As President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker vowed to protect Illinoisians. Pritzker said on Nov. 7, “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans: I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people, you come through me.”

He’s not the first Illinois governor who stood against a president’s wishes. In 1894, Democratic Gov. John Peter Altgeld (1847-1902) challenged Democratic President Grover Cleveland. Altgeld served from 1893-1897 and was a national figure in the Progressive reform movement.

Altgeld is a true rags to riches story; he was an infant when his family immigrated from Germany to Ohio. He served during the Civil War in the 164th Ohio infantry. He returned to the family farm and then walked to Missouri and worked on a railroad construction gang, while studying law at night. In 1872, he was admitted to the Missouri bar and came to Illinois in 1881. Besides practicing law, he acquired a real estate fortune, building in 1891 what was then Chicago’s tallest building, the 16-story Unity Building. In 1886, he was elected to Cook County’s Superior Court.

In 1892, he defeated Bloomington Republican Gov. Joseph Fifer. Altgeld initiated reforms that included public education funding, prison reform, child labor and factory inspection laws. He supported public education, and each university received a new building, the Gothic Revival “castles.” Cook Hall at Illinois State University is one of those.

In 1893-94, the country fell into Depression. 1894 saw coal strikes across Illinois. Altgeld refused to send the state militia to protect mining company properties, only dispatching the military if there was violence.

The same year witnessed the largest industrial strike in U.S. history, the Pullman strike. George M. Pullman had built his model town south of Chicago. When the economy collapsed, he cut workers’ wages and hours but refused to lower rents in company-owned houses. On May 11, 1894, Pullman workers walked out in protest. Organized by the new American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, workers across 27 states refused to move any train with a Pullman sleeping car on it. Railroads added mail cars to the Pullman trains and then claimed the workers were impeding the U.S. Mail.

The U.S. Attorney General was railroad attorney Richard Olney, who still received a railroad retainer while in federal office. Olney convinced President Cleveland to send federal troops to break the strike. Altgeld pleaded with Cleveland that Illinois was peaceful, but his entreaties were ignored. Olney went to the courts for injunctions against the strike. Altgeld wrote that: "This decision marks a turning point in our history for it establishes a new form of government never before heard of among men; that is government by injunction. … Under this new order of things a federal judge becomes at once a legislator, court and executioner.” As the troops marched into rail yards violence broke out and over 12 were killed in Chicago. The strike was broken.

With the strike ended, hungry Pullman residents wrote to Altgeld, who came to the community on Aug. 20 and went door to door, inquiring about people’s conditions. He wrote to Pullman, asking for compassion for the residents. He was rebuffed and instead turned to the state’s population, who made donations to a relief fund.

Altgeld represented the Democratic Party’s progressive wing; Cleveland and his Vice President Adlai Stevenson were opposed to increasing the money supply and they supported white Southern Democrats in their anti-African American reign of terror. In 1896, Democratic presidential nominee Williams Jenning Bryan and Altgeld both lost their campaigns. Altgeld was defeated by Republican Joseph Tanner, who continued Altgeld’s labor policies, refusing to dispatch militia units to guard company property.

Altgeld was financially ruined after his term. Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow brought Altgeld into his law firm. He collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 54 while speaking in Joliet. He was eulogized by Darrow and Hull House founder Jane Addams. Springfield poet Vachel Lindsay composed his 1913 poem, "The Eagle That is Forgotten," saluting Altgeld.

Gov. Pritzker has a proud model in John Peter Altgeld who put Illinoisans before political or corporate interests and built Illinois’ firm foundation for the Progressive Era.