100 years ago
Tuesday, Sept. 17, 1918. A Chamber of Commerce meeting is usually an occasion for boosterism and optimism, but former state senator Edgar T. Brackett says tonight that “I had hoped sometime to hear a general discussion by this body of the question, ‘What is the matter with Saratoga?’”
Speaking at the Casino, Brackett claims that “Saratoga Springs has been going down hill for the past fortysix years.” As proof, he cite the fact that a vacant lot on North Broadway that sold for $10 per front foot in 1872 now goes for “only a fraction of that amount.”
Brackett has his own idea of what’s the matter with the Spa City. “One of the first things that must be done is to make Saratoga Springs a safe place to live in,” he says, “Any chance for a repetition of the crimes of last August must be avoided, and the people at large must be informed that the city is safe and decent and that vulgar crimes will not be tolerated.”
Saratoga Springs saw two murders and a wave of burglaries during the 1918 racing season. Brackett won’t rule out that racing may be what’s the matter. “If the races cannot exist without a following of low vulgar criminals, then the races ought to go,” he says.
In response to a Chamber survey, Saratogians described crime as a “burning question” and expressed a need to “clear our name with the outside world” after the 1918 meet.
“In regard to racing there were all kinds of opinions,” The Saratogian reports, “One member wanted racing stopped entirely while another wanted everything possible done to encourage the sport.” W.C.T.U. Convention To Jennie E. Wright, president-elect of the Saratoga County Women’s Christian Temperance Union, alcohol is the real problem in the city and around the world.
“Now the two greatest destroyers in the world today are Kaiserism and John Barleycorn,” Wright says at today’s county convention at Corinth Baptist Church. Alcohol, a.k.a. John Barleycorn, is “the Kaiser’s most powerful ally, so we must destroy him that we may defeat the Kaiser.”
Wright believes that “the most effective assistance” civilians can give the federal government in wartime is “to help secure ratification of the national prohibition amendment and war prohibition.
“While it doesn’t seem possible that God would ever permit the dreadful Hun to triumph, yet I believe He will withhold from us the final victory, until we shall have driven from our midst the terrible sin of legalized intemperance and shall have made ourselves right with Him; that then, and not until then, He will give us the victory.”