Part of a group of Progressive Miners beaten in Franklin County. Standing, left to right: Catherine De Rorre, Agnes Burns Wieck, Rose Menzyk, Thomas Wakefield. Sitting left to right: Mrs. Allen Lawton, Anna Demaret, and Mrs. Thomas Wakefield.

After enjoining Governor Horner to protect their civil liberties a couple of weeks earlier, men and women lawfully demonstrating in support of the Progressive Miners of America were assaulted and severely beaten by Franklin County sheriff’s deputies and Lewis-Walker gun-thugs in the town of West Frankfort, IL on February 5, 1933.

A contingent of injured union activists lead by Illinois Women’s Auxiliary President, Agnes Burns Wieck immediately returned to Springfield to demand action from Governor Horner.

On January 26, 1933, Gov. Horner had urged Wieck and the 10,000 protesters who attended the Springfield mass march to retain confidence in government adding: “I am not a prayerful man, but I an praying that you will keep that faith. For without that faith in government the government cannot endure. When government goes all is lost.”

Ironically the returning protesters were brutalized by Franklin County sheriff’s deputies, sworn representatives of the government.

Agnes Burns Wieck recounts: “Governor Horner had no time to see the victims of his broken promise. But they had time to wait and thus compel him to see the price they had paid for the Constitution he had broken. The cloak of humanitarianism had now fallen from the shoulders of the new Governor. He stood revealed as just another politician protecting the interests of the privileged few. He advised recourse to the courts, declaring that he could not intervene except at the sheriff’s request.

‘We put you into office,’ the wounded women screamed at the Governor. ‘And now you would turn us out upon the icy streets of Springfield, even without mercy, let alone justice.’”

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