Monday, Oct. 8, 1917
Mayor Cornelius F. Burns opens his re- election campaign tonight by going on the offensive against Republican challenger George T. Morris.
Burns tells the gathering at Harmony Hall that he had resolved earlier this year not to seek a fourth twoyear term as mayor. But after the U.S. declared war on Germany last April prominent citizens “of all political beliefs” urged him to run again.
“These men argued that I had a public duty to perform,” the mayor says, “They contended that during the next two years the effect of the world war would be felt here as in other communities, and that one experienced in administrative affairs and intimately acquainted with the local situation could meet such conditions and any unforeseen contingencies far more satisfactorily than a new man.”
The new man, should Burns lose next month, would be Morris, a maverick fiscal conservative who represents the Fourth Ward in the common council. Since securing the Republican nomination despite the obvious distaste of the GOP leadership, Morris has been criticized for making his campaign too personal. He has described Burns as a publicity-seeking egomaniac whose fiscal mismanagement has driven businesses away and stalled Troy’s economic growth.
Chairing tonight’s meeting, state public service commission chairman Seymour Van Santvoord portrays Morris as a traitor to his city. The Republican’s “false and malicious” attacks on the mayor and the city are “actuated by the same kind of object which prompted a member of the United States Senate [Robert M. LaFollette] to utter remarks of disloyalty against the government last week,” Van Santvoord says.
Corporation Counsel Thomas H. Guy claims that Morris is “unfitted by intelligence, experience or temperament to become your chief executive.” The challenger is “A man intemperate of speech who has denounced without cause and defamed without reason,” Guy charges.
Speaking for himself, the mayor acknowledges that some businesses have failed during his watch, while some skilled workers have sought opportunity elsewhere, but insists that Troy “was by means the only community” affected by economic developments since the world war began in 1914. Now that the U.S. is in the war, Burns notes, city industries are booming again.
As for Morris, “He owed a public duty of helpfulness to the city and to the administration. He chose instead to be merely a critic and a fault finder. He has given utterance to statements that were not only untrue but were highly injurious to the city.”
The alderman’s inaccurate statements about the city’s fiscal health have done more to drive or keep businesses away from Troy than any of Burns’s own policies, the mayor claims.