Tag: Illinois

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Dueling Seals

The U.S. Department of Justice sent the last governor of Illinois, George Ryan, to prison. And now it’s making a case against the incumbent, Rod Blagojevich. The department might consider opening an office in the governor’s suite from now on.

Anyway, in reading Blagojevich’s official governor’s page and in visiting the website of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, I noted the striking similarity between the official seals of the sovereign state and the federal department (click for larger images).

Justiceseal120908Illinoisseal120908

Well, the left-facing eagles, the shields of Union, and the olive branches are the same, anyway. For what it’s worth, the Justice Department seal apparently predates the current version of the Illinois seal by about 20 years. The histories are here:

Seal of the State of Illinois

DOJ Seal: History and Motto

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Your Illinois Governors: Felony Update

With the news that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is under arrest for influence peddling, it’s time to freshen my list of recent Illinois governors whose legal trouble reached felony level. As I said five years ago, when George Ryan, the last Illinois governor, was indicted on federal corrupion charges, Prairie State governors have racked up quite a record over the past half-century:

William G. Stratton (in office 1953-61): Indicted (1964) for income-tax evasion (acquitted).

Otto Kerner (1961-68): Indicted (1971) and convicted (bribery and other charges).

Sam Shapiro (1968-69): Never charged with anything, but then he only had eight months in office.

Richard Ogilvie (1969-73): Clean, so far as we know. Probably why he only served one term.

Dan Walker (1973-77): Indicted (1987) in his post-politics career as an S&L thief. Pled guilty.

Jim Thompson (1977-91): His career was about indicting other people, for a change.

Jim Edgar (1991-99): No dirt so far.

George Ryan (1999-2003): Indicted (2003) and convicted on federal corruption charges.

Rod Blagojevich (2003-present): Arrested (at home at 6:15 this morning) for influence peddling, including an alleged conspiracy to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. For a glimpse at government at its very best, it’s worth reading the press release from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. It’s a 12-page PDF. Among the highlights: “In a conversation … on November 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them.”

[Update: As U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald just explained in his press conference in Chicago, Blagojevich has not been indicted; he was arrested pursuant to a two-count complaint: count one charges him and his chief of staff with conspiracy to defraud the state of their honest services; count two charges them with a scheme to get at least one editorial writer at the Chicago Tribune fired. The full 78-page complaint, in PDF form, is available here: United States of America v. Rod R. Blagojevich and John Harris.]

Score:

Nine governors.

Four indicted; one under arrest; four unindicted.

Three convicted.

One acquitted.

One with charges pending.

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Tiny Alpine

Brainstorming some story ideas for my radio news gig, this is where I go: I started out thinking that it might be fun to call a couple of the less populated counties in the state to talk to the county clerks about election day plans. You know–the quaint voice of outback telling the city slicker about the one polling place in the town bar, or something along those lines. And then:

You know, California is big, about three times the land area of my native Illinois. It’s got about three times the population, too, so off the top of my head the overall population density is probably about the same (according to the Census Bureau, in 2006 California had 217 people per square mile; Illinois 223).

The Prairie State is divided into 102 mostly pocket-sized counties. California is split into 58 relatively large ones. California has nine counties with 1 million or more people, Illinois one (Cook). The Land of Lincoln’s biggest county would rank second here, behind Los Angeles County. The No. 2 county in Illinois, DuPage in Chicago’s western suburbs, would rank 11th in California, right after Fresno County. The third most populous Illinois county, Lake, would be 16th in the Golden State. And so on.

But as you go through the list of counties in the respective states, an impression forms: of extremes in California, of relatively even distribution, outside Chicagoland, in Illinois. My county, Alameda, is 738 square miles and has about 1.5 million people. On the other side of the Sierra Nevada passes is a place called Alpine County. At 739 square miles, it’s one of the smaller counties, but not the smallest (that would be, ahem, San Francisco County, at 47 square miles; Santa Cruz is second at 445-point-something) in the state.

Around the old Examiner newsroom, and it deserves to be called that, we had a fellow editor whose family has a summer home up in Alpine County. Whenever something happened in the county–a fire, generally; conceivably some other natural unpleasantness–the Examiner would describe the place as “tiny Alpine County.” The tininess comes from the population: 1,208 in 2000, an estimated 1,180 now.

That’s 1,180 people spread across 739 mountainy, brushy, stream-crossed square miles. One-and-a-fraction human beings per 640 acres. That’s almost as un-dense as Palin-land. My county has something like 1,300 residents for every resident of tiny Alpine County. That’s a lot more, wouldn’t you say? And the density in the city where I live is part about 7,000 times that of tiny Alpine. Just as a for instance of California realities.

Not that you couldn’t find similar extremes if you picked the right patches of Illinois. Cook County has about 5,500 people per square mile, and the city of Chicago is in the neighborhood of 13,000. Statewide, the least populous county is Pope County, at the state’s southeastern tip, with about 4,100 people. Those 4,100 fit somehow into 370 square miles–about 12 people per square mile; I’m guessing that’s the lowest county density in the state. (The second-smallest county population-wise is also the No. 1 smallest area-wise: Hardin County, bordering Pope County on the east. Hardin has 4,600 mosquito-bitten souls–about 27 per square mile.) Those are lonely places judged by the standards of Wrigleyville (or at least Wrigleyville before a Dodgers’ sweep), but they are downright crowded by tiny Alpine County standards.

And that’s where I’m calling, along with Modoc County, maybe, to see how the election preparations are going.

(The point of the foregoing. As I said: Where I go when I start thinking on something. ‘Night. )

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Illinois

Comparing home state performances, it looks like Obama’s support among exit poll respondents was 68.3 percent. Clinton didn’t crack 30 percent (29.8). All sorts of ways you can spin that, but one that Obama’s folks will seize on — and rightfully so — is that he actually ran a fairly respectable race in Clinton’s home state compared to her performance in his.

And oh, yeah: Illinois is Clinton’s home state, too (born and raised there, if you’re keeping score at home).

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The Hell of the … South

A wonderful find, by way of Marie:

First, this: An account of a cycling road race, the Hillsboro Roubaix, in what I’d call south-central Illinois. It’s a big state, and it’s full of stuff I’ve never heard of or dreamed existed. Just a few items that come to mind from the last several years: the car ferries on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers; the grave of Mother Jones; the national cemetery, mostly for Civil War dead, down at hardscrabble Mound City; the beautifully massive and useless flood gate in the levee at beaten-down Cairo, just a few miles from the cemetery.

Anyway, Hillsboro is said to be about 50 miles south of Springfield. It’s apparently in a hilly area, and the town itself still has some rough cobbled streets. The name of the race, the Hillsboro Roubaix, is a reference and tribute to one of the greatest of the classic spring races in Europe, Paris-Roubaix. The race’s most notable feature, as illustrated in the stirring documentary “A Sunday in Hell,” is its route across sections of ancient cobblestone roads across the countryside of northern France and Belgium. “Cobblestones” doesn’t do the riding surface justice: the pavement consists of big, rough-hewn stones, thick with dirt and choking dust if dry or slick with mud if wet. I’ve never ridden there, but the race looks punishing and treacherous and usually features a slew of hard, harrowing crashes. Tradition tags Paris-Roubaix “the hell of the north.”

The account of this year’s Hillsboro Roubaix I linked to above is from a racer named Luke Seemann, who lives in Chicago. It’s a beautiful narrative on the course and a nice look at competitive road-racing tactics. Luke came in 11th in a tough race. Bravo on the result and on the write-up (a couple more excellent race accounts to check out from Mr. Seemann: from the 2006 Snake Alley Criterium (Burlington, Iowa) and the ’06 Baraboo (Wisconsin) road race).

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The News from Equality

By way of Lydell, the Chicago Tribune, and the Associated Press, news from Little Egypt:

“EQUALITY, Ill. — No major damage was reported after a minor earthquake shook areas around this small town in southern Illinois on Monday.

“The quake struck at 3:48 p.m. and registered magnitude 3.6, according to Rafael Abreu, a geologist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver. It was centered near Equality, which is about 120 miles southeast of St. Louis.

“Abreu said calls from people who felt tremors came from Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky, but the quake was unlikely to have caused any damage.

” ‘There might have been some rattling of objects, but not much more,’ Abreu said.

An earthquake in Southern Illinois? Not too shocking, if for no other reason than the greater Equality area is only 100 miles or so as the crow flies from New Madrid, Missouri, near the center of some of the most powerful earthquakes in U.S. history.

But Equality‘s another matter. Just the name: There’s got to be a story behind that. If a local school district page is to be believed, the town was known as Saline Lick. In the 1820s, the name was changed to honor the settlement’s French heritage; Equality refers to the Egalité of the French revolutionary motto. But neither the name nor the school’s Web page hints at the town’s historical notoriety: A local landowner, John Crenshaw (said in one article to be a grandson of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), is remembered for his part in a sort of reverse Underground Railroad. He and his many cohorts kidnapped free blacks in the north and sell them into slavery. Crenshaw also made a fortune from salt processing, an operation that depended on hundreds of “leased” slaves. (Yes — slavery in the Land of Lincoln; in fact, Lincoln is reported to have been Crenshaw’s guest during a visit to the area in 1840). A tangible piece of this legacy survives: Crenshaw’s place, now called the Old Slave House, still stands a few miles from Equality.

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Road Blog: Tolono 09.11.04

Dad and I headed south from Chicago, leaving the North Side about 9:30 a.m., going down Lake Shore Drive and the Dan Ryan before peeling off to the southwest on Interstate 57 with a destination of Cairo, all the way at the southern tip of the state. We stayed on that all the way down to Tolono, a small town that’s the subject of a railroad song by Utah Phillips (I wrote briefly about the song earlier this year).

The old Illinois Central (now Illinois Central Gulf) and Wabash (now Norfolk Southern) lines come together in town. In his song, Phillips describes the place as a flag stop — a place too small to have regular service. That looks like it was probably true, though there are so few passenger trains now that I’m sure it’s been decades since even a flag stop was made.

We got off the interstate just northwest of Tolono and drove into town on U.S. 45. I noticed while we were heading through that there was a sign for a historical marker. But as we passed the spot indicated — the entrance to a gas station — I didn’t see a marker. We drove out the south end of town, turned around, and tried again. We turned in at the gravel entrance to the gas station, but still didn’t see anything historic looking. But we did see a local constable parked in his Tolono squad car, apparently waiting for speeders . He lowered his passenger-side window as we rolled up.

“We were looking for that historical marker,” I said.

“What?” he answered.

“Do you know anything about the historical marker that’s supposed to be here?”

“A drunk took it down last winter. State still hasn’t put it back up.”

“Do you know what it was for? What the marker was for?

“I don’t know. State’s supposed to put it back up again.”

I had my camera out, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask whether I could take the officer’s picture. I also didn’t ask how long he’d been living in the area that he had no idea what this marker was about. Inquiries like that could be a threat to homeland security and speed-zone enforcement. Instead, Dad and I drove off to see Tolono; I was hoping there’d been an old station or stop of some kind I could photograph so I can send a shot to my old friend Gerry, who used to play the song so well. But there’s not a whole lot happening in town, certainly no evidence of a rail-passenger platform anywhere. I shot a couple scenes along the Norfolk tracks anyway. Then we headed back to U.S. 45 to go south for a few miles and get back on I-57.

We passed the historical marker sign again, and going by the gas station I finally saw the monument. It was a tablet set into a boulder in among some sort of ever-greenery. The bushes kind of looked like landscaping for the gas station, and the boulder hadn’t been visible when we were consulting local law enforcement about markers of historical significance. The police officer had been parked no more than 100 feet from the spot.

We halted again, and it turned out to be worth it this time. The marker commemorates what is said to be Lincoln’s last speech in Illinois, on February 11, 1861, during a brief stop on his journey east to be inaugurated. One site notes that Lincoln stopped further east, too, in Danville, and spoke to a crowd there. A railroad-centric account of the journey mentions Tolono, but not Danville.)

Lincoln’s brief Tolono speech is on the marker:

“I am leaving you on an errand of national importance, attended as you are aware with considerable difficulties. Let us believe as some poet has expressed it, ‘Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.’ I bid you an affectionate farewell.”

Monument commemorating Lincoln’s stop in Tolono, Illinois, (just south of Champaign) in February 1861.
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Prison: Their Home Away from…

I see that Illinois’s last governor, George Ryan, has been indicted. Quite a record for the last half-century of Prairie State governors:

William G. Stratton: Indicted for income-tax evasion (acquitted).

Otto Kerner: Indicted and convicted (bribery and other charges).

Sam Shapiro: Never charged with anything, but then he only had eight months in office.

Richard Ogilvie: Clean, so far as we know. Probably why he only served one term.

Dan Walker: Indicted and convicted–in his post-politics career–as an S&L thief.

Jim Thompson: His career was about indicting other people, for a change.

Jim Edgar: No dirt so far.

George Ryan: Indicted.

Score:

Seven governors.

Four indicted; three unindicted.

Two convicted.

One acquitted.

One with charges pending.