Denouncing the Hooded Order: Radicalism, Identity, and Dissent in the UMWA

Those one hundred per cent men told us we'd be glad to turn over the books before they got through with us. They have threatened me repeatedly, so that my house is guarded all the time. They sent notice they would shoot me or drive me away. They can shoot me all right, but they'll not drive me away.¹

This excerpt from the September 9, 1924 edition of the Alton Evening Telegraph relayed a statement made by a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) member during the Forty-Second Annual Convention of the Illinois Federation of Labor. During his time at the convention, Henry Corbishley, president of UMWA Local 992 of Zeigler, Illinois, passionately advocated for the embattled miners of southern Illinois and hoped to enlist greater support for their resistance to the "one hundred percent men" of the Ku Klux Klan.²

Located in the southwest corner of Franklin County, roughly 300 miles southwest of Chicago and 100 miles east of St. Louis, Zeigler accounted for one of the most vibrant immigrant communities in the region during the 1920s.³ By 1920, Franklin County boasted a population of 8,851 foreign-born, 7,035 native-born citizens with foreign-born parents, and 1,720 native-born citizens with mixed parentage out of a total population of 57,293. This meant that first-and second-generation immigrants made up nearly a third of the population of Franklin County during this period. Among these 17,606 men and women were a large percentage of "new immigrants," or immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Of the foreign-born residents, Italians (1,787), Poles (1,054), and Yugoslavs (914) all outnumbered the British-born population (825), while Russians (810), Lithuanians (631), and Austrians (550) also composed a large percentage of the population.⁴

A substantial number of these new immigrants resided within Zeigler, which also represented Franklin County's economic lifeblood—the coal industry. The Bell and Zoller Coal Company served as the main employer in the city, and Zeigler miners helped Franklin County lead Illinois in coal production from 1913 to 1930.⁵ Zeigler's prominence within the industry was such that at least one of the city's two mine shafts ranked among the top four in the state in terms of both miners employed and coal produced throughout the entirety of the 1920s. In fact, from June of 1924 to June of 1925, the men of Local 992 hauled 1,473,701 tons of coal out of Bell and Zoller Mine No. 1. At the time, this was the largest one-year output by a single shaft in the state's history.⁶

However, Franklin County differed from other southern Illinois mining counties because of the level of radical attitudes among its immigrant miners. This radical sentiment stood in defiance of the reactionary and repressive political climate of the decade, which frequently vilified both immigrants and leftist radicals. Through the Palmer Raids and the Immigration Act of 1924, the federal government voiced a clear disdain of both political dissent and immigrant status in the years following World War I.⁷ These policies designated both immigrants and labor activists as "others," and it was within this context that immigrant miners in Franklin County became frequent targets of violence at the hands of the newly revived KKK.

The Klan focused on new immigrant miners because of their status as both racialized others and as union laborers. For new immigrant workers, Klan attacks represented one of many volatile encounters with southern Illinoisans. These interactions shaped new immigrant understandings of their own racial and ethnic identity in relation to both Black and White workers. Many Franklin County miners mounted consistent resistance to the terror of the KKK through grassroots organizing strategies and affiliations with left-wing radicals. The clearest example of this was seen in Zeigler, when Local 992 elected Henry Corbishley president of their ethnically diverse UMWA Local. Corbishley himself was native born, but he constituted a different type of "other" in American society: he was a Communist and affiliate of the Workers...