The actions of the citizen Prohibition army in Williamson County, Ill., a hardscrabble rural mining region 300 miles south of Chicago, provides a striking example. The head of the Williamson County board of supervisors and a local Klan leader, Sam Stearns, and a Methodist pastor and Klan ally named Philip Glotfelty, along with members of the local Ministerial Association, had high hopes that Prohibition would usher in a new moral tenor in their community. Before Prohibition, the region’s largely native white Protestant miners might stop for a whiskey after a hard day’s work in the ramshackle bars that dotted the county, ignoring their pastors’ warnings against the “devil’s drink.” In Prohibition’s wake, drinking continued in new roadhouses and moonshine joints. Two rival criminal rings, the Birger and Shelton gangs, set up shop to supply the thriving black-market trade.

Glotfelty and Stearns, backed by the county’s leading businessmen and Protestant pastors, mounted a law and order crusade. They held public meetings to raise the alarm. Italian and French immigrants, largely Catholic, had been drawn to Williamson County by opportunities to work in the coal industry, and Glotfelty blamed the men “imported from across the sea” for bootlegging. He confidently predicted that all members of the local Catholic church would be in jail before “the foundations of the new church were built.”

Glotfelty’s words resonated among the region’s native white Protestant miners, whose tenuous hold on economic security was increasingly eroding. A strike to protest wage cuts had ended in open class warfare in 1922. Williamson County’s moral leaders focused native Protestant miners’ grievances on another threat: the immigrants who competed for mining jobs. The local Klan ranks swelled with the promise to “clean up” the community.

Representing the Klan, Stearns traveled to Washington to plead for support for its local anti-liquor crusade. Commissioner Haynes agreed to supply federal agents to lead the raids if Stearns could provide the foot soldiers. On Dec. 22, 1923, the first raid, in the town of Herrin, got underway. Some 500 citizen volunteers deputized by Haynes’s agents stormed scores of roadhouses and homes. A second raid two weeks later overwhelmingly targeted Italian immigrants, who protested rough treatment, theft and planted evidence.

The Italian vice-consul in Springfield, Ill., denounced the “terrorization of foreign residents of Herrin” to the State Department. National Guard troops were called in to stem the chaos and violence. Eventually, the federal government ended its authorization for the volunteer army, refusing “reinforcements from the Ku Klux Klan or any other volunteer organization.”

But the citizen army was not easily deterred. Stearns gleefully declared, “We’ve got the bootleggers on the run now, but we want to give them their hats, so they can keep on running.” Over the following months several more raids, each increasingly reckless, targeted Williamson County’s immigrants. On Feb. 2, 1924, S. Glenn Young, a former Prohibition agent who had been recruited by the Klan, led more than 1,000 men in raids against roadhouses and homes, setting fire to some of them. This time the county’s French immigrant community joined the Italian immigrants pleading for help from their consul. With Klan and anti-Klan forces battling in the streets, the Illinois governor declared martial law.

The orgy of violence resulted in 14 deaths, but it also eroded Klan support among the public. Klan candidates had swept into office in Herrin in 1924, but one year later they lost power. The newly elected mayor promised to bar Klan supporters from parading in masks. But before the collapse of its power, the local Klan had partially accomplished its goals: More than 50 roadhouses and illicit drink spaces had been shut, and many of Williamson County’s immigrants heeded the Klan’s call to leave the county. Of the 11,000 foreign born and their children in 1920 in Williamson County, only 8,174 remained a decade later.