100 years ago in the Record
Sunday, July 21, 1918
One week after the Republican state convention in Saratoga Springs, New York Democrats will hold their convention in the same place starting Tuesday, July 23.
Like the Republican gathering, the Democrats will not nominate candidates for statewide office. Candidates will be chosen by rank and file primary voters in September, but the convention gives party leaders a chance to give one primary candidates their endorsement.
One of the contenders for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination is newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who won the nomination in 1906 but lost the election to Republican Charles Evans Hughes. Hearst supporters are circulating petitions statewide to get his name on the primary ballot.
A pioneer of so-called “yellow journalism,” Hearst is a divisive figure in journalism and politics. A Record reporter gets fresh evidence of this tonight, when 31 year old Gustave Schulman walks into the newsroom and announces that he’s willing to spend $25,000 of his own money to stop Hearst.
Schulman is a Canadian who recently enlisted for the Canadian army in New York City. He signed up in the U.S., he explains, after receiving treatment for defective eyesight that got him rejected by Canadian medical examiners.
“I feel that if I can stop Hearst with his sugar-coated patriotism I will be accom- plishing as much as if I were over there,” Schulman says, declaring his political mission the moral equivalent of war. Hearst was accused of favoring Germany in his newspapers before the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 191.
$25,000 in 1918 is equivalent in buying power to approximately $417,000 in 2018. Schulman has the money to spare, having recently inherited $3,000,000. How he proposes to use his money against Hearst is, perhaps understandably, left unclear in our story.
Schulman favors New York City Council president Alfred E. Smith for governor. “Al Smith is the only man we want,” he says, “and if my money can do it, we’ll get him.”
For many Trojans, the big story of the convention is the split it’s exposed among city Democrats. Mayor Cornelius F. Burns intends to attend the gathering despite being left off the Rensselaer County delegation by local party boss Joseph J. Murphy.
After an exchange of interviews yesterday in which Burns threatened reprisals against Murphy and Murphy dared him to try, today’s Sunday Budget reports that Murphy “now realizes his mistake in publicly slighting the Mayor of Troy.”
A past president of the New York State Conference of Mayors, Burns is “a far stronger man, by far, in the State than Mr. Murphy” and is sure to be “an influential factor in the deliberations.”