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Updated: June 5, 2025
At the conclusion of my first term, I was, on January 22, 1889, re-elected without opposition. The country had turned the Republican party out of power and elected Mr. Cleveland in 1892; and for the first time since 1856, the State of Illinois went Democratic and elected Mr. Altgeld as Governor.
The Knights of Labor who first put "equal pay for equal work" into their platform, appeared in their late convention, under the lead of Sovereign, who declared that Gov. Altgeld "was one of the finest types of American manhood to-day." They seem to be drifting toward that phase of Socialism to which Alice Hyneman Rhine referred.
Altgeld was so earnest and sincere, so full of his message that he scorned all the tricks of oratory, but still he must have been aware that his insignificant form and commonplace appearance were a perfect foil for the gloomy, melancholy and foreboding note of earnestness that riveted his words into a perfect whole.
In no Northern State east of the Mississippi were the Populists able to make a strong showing; but in Illinois, the success of John P. Altgeld, the Democratic candidate for governor, was due largely to his advocacy of many of the measures demanded by the People's party, particularly those relating to labor, and to the support which he received from the elements which might have been expected to aline themselves with the Populists.
The losses inflicted on property throughout the country by this strike have been estimated at $80,000,000. The strikers were undoubtedly encouraged in resorting to force by the sympathetic attitude which Governor Altgeld of Illinois showed towards the cause of labor.
Over against the type of oratory represented by Altgeld, America has produced one orator who fascinated first by his personal appearance, next exasperated by his imperturbable calm, then disappointed through a reserve that nothing could baffle, and finally won through all three, more than by his message. This man was Roscoe Conkling, he of the Hyperion curls and Jovelike front.
Governor Altgeld, of Illinois, leader of the Democrats of that state from 1892 to 1896, was a successful lawyer who was looked upon by his friends as a liberal-minded humanitarian, the friend of The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor, whose sympathies with the laboring classes had given him the support of the reformers and the wage earners.
I have drawn at this point upon Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic, 453-456. Peck, 451-453. For brief accounts of Tillman, see Leupp, National Miniatures, 117; N.Y. Times, July 4, 1918; N.Y. Evening Post, July 3, 1918. Cf. Whitlock, Forty Years of It, 64 ff.; Altgeld, Live Questions and The Cost of Something for Nothing.
One of the most impressive orators of modern times was John P. Altgeld, yet to those who heard him for the first time his appearance was always a disappointment.
While nothing in its genesis or spirit could be further from "anarchy" than factory legislation, and while the first law in Illinois was still far behind Massachusetts and New York, the fact that Governor Altgeld pardoned from the state's prison the anarchists who had been sentenced there after the Haymarket riot, gave the opponents of this most reasonable legislation a quickly utilized opportunity to couple it with that detested word; the State document which accompanied Governor Altgeld's pardon gave these ungenerous critics a further opportunity, because a magnanimous action was marred by personal rancor, betraying for the moment the infirmity of a noble mind.
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