(Floyd Ham of the Stark County Genealogical Society gave a presentation on Saturday in Toulon on “The Kewanee Riot August 21, 1893.” You can click here if you’d like to see Floyd’s presentation. A while back, with Floyd’s help, I also researched that event. Here’s the story I wrote.)
I’ve written previously about a Kewanee riot involving liquor. (See “The Kewanee Liquor Riot of 1856,” May 2, 2020, Star Courier.) In 1893, the village experienced another riot. While partly fueled by liquor, it was primarily ignited by a speaker intending to espouse a particularly malicious strain of anti-Catholicism and anti-immigration on a stage in our hometown.
The back story.
In 1887 in Clinton, Iowa, Henry F. Bowers, a 60-year-old lawyer, founded the American Protective Association. It was an all-male, secret society whose members were bound by oaths “at all times to endeavor to place the political position of this government in the hands of Protestants to the entire exclusion of the Roman Catholics . . . .” Between 1891 and 1897, the A. P. A. became a troubling factor in most of the northern states, by some estimates reaching a membership of almost half-a-million. It distributed anti-Catholic literature, published newspapers and magazines, and arranged for lectures by “ex-priests” and others intended to denigrate Catholicism.
The A. P. A. attacked the manliness of Catholic men, asserting that the Catholic church, “can and does so far degrade and stupefy the intellectual nature of the man, that he loses the ambition to be free, to think for himself.” Priests were alleged to be inherently unmanly, immoral predators who defiled women. Lecturers and writers luridly told of nuns held in convents behind locked doors, or of compliant young girls seduced in confessionals, “to have their young souls and lives blighted by the hot breath of wine-besotted priests.”
But women were directly attacked by the A. P. A. as well. It posited that by rejecting marriage, Catholic nuns posed a threat to masculinity. It described other females being brainwashed to enter a secret society of Catholic women called the “Blessed Creatures” or “Brides of Heaven.” Blessed Creatures (often already married to a “duped, unsuspecting, emasculated husband”) would lead a secret, double life of satisfying priestly lust. And so on.
The main players.
A. H. Mertz was the editor and publisher of The Peoples Union Mission, a small Geneseo newspaper of sorts. He was about 40 years-old, with a scraggly beard, sallow complexion, and a slight build. Mertz was a fervent supporter of the A. P. A. He had literally bounced around Iowa and Illinois – that is, he regularly offended folks with his vitriolic writings and eventually was bounced out of positions in Burlington, Iowa, and Rock Island before landing in Geneseo. Mertz did not change his stripes upon his arrival in Henry County.
Next are the Bradys. I’ve previously written about the Brady Saloon. (See “The Brady Saloon – More Than Meets the Eye,” July 25, 2020, Star Courier.) Thomas Brady had arrived in Kewanee in 1866, and by the mid-1870s, he owned and operated a saloon on Railroad Square (today’s Third St. between Chestnut and Tremont Sts).
By 1892, Brady operated another grand saloon at 213 W. Third St., today’s Cerno’s. Brady’s son, John, was a bartender in the new saloon. Other of Brady’s sons were working in other aspects of the family’s burgeoning businesses.
Thomas and his wife were active in the Catholic Church, first at St. Mary’s on Fifth Street, and then at the new Visitation Church on Park Street. His Catholicism and his prominence as a businessman made him a community leader – he had just completed a term on the town council that year.
We can’t leave out the defendants at the subsequent trial: in addition to the Bradys (patriarch Thomas and sons James and John), they were Patrick Davey, Patrick Martin, Patrick McCarthy, James McGuire, and Thomas Ryan.
Finally, there was Edwin A. Swain, Kewanee’s marshal who suffered an injury during the riot.
The events leading to the riot.
In the middle of August 1893, Mertz traveled from Geneseo to Kewanee to ask Mayor William H. Lyman for the use of a park for a speech and for police protection. Surprised by the request, Lyman said that if the nature of his speech required protection, Mertz was not welcome in Kewanee, and he denied Mertz’s requests.
Undeterred, Mertz somehow secured the large hall over the new Kewanee National Bank on Tremont St., next to the Odd Fellow’s Building, for a speech.
A number of Kewaneeans, primarily Catholics, learned about Mertz’s planned speech. They were not happy about it. The Kewanee Independent reported that his speeches elsewhere were “outrageously slandering the Catholic people.” Thomas Brady said that he had heard that Mertz “was going to lecture on A. P. A. and run the Catholics down.” Brady had seen one of Mertz’s papers and heard what he had previously said about Catholic women and children in other speeches. Patrick Martin said “I didn’t want him to run down my mother and sisters.” Others expressed similar sentiments.
When Mertz arrived at the hall, there were only a few friends there, and when the bank trustees learned of the meeting, they locked him and his friends out.
The riot.
Meanwhile, a large crowd, estimated to be anywhere from 100 to 600 men, had gathered outside the bank. It appears that many had been at Brady’s saloon earlier where there was talk of what to do about Mertz – and some drinking.
When Mertz came out of the bank building, some of the mob grabbed him, began roughing him up, and then started hauling him north on Tremont, west on Third past the Kewanee House, and down Whiskey Row toward the railroad’s freight depot.
Accounts varied greatly as to what happened to Mertz and others. Some testified that Thomas Brady was the leader of the mob and had intentionally liquored up the crowd. Others said that Brady had merely been an observer. Brady said that he did not encourage the crowd by serving free drinks and later tried to calm the crowd and safely usher Mertz out of town.
Some men were said to have engaged in fights while in Brady’s Saloon prior to leaving for the bank confronted Mertz, and thus were aroused.
Photo 6
Various men testified to swings and punches being thrown at Mertz as well as at others among the mob. Amongst the shoving and jostling, a number of people were hit and bloodied. Some said that many in the mob were calling to hang Mertz.
There were variances, too, in the stories of how Mertz made it from the bank to the freight depot. Some testified he was dragged, others that he was escorted, not dragged, while others couldn’t say. In any event, Mertz was badly dazed and bloodied.
Marshal Swain and other officers attempted to intervene to protect Mertz and disperse the crowd. Testimony on their efforts varied greatly, too. During the melee, Swain was injured – some say by a thrown rock and others by a thrown punch. Eventually, Swain, after firing his pistol in the air, was able to get Mertz safely to the freight depot and on a carriage out of town.
The trial.
Following the riot, there was a cry from Kewaneeans not involved to bring the rioters to justice. With J. K. Blish served as the defendants’ attorney and C. K. Ladd handled the prosecution; there was much testimony from many participants and observers. The defendants pled guilty (one was convicted) of participating in a riot. In passing sentence, the judge framed the issue as one of respect for the right to speak one’s mind:
“We are here from all parts of the world, from every country, and all have different backgrounds and values and cannot live peaceably together unless we respect each other’s right to speak whatever we want to, so long as it is in accordance to law.”
The judge then commented on the case itself:
“This is one of the most important cases tried to Kewanee for some time and I hope there never will be another such. The crime that has been perpetrated is one of the worst ever committed in this vicinity. Such crimes deserve the highest penalty of the law.”
But the judge also noted mitigating factors:
“[T]here had been rumors afloat that the man that was going to speak had slandered the Catholics and was publishing a paper which contained slanderous language against the Catholics. In the second place, those charged with this crime are all young men, with the exception of Thos Brady, and they were without any weapons or missiles, whatever. And the evidence has shown that it was not their intention to kill Mertz, but they wanted to send him out of town on the first train.”
The judge then issued $100 fines against all but one defendant, who received a $50 fine.
The aftermath.
Many in Kewanee had been embarrassed by the riot and the refusal to permit Mertz to have his say. Others felt justified in keeping the vile lecturer from spewing his hate.
Shortly after the trial, the American Eagle, the official newspaper of the A. P. A. of Kansas, luridly described the riot, and then wrote that “[i]n order to free our country from the grasp of the political viper the Pope of Rome, drunken Roman riots are an essential aid in building up and giving the A. P. A. a more rapid growth.”
The A. P. A. did, in fact, grow for a few years, perhaps even aided by riots similar to the one Kewanee experienced. But then it withered on the vine and died the slow death of other hate groups.
Meanwhile, A. H. Mertz continued his career as a “professional slanderer,” as one newspaper later described him. In 1898, the Rock Island Argus reported that “A. H. Mertz, the editor of Geneseo’s sheet, the People’s Union Mission, is now appealing to his friends to assist him from the Mt. Carroll, Ill., jail, where he is serving a 9-months’ sentence for slandering some of the prominent people of that place.” One historian reported that, overall, Mertz was arrested eleven times, jailed seven times, and mobbed twenty-two times over his career.
The A. P. A. was neither the first nor last organization to attack Catholicism – as we’ve seen earlier, Wethersfield was founded in part to keep Catholicism from spreading in the Midwest. Later, Catholics were the target of the Ku Klux Klan. When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, there were cries of fear of papal dominance over U.S. politics. Today, we still attack people based on their religious beliefs, though we couch our criticisms in terms of national security or offer other rationales.
And mob violence is still used today, for just and unjust causes alike, as we’ve seen in Washington D. C.
Perhaps it’s true – the more things change, the more they stay the same.
(Again, thanks to Stark County historian Floyd Ham for his research and writing on the riot.)
