Altgeld of Illinois

THE AMERICAN (337 pp.) -- Howard Fast--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

"Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten," wrote one Illinois poet, Vachel Lindsay. "The only governor of Illinois sure to be named by remote generations," wrote another, Carl Sandburg. Ex-Secretary of War Newton D. Baker thought him "a genuinely 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.

Fictionalized biography is at best a bastard literary form, at worst as silly and hoked-up as, say, U.S. cinema's recent contribution to the biography of Frederic Chopin, A Song to Remember. The American is a sober, workmanlike job, but it suffers from the acute schizophrenia common to all 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 and fullest account of Altgeld's life. The American contributes "interpretive" moments and prose passages that sound like Upton Sinclair.

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."

The truth is, as Novelist Fast points out, that the prisoners had almost certainly been railroaded to jail for political purposes, and that the Governor himself was not trying to overthrow civilization. He was a self-made Gilded Age millionaire lawyer of German peasant stock who happened to develop a social conscience. Personally he had little to gain by the pardon and much to lose; in fact, he lost the governorship at the next election, and later could not even get elected Mayor of Chicago. He died a relatively poor man at a relatively early age (55) in 1902, of locomotor ataxia. He was mourned by thousands, among them Poet Vachel Lindsay, who as a boy had known him as governor in Springfield:

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.*

*As Chicago cops moved in to break up a union rally, a bomb was "thrown by an unknown hand," killing or wounding 200 workers and 67 policemen. Eight union leaders were convicted (without much direct evidence); four were hanged, one committed suicide. The other three, sentenced to life imprisonment, were freed by Altgeld.

*Reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Co. from the poem, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.

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