by the Navy due to medical reasons. After moving briefly to other towns in Missouri and Illinois, he landed in nearby Collinsville in southern Illinois in the late summer of 1917. He first took a job baking for an Italian baker named Lorenzo Bruno. In early 1918, Prager learned of the high wartime wages that miners were earning and began working in a laborer's position at the Donk Brothers Coal and Coke Co. Mine #2 in nearby Maryville. But Prager was rejected for permanent membership as a mine worker in United Mine Workers of America Local 1802, perhaps due to his argumentative personality or suspected socialist beliefs. Background: Labor issues in Collinsville Coal mining was the lifeblood of Collinsville in 1918, with seven mines in production in or around the city. More than half the city's male working population was employed at the mines. The work also drew itinerant miners who had no familial anchors to the community. Many of the miners in this period were immigrants or had at least one parent who was an immigrant, and most were from European nations. The United Mine Workers of America (UMW) had five locals in the Collinsville area, and the miners dominated the community. Radical elements in the UMW unions caused a number of wildcat strike actions at Collinsville area coal mines in the summer and fall of 1917. Almost concurrently with the wildcat strikes, a unionization strike at the St. Louis Lead Smelting and Refining plant (Lead Works) in Collinsville energized many of the coal miners and other union members in the community. The strike turned violent at times. In an unusual twist, Collinsville police officers and Madison County Sheriff's deputies, mostly former miners themselves, sided with the striking workers from the Lead Works and the coal miners who supported unionization. Industry owners hired strikebreakers, who were harassed by both union men and law enforcement officers on local streets and in streetcars. The strike at the Lead Works resulted in social tensions similar to those that had preceded the East St. Louis Race Riots earlier in 1917. Owners had hired black workers to break strikes in that community. In Collinsville, ethnic white workers objected to the use of "imported" workers, and many of the workers hired to fill the non-union jobs at the Lead Works were black. The wildcat coal mine strikes and unionization strike at St. Louis Louis Smelting