John Peter Altgeld

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Peter Altgeld

(born Dec. 30, 1847, Niederselters, Prussia — died March 12, 1902, Joliet, Ill., U.S.) German-born U.S. politician, governor of Illinois (1893 – 97). He emigrated from Germany as a child. In the 1870s he moved to Chicago, where he accumulated a small fortune in real estate and became active in Democratic Party politics. In 1892 he won the governorship as a reformist candidate. In 1893, at the urging of Clarence Darrow and labour leaders, he granted clemency to three men convicted of complicity in the Haymarket Riot. The controversial pardon provoked an outcry from conservatives and contributed to his defeat for reelection in 1896, though Altgeld's decision later gained wide approval in judicial circles.

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American reformer and jurist and a governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld (1847-1902) became nationally prominent when, in 1893, he pardoned three anarchists convicted of the Haymarket bombingand, in 1894, was critical of the Federal government's intervention in the Pullman strike.

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

Beginning Politician

Altgeld's fortunes improved rapidly from this point as his talents and immense energy began to assert themselves. While teaching school, he studied law and 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.

Governor of Illinois

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.

A National Figure

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.

John Peter Altgeld

20th Governor of Illinois
In office 1893 – 1897
Preceded by	Joseph W. Fifer
Succeeded by	John R. Tanner

Born	December 30, 1847 Westerwald, Germany
Died	March 12, 1902 Joliet, Illinois
Political party	Democratic

Biography

Early years

Altgeld was born in the town of Selters in the German Westerwald, the son of John P. and Mary Altgeld. He came to America early in life with his father's family, who settled on a farm near Mansfield, Ohio.

He left home at age 16 to join the Union Army (lying about his age), where he fought in Virginia with an ill-fated regiment and nearly died of fever. He then worked on his father's farm, studied in the library of a neighbor and at a private school in Lexington, Ohio, and for two years taught school.

After a brief stint in an Ohio seminary, he walked to Missouri and studied to become a lawyer while working on itinerant railroad construction crews. He was elected district attorney of Andrew County, Missouri, and a year later resigned and moved to Chicago, where he founded a prosperous law firm that soon employed such rising stars as Clarence Darrow.

He also became wealthy from a series of savvy real estate dealings and development projects, most notably the Unity Building (1891), the 16-story office building that was at that time Chicago's tallest building. In January 1890, Altgeld bought a lot at what is now 127 North Dearborn Street in downtown Chicago, and he established the Unity Company to build and manage the future Unity Building. He indiscriminately contributed his own fortune toward the endeavor, and for a while the construction was moving more quickly than expected. However, this led to a $100,000 mistake and much of the framework of the building had to be rebuilt. Altgeld also made an error by trying to borrow $400,000 from John R. Walsh, president of the Jennings Trust Company and of the Chicago National Bank. Technicalities in the contract caused many problems for Altgeld. Eventually a new contract was signed, but Altgeld was only able to borrow $300,000 from Walsh. He ended up raising the rest of the money himself, and the construction of the Unity Building was completed. In 1893, he declared that the Unity Building had given him the most personal satisfaction of all his achievements.

He was married to Emma Ford, the daughter of John Ford and Ruth Smith, in 1877 in Richland County, Ohio.

Political career

Altgeld ran for Congress in Illinois's Fourth Congressional District in 1884. Although this district was heavily Republican, Altgeld garnered 45.5 percent of the vote in his race against incumbent George Adams, a better showing than well-known Democrat Lambert Tree had made two years earlier. As a Republican leader recalled, "He (Altgeld) was not elected, but our executive committee was pretty badly frightened by the strong canvass he made." He was elected to a judgeship in 1886, and served on the bench until 1891.

He was drafted by the Democrats to run for governor, and narrowly defeated incumbent Joseph W. Fifer. He suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after his victory, and nearly died of a concomitant fever. He managed to appear at his inauguration, but was only able to deliver a brief portion of his speech. Although the General Assembly hall was so warm as to cause several men to faint, Altgeld, clad in a heavy topcoat, was pale and visibly shivering. The clerk of the Assembly delivered the remainder of his speech.

Labor issues

Altgeld's grave

As governor, Altgeld spearheaded the nation's most stringent child labor and workplace safety laws, appointed women to important positions in the state government, and vastly increased state funding for education.

Historically, Altgeld is remembered chiefly for pardoning the three surviving men convicted in the 1886 Haymarket bombing (four others had already been executed, one committed suicide in prison). After reviewing their cases, he concluded, as have subsequent scholars, that there had been a serious miscarriage of justice in their prosecutions. He came under intense attack.

In 1894, the Pullman Rail Strike, led by Eugene V. Debs, flared into riots, sabotage, and crucially, disruption of U.S. Mail deliveries, a Federal concern. Altgeld, however, refused to authorize President Grover Cleveland to send in Federal troops to quell the disturbances. But on July 4, 1894, Cleveland went ahead and sent several thousand troops to Chicago without Altgeld's approval, an action later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Altgeld's opposition was seen as a highly unusual stance for a state governor at that time.^[1]

The Pullman incident and the Haymarket pardons were used against Altgeld by his conservative enemies. In 1896 Altgeld was ineligible to run for president (since he was born in Germany), but he led the fight against the Cleveland forces. Altgeld publicly broke from Cleveland and his conservative supporters. Altgeld helped split the Democratic Party during the 1896 presidential election into Free Silver and Bourbon Democrats. He ran for reelection on the same ticket with Democratic nominee candidate William Jennings Bryan. Altgeld had not supported Bryan for the nomination and hesitated to support the "Free Silver" plank that was central to Bryan's campaign.^[2] Harper's Weekly, warned that Bryan would be a puppet of Altgeld, whom it referred to as "the ambitious and unscrupulous Illinois communist". However Bryan, who was being hurt by Republican charges that he was a stooge for Altgeld, avoided the governor and did not endorse him.^[3]

Republicans in Illinois focused their attacks on Altgeld. Theodore Roosevelt, before an audience of 13,000 cheering partisans in Chicago, said Altgeld was "one who would connive at wholesale murder," who "condones and encourages the most infamous of murders," and who "would substitute for the government of Washington and Lincoln a red welter of lawlessness and dishonesty as fantastic and vicious as the Paris Commune."^[4] Altgeld campaigned energetically despite his failing health, and was defeated by John R. Tanner; Altgeld outpolled Bryan by 10,000 votes.

Altgeld ended his political career with a run for mayor of Chicago as the candidate of the Municipal Ownership Party in 1899. Although an early favorite to win, he finished a humiliating third, garnering only 15.56 percent of the vote.

Final years

Sickly since his brush with death in the Civil War, Altgeld had suffered from locomotor ataxia while governor, impairing his ability to walk. He lost all of his property except his heavily mortgaged personal residence, and only the intervention of his friend and former protégé, Clarence Darrow, saved him from complete financial ruin. Altgeld was working as a lawyer in Darrow's law firm when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while delivering a speech on behalf of the Boers in Joliet, Illinois in March 1902. He was 54 years old when he died. Thousands filed past his body as it lay in state in the lobby of the Chicago Public Library, and he was eulogized by Darrow and by Hull House founder Jane Addams. Altgeld is buried in Uptown, Chicago's Graceland Cemetery.

Poet Vachel Lindsay celebtrated his hero, "Altgeld the Eagle":

Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,

Whose name the few still say with tears?

Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,

Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.^[5]

Namesakes

Altgeld Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 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.^[6] The building is one of five castle-themed university structures in the state of Illinois that were particularly influenced by the former governor.^[7] The other four are the eponymous edifices at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Northern Illinois University, as well as Cook Hall at Illinois State University and Old Main at Eastern Illinois University.

Footnotes

^ Wallace, Chris (2004). Character: Profiles in Presidential Courage. New York, NY: Rugged Land, LLC. ISBN 1-59071-054-1.
^ Browne (1924) p 279-80
^ Browne (1924) p 286
^ Browne (1924) p 287
^ "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan," by Vachel Lindsay,
^ http://www.math.uiuc.edu/History/altgeld_history.html
^ http://www.dailyvidette.com/news/2007/10/16/News/Many-Campuses.Throughout.Illinois.Have.Castle.Style.Buildings-3033604.shtml

Bibliography and References

Barnard, Harry (1938). Eagle Forgotten. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Brown, Waldo R. (1924). Altgeld of Illinois. New York: Huebsch. http://www.questia.com/read/914101?title=Altgeld%20of%20Illinois%3a%20A%20Record%20of%20His%20Life%20and%20Work.
Fast, Howard (1946). The American. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce; American Book-Stratford Press Inc.. pp. 337.
Wish, Harvey. "John Peter Altgeld and the Background of the Campaign of 1896," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Mar., 1938), pp. 503-518 in JSTOR

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