
Workers locals gradually merged so that people from the Troy local blended
in to Collinsville local number 3. They finally all sort of half folded
up and now we only have leavings of the old locals. The problem would
arise if they voted to pay the money to the last survivors of the old
locals. Do their widows inherit too and how far back do you go and so
on. It's a real can of worms for a lawyer.
And they've hired a West Virginia lawyer who is an expert supposedly in
sorting out who owns what local to try to figure out who owns that building
so the theater can buy it. That was a couple of years ago and they
haven't succeeded yet.
Well, anyway, the coal mining business dwindled here. The operator owned
mines would fold and then maybe the miners themselves would form a little
co-op and take it over. During the thirties, four little co-op mines
were started along the bluffs. And they survived up--World War I1 picked
them all up. Everybody survived during World War II and after World War
11, rather rapidly the smaller mines folded up and the only one that was
left was Lumaghi Number 4 which was a big modern slope mine. And they
worked that thing out considerable distance from the bottom of the slope
and finally closed up when the belt needed major repairs and they decided
it wasn't worth putting that much more money into the belt because the
mine itself would probably be closed shortly.
Now they had operated on a scientific manner putting money aside for
depletion so that they had cash money ahead. They could have probably
started another mine in coal reserves that they bought farther east of
town but instead of that they simply just decided to quit.
At one time in the old days the small mines were all located along the
Canteen Creek Cut and I've talked to old coal miners that claimed that

Karl Monroe 10
they could start at the old Confidence Mine, which was up east of town
about two and a half miles, and walk underground from one mine to another
almost to Caseyville about four or five miles away. Some of these little
mines were built with inadequate air shafts in the beginning, before they
had good safety regulations, knowing that before too long they'd be into
the next coal mine and they could use the other mine's regular shaft as
their air shaft. And sometimes one mine's hoist wouldn't work and the
fellows would just walk over to the mine next and come on up. At least
this is what they tell me. I think maybe they were pulling my leg a
little bit but I'm not so sure.
These mines here by the way, were all dry. We never had any flooding to
speak of in the Collinsville mines. We had one interesting mine, the old
Brickyard Mine. Hydraulic Press Brick Company, a rather large company in
St. Louis, came out and started mining brick clay in the same shaft in
which they mined the coal that burned the clay. Was a unique mine. I
don't know of any other mine like that any place. They made a very high
quality face brick for skyscrapers and other modern buildings. And their
business sort of dwindled away when poured concrete in steel buildings
took the place of the old steel frame with brick facing on it. One
industry comes along and beats out another one it seems.
Q: While we're talking about Collinsville and the Collinsville area tell
me about Cahokia Mounds.
A: Well, that's a story that's pretty widely known by now. These mounds
are located about three miles west of Collinsville. Route 40 runs right
through Cahokia Mounds State Park with mounds on both sides of it, north
and south. And Route 70 runs north of the north edge of the park but
also between mounds because some of the mounds of that group are on the
north as well as the south side of Route 70.
So it's an easily accessible place and ought to be a tourist attraction
for the entire United States. As a matter of fact, it does draw a lot of
tourists.
Monks Mound itself is known as that because in the early 1800s, a small
group of Trappist monks built their residence on top of it. They must
have been gluttons for punishment because every time they wanted to go
down and farm the fields around there, they had to make a long trip and
then an unbelleveably tedious walk back up. That's a high mound. I
can't remember the height and I should remember those figures. The size
of it makes it the biggest earthen structure in the world outside of the
Ft. Peck Dam. Biggest earthen and manmade structure.
Apparently it was built starting some time before the birth of Christ
until about 1000 A.D. And distinct layers of this thing has been found,
identified by the fact that the soil is different. It's easy to define.
The successive layers were apparently carried in baskets. The archaeologists
have even been able to define sort of basketsize loads--if you can conceive
of that fine of definition--of some thing that's been laying there for a
thousand years buried. And apparently the whole thing was built with
baskets because there's no evidence at all that any of these people had
any knowledge of the wheel.

Karl Monroe 11
American Indians when the explorers arrived in this country, didn't find
anybody using the wheel. So undoubtedly these things were carried in
baskets. And it must have been a phenomenal feat to carry that much.
This mound is built with three terraces and was probably a temple mound.
Temple mounds smaller than this but somewhat similar where actually in
use when the Spanish explorers reached the southern part of this country.
And it's assumed that this was a temple mound. And further identifying
that, the archaeologists in digging have identified postholes or post
locations which define walls and rather intricate set on top of
interconnecting walls which are a little hard to explain. They don't
seem to define rooms, but a lot of walls. These archaeologists have
discovered that these Indians used some sort of a woodhenge arrangement.
They had huge trees which they erected by digging a sloping ditch and
sliding the tree trunk in it until it was positioned so that they could
give it a boost from the small end and raise it erect. We know that this
is the case because one of these was actually dug up by an archaeologist
working . . .
End of Side One, Tape One
A: As I was saying, they found this big log that was actually found was
cypress and there's no cypress now within several hundred miles of this
area. So they assume that it was probably floated up the river someway
or another. It's rather interesting mystery as to how this happened.
A far greater detective story, a real mystery, is the deduction that was
done by Dr. Me1 Fowler who is now with the University of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee, who has worked a number of summers at the mounds. These
mounds all seem to be oriented by the compass someway or another with a
east-west, north-south axis to them. At least it appears that way.
Well, most of these mounds are the temple type mound or they're rather
round conical mounds but there are near the extremities of the group long
rectangular mounds, a couple of them. Low rectangular mounds.
Almost due south of the big mound about close to a mile away is Mound 72
which is one of these rectangular things. And Dr. Me1 Fowler, from what
he had discovered in digging around at these various mounds, deduced that
in the center of this rectangular mound there should be one of these big
postholes where a pole had been erected which was a siting pole which
oriented all the mounds of the whole group in relation to the North Star.
So they went into a dig down there one summer and they dug and they dug
and they didn't find it. It was three or four yards away from where they
were digging. He was close. And just think of this. He had deduced
that a thousand years before, these people wanted to orient those mounds
in relation to where the North Star was and square them off for some
mysterious religious service I suppose. Perhaps to set up relationships
by which they could site the stars and figure out when to plant the crops
or whatever. But at any rate, he had not only figured out that they
wanted to do that but that they had done and that they had put it there.
And that to me is one heck of a detective story.

Karl Monroe 12
Q: Did you know this Me1 Fowler?
A: Yes. He doesn't care for me. I held my pictures of one of his digs
one summer a whole summer because he didn't want them published yet for
fear that the people would come and bother him or maybe disturb his
digging. So I held them all summer and then he published the whole thing
in Wisconsin before I got to do it. And I told him I didn't care for
that. So I don't think he cares for me very much.
They've had a lot of problems with this Mound 72 with guarding it because
it's right next to one of the roads that runs through the park. There's
a loop road that runs south and comes looping around an old, well it
looks like a lake. Actually they think it's the place where they dug up
a Lot of the dirt that was used to build a mound. But at any rate this
road goes right by this mound so that it's kind of an accessible tourist
attraction.
Well, this mound is not only notable for this pole and this detective
story, it's also the place where an Indian chief, say one of these prehistoric
Indian chiefs, was found buried, laid out with his arms out, flat on his
back, on top of a gorgeous, what must have been a gorgeous bird shaped
arrangement of shells. Undoubtedly they were all woven together when
they were put there, some kind of a bird thing. Thousands of these
beautiful shells were in the area with this skeleton laying on top of
them. In the same mound with him, in the same pit with him, were the
jumbled skeletons of 57 maidens from about 17 to 25 years old, a11 female
and just lots of bones. It wasn't a classy bural. Apparently they had
slaughtered them and dumped them in there.
In the same mound they found four well defined, well preserved skeletons
with the head severed and the hands severed and the feet severed. The
heads are there but they're not there with the rest of the skeleton.
They found a number of so called basket burials with the legs and arms
all pulled up under the chin, the knees pulled up to the chin, all bunched
together, which was apparently a method of burial used in a different
period. Maybe these were from a different tribe and they didn't bother
burying them classy. They found one group 05 burials that they suppose
were prisoners in which the knees, the feet, and the elbows had been tied
together. Evidently they tied the elbows behind the skeleton, behind the
body. And I think, as I recall the head was off that one too. Probably
prisoners.
In that same mound they found a collection, apparently a showing of
respect or something, of absolutely gorgeous high quality arrowheads,
thousands of them, of various materials. Some of them obviously brought
from the East Coast, the Gulf, various places because the stone is not
stone that's found around here. Incidentally, there are ample evidence
already dug up of arrowheads and other articles whlch had to come from
far down in the Ozarks, a few copper articles that came from down in the
Ozarks, things that weren't found around here. Well, I've talked too
much about the Indians.
Q: You've been around here all your life and have seen the growth and
development of this area and the decay of some of it. East St. Louis

Karl Monroe 13
very near by, well it's become in this time maybe an eyesore and a great
problem but it reflects some of the problems that all the cities have.
Can you tell me just what you remember about how East St. Louis got into
the shape it did?
A: East St. Louis has always been in the shape it's in. A fellow by the
name of Rudwick who is a historian at Southern Illinois University in
Edwardsville wrote a, Elliott Rudwick wrote an excellent book on the race
riot in East St. Louis in 1917, one of the worst we ever had in this
country. Perhaps not as bad as Watts, but bad. Many people were killed
and they burned out a good part of the town. And he traced the history
of that thing back 50 years before 1917 to corruption, long, long, long
history of shortsighted management by the so-called civic leaders, of
exploitation by the industrialist. They did everything that you shouldn't
do in running a city. The political powers have a long, long history of
corruption and it erupted in 1917 in the race riot.
They had imported these uneducated--of course, this was World SJar I time
and there was a lot of work to be had--lot of people needed things to be
done, and things were moving. And they imported illiterate blacks from
Mississippi and various southern states to do the menial tasks in the
refineries and the stockyards and the various rough dirty industries that
they had in East St. Louis. And the white workers who felt that their
jobs were jeopardized in those days didn't like it, and they were bigoted
and they finally as I say, burned down part of the town and killed a lot
of people in the most brutal way.
[It] was a great asset to the recruiting program at the time though,
because a lot of people who had participated in the riot within a few
days decided they'd better go in the army to get out of town for their
own safety.
Then it didn't change. They've had corrupt government down there for
years. The East Side Levee District is notorious for being political
patronage football. They maintain a fine set of levees--the end product
isn't bad, but the cost is excessive. 1t's just overloaded with graft
and corruption. Had been for years. But at any rate, now they've got
the white people moving out and leaving the town to the blacks. A lot of
the blacks aren't very well educated and some of the others are nouveau
riche if you want to put it that way, on the make. And they're not
helping much as I can see it. It looks to me like things are going to be
a lot worse before they get better down in East St. Louis.
Q: With your dad having been in the legislature, I'm sure he must have
told you some stories about the various governors or other senators. I
wonder if you can remember any of these anecdotes or things he may have
passed on to you.
A: One of the most fantastic stories that you can suppose goes back to
the late Orville Hodge. Orville is dead now, isn't he? ~idn't he die?
Q: I don't know. I don't know if he's dead or not.

Karl Monroe 14
A: Well, at any rate Orville Hodge, of course as a lot of people remember
was the Illinois state auditor who was caught up with and people discovered
that he had stolen maybe a million dollars of the state's money. Orville
had a rather phenomenal success as a politican. He was a back slapping,
well, he was what people expected a politican to be like. He was a back
slapper, he picked up the tab, he spent money pretty freely, he tried to
be friendly to everybody. He was the man of the year in Granite City a
couple of years before he was caught up with in Springfield. It turned
out that he had been picking up the tab with the state's money and had
been on the make every way he could be.
One of the really odd stories about hlm was told to me by a local gambler
who was pretty friendly to me, who used to stop in and chat and so on.
He told me one time that he had a reputation, he never made an awful lot
of money, but he had a reputation among the gamblers and among the people
around the edges of crime of being a straight shooter. They felt like
they could trust him and I trusted him. He wouldn't con you. He'd tell
you the straight dope. And he wouldn't steal your money. He might get
into a gambling game that wasn't legal qrd make some money on you that
way, but it'd be honest.
Q: This was Orville Hodge you're talking about?
A: No, no. This wasn't Orville. This was the fellow I'm talking to.
Well, this man told me one time that they came to him and they wanted
somebody to be the collector from the houses of prostitution on Route 40.
And he said he wasn't about to become involved in messing around with
prostitution. He didn't hold with that. He felt that gambling was a
nice clean business even if it wasn't legal. But prostitution he wanted
no part of. But he said he got a little curious. So he asked these
fellows, "Well, how would you keep books on a house of prostitution? How
could you tell whether they were giving you an honest count?" They said,
"Well, you count the towels," and this turned his stomach. But the thing
that ia amusing about it is that this job he says was the start in the
rise upward for Orville Hodge. And this sort of startled me that he told
me that, and I hope this doesn't get published because I couldn't prove
that. The man's dead now. And I think Orville is too, for that matter.
But it kind of goes to show how somebody can start pretty shady and end
up very high, and it turns out that the shadiness comes right on out
anyway. You asked about my father and the politicans and so forth. Dad
opposed Henry Horner on many things. He respected the man but he opposed
him on the sales tax. And he opposed him on numerous other things. And
as Henry got older, he came to have a serious illness. I don't know what
his illness was, but it got to the point where he simply couldn't function.
And a pipsqueak named Nudleman, Sam Nudleman, from Belleville who had
been in the clothing business and gone broke, got some kind of minor
league political job in the revenue department in Springfield and by
shear guts and pushiness and the fact that Horner was not really able to
function, this man Nudleman emerged as running the state of Illinois for
a while. It was a terrible situation. He was on the make.
Q: In what capacity was he working in when he did this?

Karl Monroe 15
A: I think he was the head the department of finance or something.
Department of revenue or something. I can't remember what his function
was. It wasn't the kind of function that you would expect would carry
this kind of authority. But apparently Horner had turned things over to
him as kind of a deputy or something, without the name. And he was
calling the shots.
A lot of them, including dad, got the idea that this was dead wrong and
they finally declared--I can't remember the detail of how they did it. I
guess they had the legislature do it. They got the governor declared
incompetent and John Stelle was put in, the lieutenant governor took over
as governor.
Up to that point, they felt they'd done the right thing. When John
Stelle got to be governor, it was an invitation to all John Stelle's
friends to make everything they could. And those days when John Stelle
was governor were bad news for the state of Illinois because all his
hangers on got the jobs and got the contracts. They made everything they
could out of it. He lasted I think 120 days or something like that
before the term ended.
It was one of the early instances of the problem of a high public official
like a governor or a president who ceases to be able to function. I
"don't think the state of Illinois has resolved it.
We're in better shape now I guess, because the lieutenant governor actually
runs with the governor as part of his operation. Although the present
lieutenant governor wasn't Walker's choice. He got on the ballot because
he was the opposition's choice. So I'm not sure we're in much better
shape than we were in Horner's days. But at any rate,-dad had an intimate
part in that because he helped to write the legal, he wasn't a lawyer but
he researched it and he helped to right the legal justification for it.
It's an interesting thing that somebody could write a very good research
piece about it, maybe for your class.
Q: You've known Paul Simon for I guess as many years as Paul Simon's
been around this part of the country, and that's been quite a few years.
But he's been a candidate for the primary for governor this past year.
Many people thought he would be governor by this time. Could you tell me
some of the things you might remember about Paul Simon and how he got his
start, and the Troy Tribune, and a few other things?
A: Troy didn't have a paper. His father was running a religious
publication--I don't remember the name of it--and residing in Highland.
His father had, at one time, was a missionary, Lutheran missionary. And
Paul is a big Lutheran. Paul went to a little college in Dana, Nebraska.
Never did graduate. Came to Troy and they didn't have any newspaper.
The former Troy Call had closed a number of years before when the publisher,
a fellow named Jarvis, died. And town's really awfully small to support
a newspaper, but the Lions Club there said they'd back him. They wanted
a paper and he was willing to undertake it.
He jumped into it with great gusto and considerable talent. One of his
talents is he works like a dog. He's willing to exert himself. And he

Karl Monroe 16
did. He told me one time that he lived most of his first year up there
on popcorn. Rented a room and got by with almost no money. Didn't go
out on dates. Of course, he didn't drink anyway. He didn't run around.
He could live pretty cheaply.
He came in there and bought this old layout. They had an old beat-up
press that he couldn't make run. We printed his paper for him for a
while. He'd get the type set up and actually put into the forms and then
he'd throw it into his car, manhandled it into his car, which wasn't very
easy because those forms were heavy, and bring them down and we'd put
them on our press and run a few papers for him.
He was always grateful to us for kind of helping him get started that
way. I think we stretched his credit pretty far in the beginning too.
He paid his bills, though. You didn't have to worry about Paul Simon
paying his bills. He's an honest guy.
But Paul was a big Lutheran as I said, and got very active in the Walther
League which was a Lutheran youth group and became sort of a small hero
to the whole Walther League organization in this southern Illinois district.
He was a discussion leader and when they went off to camp, he was in the
organization group that set it up and so on.
And he had a considerable following of extremely loyal, devoted, sincere
people that didn't want a thing politically but when he ran for office
they were for him about 2,000 percent and they went knocking on doors all
over this county.
And that's the best kind of worker, the fellow who doesn't want a thing.
They weren't in it to get a job or they weren't in it to get any kind of
preferment of any kind. They just thought he would be a good man in
office and they put him in. Be wasn't an organization man and he ran
against the organization many times subsequently.
Q: What do you mean by the organization?
A: Well, the regular party organization didn't care for Paul Simon. He
didn't have any strings on him.
Q: You mean in Madison County?
A: Right. In Madison County. The district when he started included, I
think it included, Bond County in those days. Gradually the geography
got smaller as the population got bigger. He was in the house a good
many years and immediately made a reputation for himself for independence,
hard work, and he was voted the outstanding legislator several times for
the independent Democrats of Illinois.
And he became a sort of a leading figure in this independent Democrats of
Illinois group. He always stressed his independence. He was against the
party, the organization. And sometimes they tried to beat him. They
never succeeded. One of his big stakes in life was the Kefauver Commission.
He went down and testified. Now, I don't know how much he knew about
gambling in this area, but he was willing to go in before this commission

Karl Monroe 17
and make some strong statements about it anyway. And he got a reputation
as an anti-gambling man partly on account of it. The Kefauver Commission
by the way, permanently, apparently permanently, ended the stranglehold
of organized gamblers on Madison County. Until that time they had poured
money by the bucketsful into our political campaign and usually elected
the sheriff and the state's attorney and anybody else they could elect in
passing.
Q: When was that?
A: Early fifties. I can't remember when, but it's been a long time ago
now. But the gamblers shut down while the Kefauver thing was on and they
never really got going again. Not big like they had been before. We had
wide opened big gambling casinos. Had slot machines all over the county
and bookies. We used to have five bookies on Main Street in Collinsville
with their squawk boxes going so loud you didn't have to go inside. You
could tell who was running by the noise coming outside. These bookies
paid off the police, they paid off political officials and it was just a
general corrupting influence. And the Kefauver Commission knocked that.
And Paul inherited a little credit for that because he went in and testified
before the commission and got a lot of publicity out of it.
He was associated with Dick Mudge who ran for state's attorney on an
anti-gambling thing. And Dick was a former pilot and he bombed the
Mounds Club, the big gambling house, he bombed it with leaflets right
before the election. It was a stunt all the way. But it not only emphasized
the fact that he was a World War II pilot and a hero naturally on account
of that, but also emphasized the fact that he was against gambling so
much he'd bomb them.
Q: You mean Dick got a plane and went over and dropped the leaflets?
A: That's right. And he got publicity by the bucketsful on it. And he
was sincere about it. He was against the gamblers. And after he got in
as state's attorney there wasn't much gambling that went on around here.
And it's never been the same. But Paul got some credit for that.
Q: What year was that?
A: Oh, I don't know. Along in the mid-fifties I guess. It's been a
while. Maybe late fifties. Well, Paul stayed in the house and became
very prominent in the house until about 1961 or thereabouts. My father
was a State Senator. He was getting old and the last term he shouldn't
have been there. It was a terrible strain on his health and he didn't
function too well as a State Senator either. And he mentioned one day
that he didn't know whether he ought to run again. And we said, "Boy,
you shouldn't." And we got him to announce that he wasn't going to run.
And Paul then announced he would run and breezed in, kind of inherited
the job. I don't know if he could have defeated Dad even in his bad
health. He didn't want to run against Dad. Dad had helped him when he
got started and he had a lot of friends anyway and he didn't want to make
them mad. But with Dad out of the picture, he ran and with everybody's

Karl Monroe 18
blessing and got elected easily to the senate.
from then on.
And he had a free ride
And then when he ran for lieutenant governor, he wanted to run for United
States Senate. And I had a curious experience. I didn't think he rated
that big. He wasn't that conspicious down here. He didn't have that
much influence in the legislature really. He got a lot of headlines.
But he wasn't the type that you went to to get a rather difficult job
passed because he made a lot of people mad at him in the legislature. He
was too independent. So I didn't think he was much of a candidate when
he was running for senate or trying to become a candidate for senate. It
was two years before he ran for lieutenant governor.
Q: U. S. Senator?
A: U. S. Senator. And I went to a United Press International editors
meeting in Springfield and the farther north the people were that I
talked to, the more convinced they were that he was the greatest candidate
that could run. They thought he was an outstanding candidate. They
thought he was a vote getter. They thought he would get the votes. And
down here in his own bailiwick, he wasn't that, you know, like a prophet
was without honor in his own country. But up there they thought he was
great. Well two years later when he ran for lieutenant governor with the
organization against [him] all over the state and even a little bit down
here. Even his own county organization didn't really warm up to him like
they might have. I think they kind of half endorsed him.
Q: The Democratic organization?
A: Yes, in his own county. They weren't too enthusiastic about him.
Q: All over the state of Illinois, Daley machinery and all?
A. Oh, they were against--they didn't want him.
Q: How come he got to run for lieutenant governor?
A: Well, he managed to make it stick. He ran and he had enough friends
and enough vote getting power that he won. And then he went on and got
elected. Again, nobody thought he'd get elected. Ogilvie got elected.
The Democrat running for governor didn't make it. And the strong suspicion
of a lot of people was that they figured that Daley was going to let Paul
Simon get beat too. But Paul Simon didn't get beat. A lot of Republicans
voted for him and he emerged as lieutenant governor. And of course, he
thought he was going to go for governor.
And he might have made it if he hadn't cuddled up to Daley a little.
Maybe he figured he had to do that, but he probably would have been
better off if he had been more anti-Daley than Walker was. Then either
one of them might have lost to Ogilvie. So it's hard to say what would
have happened.
In other words, if Simon had been nominated, Daley wasn't enthusiastic
about him. If he'd been nominated on an anti-Daley campaign which would--

Karl Monroe 19
might have nominated [him] he almost certainly wouldn't have been elected
anyway. Probably wouldn't have been elected. So Ogilvie almost got
elected against Walker. So it's hard to figure.
And now of course, Paul has to work his way back into the main stream.
He's pretty adroit, and has a lot of headline getting possibilities.
He's writing another book I understand. He's a pretty good writer, has
written a number of books. And he may be right back in the thick of it
in a couple of years.
End of Side Two, Tape One