Courtesy of the Franklin County Historic Preservation Society
This 1928 photo shows bootlegging gangster Charlie Birger, center, on the gallows just before his public hanging in Benton.

•October 31, 2018•

By Barbara Vitello
Of the Daily Herald

When it came to organized crime in Illinois, Chicago-based Prohibition-era gangsters loomed large during the 1920s and 1930s.
Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis, Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn and George “Bugs” Moran earned international infamy that persisted for decades after their deaths. For years, the general perception was that when world travelers informed locals they hailed from Chicago, the locals responded with “bang, bang” and a finger-gun gesture.
The combination of enterprising criminals, complicit public officials and Prohibition gave rise to crime syndicates involved in bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, extortion and murder. Organized by ethnicity and geography, the syndicates were known as the Chicago Mob or the Outfit. They produced the likes of Capone, Nelson and Moran — Capone’s rival and the target of an attempted assassination in 1929 known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which claimed the lives of seven men, including Moran associates and an innocent bystander or two. Read More

Photo courtesy of Rock Island Arsenal Museum
Antoine LeClaire, an early area settler, Illinois Gov. John Reynolds and Gen. Winfield Scott, at the table, are depicted in this mural of the signing of Black Hawk Purchase Treaty of 1832. Agreed to in the wake of the Black Hawk War, the sale conveyed Sauk lands in Iowa to the United States.

•October 24, 2018•

By Roger Ruthhart
IP Guest Columnist

Saukenuk was well-known as one of the largest Native American villages in North America, but one of its residents, the warrior Black Hawk, was even better known.
Although born in Saukenuk, which was located where Rock Island stands today, his father Pyesa and mother Summer Rain and other relatives could trace their ancestry back thousands of years. According to their oral traditions, both the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes were living in Canada 12,000 years ago at the time of the last glacial retreat. Many centuries later they were displaced from their Canadian home by the Iroquois.
The Sauk and Meskwaki migrated through New England and New York to the area near Niagara Falls. By 1640, the Meskwaki had settled at the west end of Lake Erie, near present-day Detroit, and the Sauk near Saginaw Bay in Michigan.
In 1701, the decades-long war began between the French and the Meskwaki, which almost led to the tribe’s extinction. Weakened, they joined the Sauk and together they migrated to the Mississippi River, where for nearly 100 years the tribes lived in their own villages and farmed, hunted and traded. Read More

•October 17, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

In 2000, a national group that knows about such things declared Illinois to have the best higher education offerings among the states for quality and affordability. Today, in contrast, nearly half all Illinois high school grads headed to college flee to institutions out of state. This can be turned around, but not without a renewed collaboration among state leadership on affordability, focus and understanding of the new realities.
Some background. Though not everyone needs a bachelor’s degree, every youngster who can benefit needs post-high school training and education. To meet these needs for three-quarters of a million of our citizens, Illinois offers four “layers” of higher education.
There are graduate research universities (think University of Illinois) and teaching universities (such as Illinois State University). And private colleges (e.g., Northwestern and Knox, which in total educate more four-year college students than the publics), and community colleges, which blanket the state. There are also for-profit colleges, which range from good to rip-offs.
There was dramatic growth and lavish spending on higher education and student financial aid post-World War II up to the 1980s, when student numbers boomed and the state had some money. Read More

•October 10, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Illinois Democratic House Speaker Mike Madigan is not the evil Darth Vader trumpeted by opponents’ ads—but he has shut down democracy in Illinois, and must go.
Mike Madigan is simply an old-fashioned Chicago pol who has had half a century in office to hone his skills and thus accrue unprecedented power.
In the Illinois legislature, absolutely no bill—not one—introduced by representatives of the people will ever be heard and voted upon without the express approval of Mike Madigan. Every bill, indeed every amendment to every bill, must first be approved by the small Madigan-controlled House Rules Committee.
Even if a back-bench lawmaker wanted to overrule the Rules Committee so as to afford a bill a hearing, such is impossible, as it takes unanimous consent(!) to break a bill loose from the Rules Committee.
Democracies also offer opportunities for voter participation through referendums on issues of major importance, such as on wildly popular matters such as term limits and independent redistricting of legislative boundaries.
Yet Madigan has blocked repeated efforts to give the people a vote on these issues. Read More

Credit: Steve Davis/The Register-Mail
Tablets of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas adorn the east entrance of Old Main on the Knox College campus in Galesburg. The tablets were hung during a celebration honoring the 100th anniversary of the Oct. 7, 1858, debate in Galesburg.

•October 3, 2018•

By Owen W. Muelder
For the Register-Mail of Galesburg

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are among the most important events in the United State’s history.
The seven debates were conducted throughout Illinois in the summer and fall of 1858. Not only significant in their own time, the debates have since been recognized as an ultimate example of our political process - which has continued throughout the centuries as most office seekers nationwide debate each other every campaign season.
Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln were respectively the Democratic and Republican party candidates for the U.S. Senate. The primary question these men discussed was whether slavery should be extended into the nation’s territories.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but he loathed slavery and looked forward to a time when it would disappear. He also maintained that it should be forbidden from being established in new states that desired to join the Union. Douglas defended the concept of “Popular Sovereignty,” whereby the people who resided in western territories should have the right to decide if slavery would be allowed.
The slavery question was so important then that no other political issue was raised by either candidate during the debates.
Public oratory was popular in the 19th century; both candidates often used harsh language and outspoken mud-slinging to characterize each other. People attending these contests also shouted out derogatory comments and catcalls toward both men. Spectators came from every part of Illinois to hear the speakers and newspapers throughout the country published detailed accounts. Read More