100 years ago in The Record
Monday, Oct. 29, 1917
The Republican party is scrambling to recruit speakers to make a better case for mayoral candidate George T. Morris amid reports that his maverick campaign against Democratic incumbent Cornelius F. Burns is floundering.
State senator George B. Wellington is expected to make his first speech for Morris in Lansingburgh later this week, after standing aloof from the campaign for most of the fall.
“Not a few admirers of Mr. Wellington were surprised to hear he had been induced to speak in this campaign,” The Record reports, “His very absence from it to date had given many of them the satisfaction of feeling that he did not fit into the present proceedings.”
Our paper is not the place to go for an unbiased account of the Morris campaign. While our editors normally lean Republican, they’ve endorsed Burns while condemning Morris as an obstructionist mudslinger. The Fourth Ward alderman has answered in kind, accusing The Record of lying about him and trying to suppress its own past criticisms of the Burns administration.
“The Morris campaign is lacking in weight,” our reporter writes, “It is generally regarded as entirely too devoid of seriousness….It has been rich in noise and shouting; violent and unrespecting and even untruthful in attack and denunciation and all the time showing a lamentable paucity in the kind of appeal that will be effective with Republicans.”
Wellington, by comparison, represents “the highest type of men in the Republican party, men who previous to this time have been indifferent to if not wholly out of sympathy with the character of campaign waged in behalf of the city ticket, men who have preached Republicanism and advocated good government without vilifying their neighbors.”
While some GOP leaders hope that Wellington can turn the city campaign around, one unnamed Republican has his doubts. He tells our writer that Republicans “are either going to ridicule and hammer Mayor Burns out of office if they find the people unsuspecting enough to listen seriously to them, or they are going to go down to defeat by the most disgraceful majority a political party ever received in this city.”
Food Pledge Week A mayoral proclamation today opens Food Pledge Week in Troy. As part of a national food-conservation campaign, public school students will go door-to door encouraging households to do their part in the effort to stretch out the wartime food supply.
“It is expected that every family in the country will enlist,” Burns writes. He asks Trojans to take part “in the same spirit of enthusiastic loyalty that has marked every activity of the people of Troy during this war.”