biography
| name: |
Altgeld, John Peter
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1847–1902)
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| biography:
| Reformer and US governor, born in Niederselters, W Germany. Brought to Ohio as a baby, he received little schooling while working on his father's farm. A Union private in the Civil War (1864–5), he then taught in Ohio, moving to Missouri where he became a lawyer (1871) and a county attorney (1874–5). Moving to Chicago, he began his own law practice, making a fortune in real estate. He wrote Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims (1884), becoming Superior Court judge (1886–90), then chief justice (1890–1). As the Democratic governor of Illinois (1893–7), he gained sudden fame (and offended the conservative establishment) when he pardoned three anarchists convicted of complicity in the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riot (a labour protest labour meeting at which seven Chicago policeman were killed in Haymarket Square), claiming they had not been given a fair trial. He improved prison conditions, reformed trial and parole procedures, and advocated child labour laws. He opposed the use of federal troops to end the Pullman Strike in 1894. After campaigning for William Jennings Bryan in 1896, he lost his own re-election campaign, returning to his law practice with his partner, Clarence Darrow. He was penniless when he died, but his reputation as a progressive reformer increased over the years. |
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