The Auditor’s Open Revolt
A defiant Seattle county official squares off against the city’s tax-paying elite, sparking a public war of words in the local press.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A request made by a number of the largest tax-payers in the County upon the County Auditor for a more explicit statement of the financial condition of the county than he chose to make in his official report, has brought forth, through the organ of the “ring,” the following insolent response:
'The only evidence I have that such a petition ever originated is from its appearance in the last issue of the PUGET SOUND DISPATCH... It certainly could not be that the whole affair was set up for any political effect—the financial responsibility of the signers would preclude such an idea. Possibly it was not the intention of the majority of the signers to have the thing published, but owing to the pressing necessity of the DISPATCH editor, in his last expiring efforts to give an interest to his dying sheet... they could not resist his powers of persuasion. But whichever reason the public may assign... my impression (and probably the most correct one) was to treat the thing with the contempt it deserves.'
Gardner Kellogg, the County Auditor, then escalated the feud by claiming the signers were enticed into the plot by 'political sharpers.' The DISPATCH fired back, calling Kellogg’s response 'insolent audacity' and noting that he owed his position to the very citizens he now treated with contempt. The paper accused Kellogg of shielding financial irregularities, writing, 'They ask this clerk for explanations of manifest irregularities and he replies with insult and contempt, assuming that he is master and they his humble petitioners.'
“This bravado, so unprovoked and out of place, is conclusive of rascality somewhere.”
This 1872 public spat over fiscal transparency and the arrogance of local government serves as a sharp reminder that Seattle's tradition of contentious, loud-mouthed civic discourse is as old as the city itself. Today's debates over public oversight and institutional accountability echo the exact same tensions between taxpayers and the ‘rings’ of power.
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