Book dossier

Live questions

by John Peter Altgeld

Live Questions in the 1899 edition of Geo S Bowen & Son, is a very large 1009-page collection of the ex-governor of Illinois's "productions", essays, speeches, testimonials, newspaper articles and some interview format epistles that one suspects were written for the particular purpose of this book. An extraordinary collection of prose, both detailed and philosophical in bent, by one of the premier progressive governors of the midwest in the turbulent 1890s. Altgeld ran cross-current to his legislature and the spoilsmen politics of the time and had no lack of political courage, witness his pardons. This collection of his political thought is priceless as he examines the politics of not only Illinois, but also the country at the close of the 19th century. Unsparing in his criticism of economic and social injustice, he is also a keen observer of the sordid realties of the working conditions of his era and the court system and political system that maintained the economic darwinism of the time. He examines tariffs, corporations, courts, political factions, prisons, railroads, elections, with a critical eye that is humanistic and partisan at the same time. What is striking about this book is how much of it could have been re-written, with only slight modification, to describe conditions 110 years later. Altgeld was essentially a modern figure, with modern sensibilities, and to read his "productions" is to see the seedbed of thought that gave rise to the later insurgency of Theodore Roosevelt and the future experiments of the New Deal. A matchless document of our political evolution.