Word: altgeld
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great man"; so did Brand Whitlock, onetime U.S. Ambassador to Belgium; so did, and do, numberless others. The latest to unearth and praise the forgotten eagle is able, young (32), leftist Novelist Howard Fast (The Last Frontier, The Unvanquished, a New Masses assistant editor). Fast retells the John Peter Altgeld story in a fictionalized biography: The American, A Middle Western Legend...
...work of its kind. The biographical and historical detail limit its interest as story. The choice of facts and the touches of literary fancy work limit its value as biography. Novelist Fast knows facts when he sees them, treats them respectfully, arrays most of those relating to Altgeld's career in good order. But he adds dabs of "color," invents dialogue ("Dear . . . do you want eggs or hot cakes?" "I want hot cakes"), even pretends to plumb Altgeld's mind and explain his motives. Harry Barnard's biography, Eagle Forgotten (1938), remains by far the best...
Millionaire "Socialist." Altgeld's bravest, best-known act as governor of Illinois was his pardon, in 1893, of three labor leaders jailed for complicity in Chicago's Haymarket bombing seven years earlier.* For this he was damned far & wide as a "Socialist," a "wild-haired demagogue." Robert Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln's only surviving son, rose at a Harvard alumni banquet to beg all good Harvard men to "stand firm in the midst of such dangers in the republic." The press screamed that the Governor was encouraging "anarchy, rapine and the overthrow of civilization...
...Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth...
...Wild Chicago, When the Time Is Ripe for Ruin's deeds, When constitutions, courts and laws Go down midst crashing creeds, Lift up your weak and guilty hands From out the wreck of states, And as the crumbling towers fall down, Write ALTGELD on your gates! Thus adjured the outraged New York Sun in 1893. Called anarchist (for freeing three of the Haymarket rioters) and blamed for the great Pullman strike was Illinois' liberal Governor John Peter Altgeld. Years afterwards Poet Vachel Lindsay wrote a poem about him (The Eagle That Is Forgotten}, Biographer Carl Sandburg called...