The Lynching Of A German Immigrant (1917)
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's April 9th. This day in 1917, a German man by the name of Robert Prager is attacked and lynched during a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in The United States.
Jody, Niki, and Kellie talk about the pervasive suspicion of Germans in the run-up to World War I, and how Prager's lynching was cheerleaded by the media, the government, and larger society.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to This Day, a history podcast from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:10.8 | This day, April 4th, 1918, a German immigrant, Robert Prager, was lynched in Collinsville, Illinois, |
| 0:18.9 | amid anti-German sentiment during World War I. |
| 0:24.4 | We'll get into the specifics of the anti-German fervor at that time and the German community |
| 0:28.8 | in this part of the country as well, but just for context, I want to read a quote from President |
| 0:32.8 | Woodrow Wilson as the U.S. is entering the war. President Wilson says, quote, any man who carries a hyphen |
| 0:39.7 | about with him, meaning something like German-American, any man who carries that hyphen carries a dagger |
| 0:45.5 | that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic when he gets ready. So maybe it's |
| 0:51.5 | no surprise then that this level of violent backlash took place. So here to |
| 0:56.0 | discuss the lynching of Robert Prager are, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter |
| 1:00.6 | Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. Let's paint the picture of the |
| 1:06.2 | community in which Prager arrives as an immigrant and then eventually meets his fate. |
| 1:12.8 | So Prager lives in Collinsville, Illinois. |
| 1:15.6 | And this is a town that's just across the river from St. Louis. |
| 1:21.0 | It has about 10,000 people in 1918. |
| 1:23.9 | And it is part of this Ohio River Valley where hundreds of thousands of German immigrants |
| 1:30.4 | settled in the 19th century. My family settled in this area, places like Cincinnati, Evansville, |
| 1:37.0 | where I'm from. My grandparents grew up in a town called Darmstadt. And all of the roads had |
| 1:43.1 | German names. People spoke German. There were |
| 1:46.2 | German newspapers. And Collinsville was like this. It was a coal mining town that was part of this |
| 1:52.7 | broader German American community. German Americans are now the largest kind of ethnic |
| 1:58.9 | subgroup in the United States. At the time, there were |
... |
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