John Peter Altgeld

German-born governor of Illinois (1893-1897)

• Born: December 30, 1847
• Birthplace: Niederselters, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: March 12, 1902
• Place of death: Joliet, Illinois

A German immigrant who rose to become one of the most influential Democratic politicians in the United States, Altgeld furnished American political life with a high standard of moral courage and helped to establish the principle that maintenance of the welfare society is an obligation of government during a crucial period of political change.

Early Life

John Peter Altgeld (awlt-gehld) was born in the Prussian province of Nassau, the eldest son of a wagon maker, also named John Peter Altgeld, and his wife, Mary Lanehart. The family came to the United States in the spring of the following year, and Altgeld grew up on farms near Mansfield, Ohio. Because his father was against the idea of education for his children, Altgeld attended country schools for only three terms. When he was sixteen, he enlisted in an Ohio militia regiment and was sent to Virginia. There, he contracted a fever that permanently damaged his health, but he refused to be sent home and finished out the hundred days for which the regiment had been mustered.

When he returned to Ohio, Altgeld, much against his father’s wishes, attended high school in Mansfield and a teacher-training school in Lexington, Ohio, and taught school for a time. Until he was twenty-one, he turned over all of his wages to his father, but in the spring of 1869, perhaps because the parents of Emma Ford would not permit her to marry him, he headed west on foot, working on farms as he went.

Altgeld arrived finally in St. Louis with only fifteen cents, worked there for a time in a chemical plant, and later worked on a railroad that was being built in southern Kansas. When a recurrence of his fever forced him to quit, he went to northwestern Missouri, most of the way on foot. Dressed in rags, he collapsed at a farm near Savannah, Missouri, and was taken in by a farmer who restored him to health and gave him work. Later, he taught school and read law, and in April, 1871, was admitted to the bar and began legal practice in Savannah. He had not revealed any interest in politics until this time, beyond a devotion to the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, but he served as city attorney for Savannah for a year and ran successfully as the Populist candidate for prosecuting attorney of Andrew County in 1874.

For reasons that remain obscure, Altgeld resigned this office after a year and, with only one hundred dollars, moved to Chicago. There he established a law practice, and in 1877, on a visit to his parents in Ohio, he married Emma Ford. During the next years, Altgeld achieved great success investing in Chicago real estate and in 1890 held property valued at a million dollars.

Life’s Work

In 1884, Altgeld was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in Illinois’s traditionally Republican Fourth District. At this time, he was an apparent conservative in politics and part of the Chicago economic establishment. In the same year, however, he published Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims , which revealed many of the ideas for reform that he sought to implement later in his political career. The book pleaded for the elimination of the causes of crime and the rehabilitation of criminals, and it condemned police brutality against vagrants. In 1886, in the immediate wake of the Haymarket Riot, he wrote a newspaper article in which he argued for the compulsory arbitration of strikes.

That year, he ran successfully for judge of the Cook County Superior Court, serving for five years. Apparently Altgeld regarded the judgeship as the first step toward his ultimate goal—a seat in the U.S. Senate, the highest national office open to citizens of foreign birth. When he resigned his judgeship and failed to win election to the Senate, he embarked on his greatest project in real estate—the construction of the sixteen-story Unity Block, at that time one of Chicago’s greatest buildings.

In 1892, Altgeld was nominated by the Democrats for the Illinois governorship, probably more for his success as a businessperson than for any stand he had taken on social issues. In this campaign, he revealed the strict ethics and liberal instincts for which his followers admired him, mixed with a real hunger for power and an occasional tendency to political chicanery. As the first Democratic governor of Illinois in forty years, Altgeld cleared out all the Republicans in state government, and though many of his replacements were brilliant, he fired some able Republicans and appointed some incompetent Democrats.

In the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot, when a bomb killed several policemen, eight anarchists had been sentenced to death; one of them committed suicide in prison, and four others were hanged. The sentences of the other three—Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe—had been commuted to life imprisonment. Altgeld’s supporters expected him to pardon these three men and assumed that he would be motivated only by feelings of mercy. Nevertheless, when the pardons were issued on June 26, 1893, it was clear that though he detested anarchism, he was convinced that the eight men had been convicted not for their deeds but for their opinions, that the jury had been impaneled improperly, that the judge was prejudiced, and that five of the accused were, in effect, the victims of judicial murder.

Altgeld issued a pamphlet of eighteen thousand words in which he presented his arguments with great clarity and logic, but this explanation could not allay the storm of abuse that fell upon him for his act. Those who had favored the sentences now raged at him in virtually every newspaper in the country, and those who had favored a pardon were angered that he had issued an absolute pardon and that the pamphlet exposed the errors of the judicial system itself. Altgeld was accused of being an anarchist; this was said by many editorialists to be the result of his foreign birth.

The charge that he was an anarchist seems absurd when one considers his use of the Illinois militia during the labor troubles of his term as governor. Only two weeks before he issued the pardons, he sent the militia to Lemont in response to a plea from local authorities that they could not maintain order in a labor dispute. In June, 1894, he sent the militia to Mount Olive, where striking miners were interfering with mail trains. These affirmations of the power of the state did not satisfy his enemies, because, unlike his predecessors, Altgeld used the militia only to maintain order, not to break the strikes.

This was one of several issues that led to Altgeld’s break with President Grover Cleveland . In July, 1894, when the Pullman Company had locked out its employees, and federal troops had been dispatched by Cleveland to break the “strike,” Altgeld, in a letter to the president, condemned his action on the grounds that sufficient Illinois militia were available on the scene to preserve order. The Chicago newspapers, still harping on Altgeld’s supposed anarchism, wildly denounced him for this protest, but in fact violence did not occur until the federal troops arrived, and then Chicago police and the state militia put it down. In fact, the disorder actually ended when a company of Altgeld’s militia killed seven men by firing point-blank into a mob.

This dispute was only one of Altgeld’s quarrels with the president. Altgeld saw Cleveland as an unquestioning supporter of “government by injunction,” the use of the courts to rule strikes illegal, and he condemned the Supreme Court when it struck down the federal income tax in 1894, in an opinion written by Cleveland’s appointee, Chief Justice Melville Fuller. Altgeld saw little difference between Republicans and Cleveland Democrats on the tariff question or on the silver issue. By thorough study, he made himself the outstanding authority on the latter question in American public life, and he embraced the silver issue in 1895, calling for the coinage of silver to increase the money supply.

By this time, in spite of the campaign of vilification against Altgeld in the press for the Haymarket pardons and his stand on the Pullman dispute, Altgeld was the most influential Democrat in the country. With the laboring class throughout the country, he enjoyed an affection that verged on idolatry, and his stand on silver gave him a large following in the West and South. As a result, there is little reason to doubt that, had it not been for his foreign birth, he would have been the Democratic nominee for president in 1896.

As it was, he was clearly the master of the Democratic convention of that year. The platform reflected his views—free coinage of silver and gold at a ratio of sixteen to one, opposition to government by injunction, arbitration of labor disputes involving interstate commerce, protection of the rights of labor, and an income tax. Although he did not favor the nomination of William Jennings Bryan, Altgeld worked mightily for his election, even at the expense of his own reelection campaign. He did not want another term as governor—his finances had suffered from the economic depression of the time, and his health was bad—but he bowed to the party’s wishes.

The Republican strategy, in the face of a national trend away from the gold standard, was to depict Bryan as the tool of the “anarchist” and communist Altgeld. Not for the last time in the nation’s history, political profit was made from calling an opponent a communist. On October 17, 1896, in a great speech at Cooper Union, Altgeld took the fight to the enemy, arguing against government by injunction and against federal interference in the rights of states to maintain order within their own borders. Throughout the campaign, he literally rose from a sickbed to speak, sometimes seven or eight times a day.

In the Bryan debacle, Altgeld’s defeat for reelection was probably inevitable, and he was defeated in the legislature as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He returned to Chicago to attempt to rebuild his shattered finances, but he lost control of the Unity Building and returned to the practice of law. As governor, he had rejected a bribe of a half-million dollars from the Chicago traction magnate Charles Yerkes, and he had always favored public ownership of monopolies. On this platform, he ran unsuccessfully as an independent for mayor in 1899.

During the 1900 presidential campaign, Altgeld was still a powerful influence, as was evident in the Democratic Party’s repetition of its 1896 stand on the silver issue, and he campaigned with great energy for Bryan. At this time, he was also condemning American policy in the Philippines. He died suddenly on March 12, 1902, a few hours after making a speech in Joliet, Illinois, that condemned Great Britain’s treatment of captured Afrikaner (Boer) women and children in concentration during the South African War.

Significance

During his governorship, John Peter Altgeld achieved much for Illinois in the improvement of existing state institutions and the building of others, and his use of the state’s police power to preserve order reflected a deep conservative respect for the rights of property, contrary to the charge of anarchism leveled against him by journalistic hacks and by politicians who must have known better.

Altgeld’s pardoning of Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe, an act of courage with few parallels in American political life, was consistent with his stands on social and economic issues—stands that have been vindicated by history. In 1896, he forced the Democratic Party to commit itself for the first time to social reform, and the achievements of the Progressive Era and the New Deal were the fruits of the seeds he planted. Indeed, it is an irony of history that Altgeld is forgotten by most Americans, while Theodore Roosevelt, who once in a foolish speech called him an apologist for wholesale murder, is a hero of American Progressivism because he enacted much of Altgeld’s program. Altgeld remains what the poet Vachel Lindsay called the “wise man, that kindled the flame.”

Bibliography

Barnard, Harry. Eagle Forgotten: The Life of John Peter Altgeld. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938. The definitive biography of Altgeld, not likely to be superseded, and the basic source for information on his early years.

Browne, Waldo R. Altgeld of Illinois. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924. The first biography of Altgeld, written out of profound respect for its subject and informed by a deep sense of social justice. Lacks a thorough account of Altgeld’s pre-Chicago years. Valuable, though superseded by Barnard’s biography.

Christman, Henry M., ed. The Mind and Spirit of John Peter Altgeld. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. Includes a useful though brief biographical account and a representative selection of Altgeld’s writings, including the Cooper Union speech of 1896 and “Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab.”

Ginger, Ray. Altgeld’s America. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958. A thorough study of Altgeld’s achievements in developing a progressivism that would adapt American political idealism to modern industrial conditions.

Pegram, Thomas R. Partisans and Progressives: Private Interests and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870-1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pegram describes how Progressives in Chicago and other parts of Illinois sought to implement reforms and create a more efficient government. Includes information about Altgeld’s governorship.

Whitlock, Brand. Forty Years of It. New York: D. Appleton, 1925. Whitlock served in the Illinois government during Altgeld’s governorship and was his close associate. This autobiography provides a firsthand account of events surrounding the Haymarket pardons and the Pullman dispute.

Wish, Harvey. “Altgeld and the Progressive Tradition.” American Historical Review 46 (July, 1941): 813-831. Emphasizes the progressivism of Altgeld’s social and economic beliefs. Puts his career in a perspective that is frequently lacking in accounts that concentrate on his role in the Haymarket case.