EDWARDSVILLE • Bernhardt Mueller, a barber, testified he saw Joseph Riegel lead the lynching. Riegel grabbed the rope first, Mueller said, and shouted to his cohorts, "Let's not have any slackers here."

Defense lawyers asked Mueller why he was "pro-German."

Riegel was accused of being the ringleader in the murder of Robert Paul Prager, a coal miner and native of Germany. A mob hanged Prager, 30, from a hackberry tree west of Collinsville on the false and flimsy tale that he was a spy for the Kaiser during World War I.

Riegel, a cobbler and former soldier, and 10 other men went on trial in the Madison County Courthouse on May 28, 1918, seven weeks after the lynching. It had taken the lawyers two weeks to seat a jury.

Many of their questions were about loyalty to America, or the supposed lack of it.

"When the present laws were made, we were not at war," said defense lawyer Thomas Williamson. "Things are different now."

The U.S. had declared war against Germany one year before, and public sentiment turned hard against German-Americans. Prager tried to join the U.S. Navy and dutifully reported his legal status as an "enemy alien." It wasn't loyalty enough.