"Godlove S. Orth is a fat, fluffy, pudgy-cheeked, good-humored old boy, with a volubility co-equal with the necessities of a politician, and a smile that is broad, bewitching, childlike, and bland," the Chicago Times reported in 1876.

"[3] He was, in fact, a politician skilled at political survival, and had to be: as was so often the case with congressmen, local jealousies kept even the most able members from serving more than one or two terms, before some other county in the district demanded the nomination in recognition.

On the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he became the Grant Administration's most reliable point-man, and in 1871 the one to manage a resolution appointing a fact-finding commission sent to Santo Domingo to prepare the way for possible annexation.

He condemned the racial discrimination of the first Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), declaring that he would vote against the bill because "I am opposed to all legislation founded on 'race, color, or previous condition of servitude.'

Members of the reform wing distrusted Orth automatically, because he stood well with Senator Oliver Morton's political machine, and they doubted his personal integrity.

They were strengthened in their suspicions when a newspaper charged him with participating in a ring of speculators that shook down Venezuelan claimants in disputes between injured parties in Venezuela and the United States and with lobbying the Congress to confirm those claims.

With the ex-Congressman refusing to make a full explanation or convincing denial and with rumors of incriminating letters waiting to be released in what promised to be a hot campaign[clarification needed], Morton withdrew his public support.