100 years ago in The Record
Thursday, July 26, 1917
Things aren’t going well so far this summer for the Rensselaer County Republican party. They’re stuck with a candidate for mayor of Troy that they don’t really want, and they now face a bitter primary fight for sheriff. Party leaders tapped Buddington Sharpe for sheriff at a July 20 conference. If elected in November, he would succeed term-limited Republican incumbent William P. Powers. Sharpe’s fist test will come in September, however, when he faces Alexander Diver in a primary election. Diver, a Schaghticoke man, comes to Troy today to “let it be known that he does not intend to abide by the decision of the new advisory committee.” He refutes reports that he had withdrawn over the weekend following the leadership’s selection of Sharpe. The “shrievalty” primary sets up a battle for dominance within the GOP between longtime party boss Cornelius V. Collins and his longtime rivals. Collins, a former state prison superintendent who left office under a cloud of scandal, has been making a comeback in county politics. The replacement earlier this year of the ten-member advisory committee with a three-member executive committee is now widely seen as a purge of Collins’s opponents. Buddington Sharpe is Collins’s choice for sheriff. The Record reports that anti-Collins Republicans, including Diver, were conspicuously absent from the conference that tapped Sharpe. Diver claims that he didn’t even know a conference had been scheduled, while “the personnel of the conference was so arranged that Sharpe men would predominate.”
“Mr. Diver’s friends are using the word ‘double-cross’ very profusely,” our reporter notes. Diver himself claims that “he had not authorized anybody to sanction the withdrawal of his name.”
The unofficial leader of the anti-Collins Republicans is the man Diver and Sharpe will fight to succeed. Sheriff Powers’s friends want him to claim the party chairmanship from the perpetually resigning Harry A. Lewis, while the Collins forces will probably keep Lewis from resigning, if only to keep Powers out of power.
AMERICA AND THE WAR
A Record editorial writer is impatient with the pace of the country’s adjustment to wartime necessities since last April’s declaration of war on Germany. He blames “three months [of] no settled policy” on Congress.
“In this country Representatives have been selected more from the standpoint of availability than of brains. As a result, the dominant type in Washington is deficient in the very attributes the nation needs so grievously to-day.
“Most of the members of Congress are utterly lacking in the ability to think and reason,” our writer claims, “If this be the measure of democracy, how can we hurl epithets of condemnation of autocracy?”