John Peter Altgeld

Background

John Peter Altgeld was born at Nieder-Selters, Germany, on December 30, 1847, and was brought to the United States by his parents when he was 3 months old. He grew up in Mansfield, Ohio.

Education

He quitted school at the age of 12 when his father insisted that he work full time on the family farm.

In 1864 Altgeld volunteered for military service in the Civil War. After brief duty on the eastern front, he returned to Mansfield and entered high school against his father's wishes. He did so well in his studies that at 19 he was teaching school himself. At 21 Altgeld went west, working on a railroad-building crew in Arkansas until illness forced him to stop. Virtually penniless and still sick, he wandered eastward to Savannah, Mo. , where he settled. While teaching school, he studied law.

Career

Altgeld's fortunes improved rapidly from this point as his talents and immense energy began to assert themselves. He was admitted to the bar in 1871. The next year he was appointed city attorney. In 1874 he won his first election as the Democratic and Granger candidate for county attorney. He resigned a year later to move to Chicago.

There Altgeld established himself in two areas, real estate and politics. He began to invest in property, and in the early 1880s he started constructing buildings as well. Soon his transactions in real estate and office buildings involved hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the same time he built up political connections, which led to his nomination in 1884 as Democratic candidate for Congress. Although he failed to carry the normally Republican district, he ran well. In the same year he published Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims, in which he criticized the tendency of the penal system to discriminate against poor persons. In 1886 he was elected to the superior court of Cook County as the Democratic and United Labor party candidate.

Altgeld was an impartial and forceful jurist, but he was dissatisfied with the judgeship and worked for higher political office. His public-speaking appearances featured endorsements of antisweatshop legislation, 8-hour laws, and union rights—views published in his book Live Questions (1890). Failing in a bid for the U. S. Senate in 1891 and worn out by his varied commitments, he resigned his judgeship to devote himself to his most ambitious construction project, a 16-story skyscraper which he called the Unity Block.

In 1892 Altgeld returned to politics as the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, winning the election by carrying Chicago decisively. As the first Democratic governor of Illinois since the Civil War, Altgeld rewarded loyal Democratic party members with patronage plums, being fairly ruthless in the dismissal of Republican appointees. However, his appointment of Florence Kelley, a leading settlement-house reformer, indicated his commitment to progressive ideas. Though the reform legislation passed during his gubernatorial years was not extensive, it did include a factory inspection law, a women's 8-hour law, and an act prohibiting discrimination against union members.

Altgeld achieved national notoriety in 1893, when he pardoned three anarchists who had been convicted of complicity in the infamous 1886 bomb-throwing incident that had killed several policemen at Haymarket Square, Chicago. (Four of the others convicted had been hanged and one had committed suicide. ) Altgeld refused to take the politically expedient course of granting clemency on grounds of mercy; instead he attacked the conviction on legal grounds. His case against the presiding judge was worded very severely. Public reaction was largely negative, branding Altgeld as an anarchist and demagogue who sought to undermine the court system.

Altgeld's conduct during the Pullman strike in 1894 was widely censured, especially by conservatives. In May the men at George M. Pullman's works near Chicago had gone on strike, supported by the American Railway Union's national boycott of Pullman cars. President Cleveland's attorney general, Richard Olney (formerly a railroad lawyer), struck back early in July and got an injunction against the union leadership. Knowing that some minor violence had occurred, Altgeld stood ready to send state troops to maintain order, as he had in earlier strikes. But Olney and Cleveland ignored Altgeld and sent Federal troops to Chicago. In spite of Altgeld's strenuous protest that Federal intervention without the request of state officials was unconstitutional, the strike was broken by the Cleveland administration's decision.

From 1894 to 1896 Altgeld was a leader of the growing anti-Cleveland element within the Democratic party. At the party's Chicago convention in 1896, Altgeld's views triumphed. Although he was not especially impressed with William Jennings Bryan, he was pleased that Bryan's nomination and the free-silver platform decisively repudiated Cleveland's leadership.

The remainder of Altgeld's career was less happy. He had overextended himself financially to build the Unity Block, and debts plagued him. His political power remained great, but his influence brought him little success. He was defeated for reelection in 1896, although he ran ahead of the rest of the Democratic ticket in Illinois. Though he successfully promoted Carter Harrison II for mayor of Chicago, Harrison proved to be very conservative. In 1899 Altgeld ran against Harrison as an independent and finished third in a three-way race. He figured prominently in Bryan's renomination in 1900, only to see Bryan defeated again. At the time of Altgeld's death on March 12, 1902, it seemed that public opinion had rejected his views. However, despite the widespread criticism of his major public acts, he had won the loyalty of many progressives, and his reputation—based on his sympathy for the disadvantaged—has grown rather than diminished in recent years.

Achievements

• John Peter Altgeld became nationally prominent when, in 1893, he pardoned three anarchists convicted of the Haymarket bombing and, in 1894, was critical of the Federal government's intervention in the Pullman strike.
  
  The governor influenced the design of five castle-like structures in Illinois universities. One is Altgeld Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is currently home to the Mathematics Department, and had previously housed the College of Law and the University Library. The other four are the eponymous edifices at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Northern Illinois University, as well as John W. Cook Hall at Illinois State University and Old Main at Eastern Illinois University. Chicago's Altgeld Gardens Homes, one of the first housing projects in the United States, was named after the former governor as well as the street located at 2500 North in Chicago's grid system, Altgeld Street.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Cost of Something for Nothing

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Gov. John P. Altgeld's Pardon of the Anarchists and his Masterly Review of the Haymarket Riot

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Our penal machinery and its victims

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Oratory...

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • The Mind and Spirit of John Peter Altgeld: Selected writings and addresses

    (U Illinois (1960) 1st ed. Hard cover w/ DJ. Writings & ad...)

Politics

He was the first Democrat to govern that state since the 1850s. A leading figure of the Progressive movement, Altgeld signed workplace safety and child labor laws, pardoned three of the men convicted in the Haymarket Affair, and rejected calls in 1894 to break up the Pullman strike by force. In 1896 he was a leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, opposing President Grover Cleveland and the conservative Bourbon Democrats. He was defeated for reelection in 1896 in an intensely fought, bitter campaign.

Views

Quotations: "As labor creates the wealth of the country, we demand the passage of such laws as may be necessary to protect it in all its rights. "

"You ask whether a woman should be paid the same wages as man when she does the same work? To this, there can be but one answer. If she does the same quantity and quality of work under the same conditions as a man, simple justice requires that she should be paid the same. wages. To deny her this is to deny her justice. "

"The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death. "

"No man's ambitions (have) a right to stand in the way of performing a simple act of justice. "

"Justice, not expedience, must be the guiding light. The orator must fix his eye on the polestar of justice, and plough straight thither. The moment he glances toward expediency, he falls from his high estate. "

Connections

He was married to Emma Ford, the daughter of John Ford and Ruth Smith, in 1877 in Richland County, Ohio. Their marriage was a happy one by all accounts but produced no children.

Father:

John P.

Mother:

Mary Altgeld

Spouse:

Emma Ford

References

• Altgeld's America: The Lincoln Ideal Versus Changing Realities
• Eagle Forgotten: The Life of John Peter Altgeld
• The Mind and Spirit of John Peter Altgeld. Selected writings and addresses, edited by Henry M. Christman
• ALTGELD OF ILLINOIS A Record of His Life and Work