THIS DAY IN 1918 IN THERECORD
Thursday, March 14, 1918. A Rensselaer county deputy excise commissioner forced to resign this weekend is a pawn in a battle for supremacy in the local Republican party organization, The Record reports. Albert E. Brooker will resign from his post as special deputy excise commissioner effective Saturday, March 16. News that Brooker has been pressured into quitting has sparked a backlash against James J. Child, the Republican state committeeman for Rensselaer County’s second assembly district where Brooker lives, who apparently approved the move. “I received a telephone message from Deputy Commissioner of Excise Farrier requesting my resignation at once,” Brooker tells our paper, “I enquired whether there was any dissatisfaction with the management of my office, either clerical or financial, and was told there was not. Mr. Farrier said had there been he would have informed me long ago.” Brooker reportedly is getting sacked because “he failed to support the Republican ticket at the latest election,” but our reporter writes that the charge is “discounted by innumerable phone calls and letters which Mr. Child received in which the strongest protest was made against Mr. Brooker’s removal.” Behind it all, The Record claims, is an old antagonist of our paper. Former state prison superintendent and longtime county Republican boss Cornelius V. Collins, an old- school machine poli- tician, currently represents Troy’s first assembly district on the GOP state committee. According to our reporter, Collins led the effort to drive Brooker from office, alleging that the deputy excise commissioner was “not much good to the organization.”
Collins’s object is twofold. He hopes to hurt Child’s standing in the state committee and in his district by associating him with the removal of a popular official. At the same time, Brooker’s replacement, W. C. Blackwood of the Fifth Ward, is a Collins loyalist who’s expected to help him win reelection for his district this September.
“Authentic information indicates that Mr. Child as state committeeman is no longer acceptable to the Collins regime,” our writer states. Collins reportedly hopes that the Brooker controversy will make Child vulnerable to a pro- Collins challenger, Alba M. Ide.
While Collins may hope that rank-and-file Republicans will blame Child for Brooker’s ouster, “as a matter of fact Child never consented to any such thing, [ but] he is evidently helpless to extricate himself from the entangled and embarrassing position in which he finds himself involved.”
Our editors recognize it all as “typical Collins & Co. methods,” while “Mr. Child has received one more lesson in applied politics and in future will be more wary as to accepting at face value the statements of certain interested parties.”
- Kevin Gilbert