The Herrin Massacre of 1922

Betrayal and Blood

Usually when workers were cut down, the press called it a “riot.” That label excused the killings and pinned the blame on the people fighting for their lives. Herrin was different. This time they called it a massacre, and they never let anyone forget it. Why? Because the blood was spilled by union miners themselves, and that gave the bosses exactly what they wanted.

The Spark

Herrin was a mining town in Southern Illinois, where coal and poverty mixed with dust and desperation. In April 1922, more than 400,000 miners across the country walked off the job in a nationwide strike called by the United Mine Workers. The Lester mine was supposed to be part of that shutdown, standing in solidarity with miners from Pennsylvania to Kansas. In June 1922, the Southern Illinois Coal Company swore it would keep its Lester mine shut during the United Mine Workers strike. Then owner William Lester broke his promise. He hauled in nonunion men under armed guard and set them to work. To miners who’d been starving through the strike, that betrayal landed like a gut punch. They saw it for what it was: war under the mask of business.

The Clash

On June 21, hundreds of miners and their families surrounded the mine. Power lines were cut. Roads were blocked. Guards opened fire, and men fell. The next day, the strikebreakers surrendered. But the fury didn’t cool. They were marched out of the mine, beaten, jeered, and dragged through Herrin’s streets. Some were shot outright. Others were chased into fields and woods, hunted down, and killed. Corpses were dumped in ditches with notes pinned to them: “Union forever.” By the end, at least 23 men lay dead.

The People

Most of the dead were strikebreakers, poor men from Chicago, Kentucky, and Italy. They weren’t angels, but they weren’t devils either. They were desperate, lured by promises of steady pay, and they walked into a trap set by Lester. The miners who killed them were also poor men, worn down by months without work, convinced they’d been sold out. Hugh Willis of the UMWA tried to calm the crowd, but rage drowned him out. Families cooked for the strikers, tended to the wounded, and then watched their neighbors cross a line that could never be walked back.

Scabs with a Charter

Herrin also laid bare the rot inside the house of labor. The International Brotherhood of Steam Shovel and Dredgemen, an AFL affiliate, had signed on to run the Lester mine’s equipment. On paper they were union. In practice, they were strikebreakers with a charter. Lester loved it, he could claim his mine was “union friendly” while stabbing the UMWA in the back. The AFL finally tossed the IBSSD out, but the damage was done. Herrin showed that bosses didn’t just buy politicians and deputies. They bought unions too, and used them as wedges.

Outsiders and Blame

Herrin wasn’t driven by the same racial hatred that scarred East St. Louis or Chicago just a few years earlier. This was a white mining town, and most of the dead were white themselves. But there was still an edge of prejudice. Many of the slain strikebreakers were immigrants from Italy, Austria, or Poland. The press leaned hard on that fact, painting them as nameless “foreigners” rather than poor men desperate for work. It made the killings easier to sensationalize and easier to dismiss, while letting William Lester’s betrayal fade into the background. Bosses everywhere knew the trick: pit locals against outsiders, natives against immigrants, and solidarity cracks wide open.

The Fallout

The national press had a field day. The Chicago Tribune screamed about “red-handed assassins.” The New York Times thundered about 'mob savagery'. Nobody wanted to print about Lester’s betrayal, or the machine guns he’d brought in to back it. Jurors in Illinois weren’t fooled; they acquitted every miner put on trial. But the verdict didn’t matter. For decades after, whenever workers fought back, bosses and their mouthpieces pulled Herrin out of the drawer and waved it around: proof that unions were violent, dangerous, out of control.

The Long Shadow

Herrin’s lesson didn’t end in 1922. Bosses kept learning how to bend labor to their own use. In the 1960s and 70s, some unions cut sweetheart deals with employers or fell under the sway of organized crime. Like Lester’s trick with the IBSSD, it gave cover to bosses while poisoning the very idea of solidarity. By the 1980s, the image of corrupt, compromised unions fed Reagan’s anti-labor crusade, a wound workers still carry today.

Herrin was messy, brutal, and real. It wasn’t a clean tale of martyrs and villains. It was rage turned to bloodshed, sparked by a boss’s lies and stoked by hunger. That makes it harder to frame than Ludlow or Homestead, but it belongs in the same story. Because the truth is this: when the powerful pit desperate men against each other, when betrayal and armed guards stand in for negotiation, what follows is atrocity. They called it a massacre because it suited them. What they’d rather you forget is who lit the match.

Sources

• Paul M. Angle, Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness (1952)
• Contemporary reporting in the Chicago Tribune (June 1922) and New York Times (June 1922)
• Illinois State Historical Society archives on the Herrin Massacre
• Transcripts from the Herrin trials (1923)
• David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields (1981)