On the day after then-Rep. Glenn Poshard lost his gubernatorial bid to Republican George Ryan in 1998, he and his wife sat in their southern Illinois home and took stock: What would they do now?
Poshard had served in Congress for a decade by then. He was a conservative Democrat who’d come through the ranks first as a teacher and then as a state senator, representing a district that, back then, was then solidly working-class Democrat.
Former colleagues dangled the possibility of lobbying, telling Poshard five clients could make him a million dollars a year.
“I said, I can’t even imagine doing that. I just, I have no interest in that whatsoever,” he said.
So that morning, he and his wife, Jo, landed on another plan: He’d been asked repeatedly on the campaign trail about how he planned to help abused children. He hadn’t known the problem was so dire.
The two of them set up the Poshard Foundation for Abused Children, an all-volunteer organization funded entirely by private donations and housed at John A. Logan College in Carterville, Ill. The foundation provides grants to 36 counties in southern and south central Illinois to help community programs and shelters dedicated to serving abused children.
Twenty-five years later, that organization has been the thread woven through his post-congressional life. Jo, now retired, runs the organization. Poshard who also had a long career in academia that culminated in him serving as the president of Southern Illinois University for eight years, helps out.
“I never thought of staying in Washington or becoming a lobbyist or anything like that,” he said. “As much as I loved Washington, I didn’t want any part of it. If it wasn’t legislating, then I didn’t have an interest.”
In recent months, Poshard has added a new task to his post-Congress work: He travels the rural parts of the state reading poetry — his own and others’ — to raise money for food deserts in the region.
“My goal is to raise a half a million dollars,” he said. “Now, whether I’ll get there or not, I don’t know. But I’ll go anywhere.”
Political origins
Poshard, now 79, was born poor. His father, who had lost an arm in a childhood hunting accident, worked as a water boy on a road construction crew for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. The elder Poshard was “a dyed-in-the-wool Franklin Roosevelt Democrat” who became a precinct committeeman. Poshard’s early memories include spending nights at the polls, watching the vote being counted.
Poshard followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming first a county Democratic leader, then a state senator. When Democrat Ken Gray retired from Congress in 1988, Poshard, encouraged by friends, ran and won.
It was, he said, a different era.
He remembers Tip O’Neill, who had just ended his 10-year tenure as House Speaker, speaking at his freshman orientation, held that year at Harvard University.
“He said, ‘You know, you’d be better served if you took your first term and just listened. Because you don’t know how this place operates,’ ” Poshard said.
Poshard took that advice to heart. He wishes others would.
“I’m not trying to be adversarial here … but so many people in the media, they want to run to Marjorie Taylor Greene for her opinion, or [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez for her opinion. … I mean, these people have their own thoughts and so on, but I don’t think they understand the whole inner workings of government.
“I’m not sure they should be the spokespeople for either party.”
Life in Congress
Poshard said when he served, bipartisanship was a point of pride, not shame, and he counted Republicans such as Bill Emerson of Missouri and then-minority leader Bob Michel of Illinois among his friends.
When he’d take a tough vote on a controversial issue, he’d have his staff set up a series of town hall meetings afterward. “I felt like I had a responsibility to explain those votes to the general public,” he said. “It was the one chance I had to help them understand why I voted the way I voted, and give them information that they maybe hadn’t seen before, that, you know, that figured into my decision.”
In Congress, he worked on rural health issues, working to increase the reimbursement rates on Medicare and Medicaid patients. He and other members of the Illinois delegation made progress on the Olmstead Lock and Dam, an inland waterway project that produced hundreds of jobs. “I shepherded that thing along as much as I could,” he said.
And he managed to convince then-Gov. Bill Clinton, who was running for president, to include 11 counties in southern Illinois in a campaign proposal to create the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, now the Delta Regional Authority.
“Those 15 counties in southern Illinois have made hundreds of millions of dollars that’s come into our area to support infrastructure needs, leadership, development, education and health care initiatives,” he said. “It has improved the quality of life of our people.”
There were disappointments as well. He was heartsick when the Clean Air Act passed under President George H.W. Bush because of its impact on mining communities in his district. “From a national point of view, the Clean Air Act made all the sense in the world. But for my district, it just devastated us,” he said. “Thousands of people lost their jobs.”
Despite wins and losses, Poshard never took his time in Congress for granted, he said.
“I couldn’t believe a kid from a very poverty-stricken area over in southeastern Illinois ended up in Congress,” he said. “I had a little apartment out in Old Town [Alexandria], Virginia, every morning when I would drive by those monuments like Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial, it was unreal. I just couldn’t believe that I was actually there.”
But Poshard is also a realist: He knows he’d never be elected in that district, now represented by Republican Mike Bost, today. Bost received 74 percent of the vote in 2024.
“You know, our rural areas — the Democrat Party has almost just given up on,” Poshard said. “The people that settled this area all came from Virginia and Kentucky and those states, so, you know, we already have an inclination to right of center in our politics.”
A career in academia
Poshard said after he left Congress, he took a job as assistant to the president at John A. Logan College in 1999, working to secure a property tax increase for the school. From there, he moved on to be vice chancellor for the administration at Southern Illinois University, then a member of the board of trustees, than the chairman of the board.
“And then our president passed away, and the board drafted me to take his place,” he said.
The school is the second-largest system in the state, and Poshard was able to leverage his contacts in Washington and Springfield, Ill., to get support for the school.
“I loved every minute of that,” he said of being president. “Golly, that was a wonderful experience.”
‘Not my America’
Before he ever ran for state Senate or Congress, Poshard taught government at high school. He’d draw a line on the blackboard. On one end of the line was laissez-faire, hands off, he’d explain. On the other end, authoritarianism.
“And I said ‘democracy is right here in the middle,’ you know?” he recalled. “Sometimes it’s slightly right of center, sometimes slightly left of center, but here is where the American people are, you know.
“But today it seems like both parties want to drag people farther away from the middle, and that’s not my America.”
The Republican Party today, under President Donald Trump, he said, “isn’t anything like the Republican Party that I knew when I was in Congress.” He’s turned off by the coarseness, he said, but many in his district find the president’s lure irresistible.
“They think he’s different, he’s a fighter and all this sort of thing,” he said. “And I think where we live in rural areas, that’s very appealing.”
Still, while he’s concerned about the rise of Trump Republicans and the sharp partisanship that exists today, he said he is less fatalistic than some.
“I don’t believe, like a lot of people believe, that we’re facing revolution, or we’re facing the downfall of democracy,” he said. “I remember the ’60s when we had assassinations of the president, the attorney general, Martin Luther King. The whole country was going through a nervous breakdown, and we survived, you know?
“And I believe we’ll survive all of this, because I think, basically, democracy demands the middle ground. Maybe slightly right of center, sometimes, maybe slightly left of center. But not on the extremes.”
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