Karl Monroe Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

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.