Charlie Birger

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2004

Southern Illinois’s history of violence grows out of the myriad and overlapping rifts that have so fundamentally divided the region’s population—labor vs. capital; nativist vs. immigrant; Protestant vs. Catholic; wet vs. dry—as well as the periodic breakdown of the state’s law-enforcement function (largely because the law officers also have been local citizens, and thus products of the region’s deeply divided culture). This long and bloody history reached its apex in the 1920s as the broader processes of modernization that marked the first three decades of the American twentieth century gradually spread their influence into such culturally remote areas as Egypt (the popular term applied to southern Illinois), in such forms as the automobile and radio. Throughout the country, the rising ethic of consumerism characterizing this modern culture—with its emphasis on self-fulfillment and immediate gratification—produced deep conflicts with the older nineteenth-century culture of self-control, as seen in the country’s passage of, and large-scale violation of, prohibition. In southern Illinois, the battles touched off by the Eighteenth Amendment would leave a long trail of dead and wounded, a story frequently retold, most famously by Paul Angle in Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness (1952).

WSIU Public Television’s documentary The Legend of Charlie Birger (2003) seeks to recreate this era by focusing on one of the most spectacular characters in the region’s history, gangster Charlie Birger, whose battles against law enforcement, the Ku Klux Klan, and rival gangsters would culminate in his 1928 execution on the gallows, the last public hanging in Illinois. Inspired by Gary DeNeal’s biography A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger (originally published 1981, reissued 1998), the film combines archival photographs, vintage footage, historical re-enactments, filmed interviews with eyewitnesses, taped interviews DeNeal conducted with many of the characters involved, and commentary by several historians to detail both Birger’s life and the continued fascination he holds for residents of southern Illinois. As expected, what emerges contains numerous conflicting versions of events, as memories have faded, while many of the accounts were self-serving to begin with. But as journalist and historian Taylor Pensoneau comments, “You have to, at some point, accept some account as [being] as close to the truth as you’re going to get.”

Like DeNeal’s book, the film is content largely to remain on the surface, simply relating Birger’s career in chronological order. Birger emerges as a man of fascinating contradictions, though they remain largely unexplored. He was, for instance, the area’s most famous gangster, but he also desperately wanted to be a respected pillar of his community; he was a cold-blooded murderer—sometimes even making a game out of executions—who became physically ill when he killed people; and despite the fact that the nature of his work required much of his activities be kept out of the public eye, he actively craved the limelight (unlike his major gangster rivals, the Sheltons).

Though he sought to portray himself as a modern Robin Hood (e.g., buying groceries for the needy), Birger was not a social bandit. He did not symbolize, as Eric Hobsbawm has described the historic role of bandits, the defense or restoration of the traditional order of things as it should be (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past). Birger was not a leader of the people, representing traditional values against the encroachments of modern society. He served, instead, as a harbinger of that modern consumer culture. His success in liquor, gambling, and prostitution was based on the consumer ethic of pleasure and instant gratification. Modern technology in the form of the automobile and machine gun made his career possible. He perfected modern business techniques, pioneering, as the film points out, the business practices of modern organized crime. And finally, he achieved success through that most fundamental of modern business practices, public relations, even to the point of running advertisements on the local radio station assuring citizens they had nothing to fear from his activities. In fact, as historian John Y. Simon points out, Birger’s ultimate downfall was largely a public relations failure—when he ordered the murder of Ethel Price. The public did not really mind when gangsters killed each other, but the killing of an innocent woman, even the wife of a crooked state patrolman, turned public opinion against Birger.

At 110 minutes in length, the documentary tends to drag and often seems redundant, with many of the vintage film clips, photographs, and re-enactments repeated several times. The music, composed and performed by the Woodbox Gang, charmingly recreates a nice period feel. But the narration frequently grows trite with lines such as, “Behind closed doors, that’s where the deals were struck and the plans were hatched”; “What went on in those sinister back-room meetings is only partially known”; “This is the nature of gangsters—money is their motive”; “They work deals, settle scores, and get rid of loose ends.”

The documentary is based largely on DeNeal’s research and DeNeal is the most animated of the talking heads placing Birger in a broader context. And for the most part, DeNeal’s comments are pertinent and acute. Thus it is disappointing that the conclusion features DeNeal’s puerile philosophizing, “If we were faced with the same choices that Birger was faced with, would we do it the same way? Can we blame him? . . . Are we better than he is? Did he deserve to hang on the gallows and are we too good for that?” The fact that the vast majority of southern Illinoisans did not resort to gangsterism and that very few shed tears at Birger’s execution would seem obvious, conclusive evidence that most people, faced with similar circumstances, chose differently than Birger.