The Scandalous Church Rivalry of 1872
A Seattle editor lashes out against a local rival, defending his character against allegations of meddling in the affairs of the Methodist Church.
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.
Another vile slanderer and meddler in the private or social affairs of others is held in detestation by all decent people. The editor of the Intelligencer is preeminently one of that class; a mendacious meddler who for years has palmed off his services to the public as a journalist. He forces himself into an attitude of sanctimony by a system of espionage, restrained by no sense of common shame or concern for the more sacred relations of private life, or the delicate details of the family circle, or the decent social custom of permitting folks to manage their own personal affairs free of molestation. The mendacious meddler, after devoting columns of his paper to assaults upon the personal character of a lawyer in this city, in a matter in which he had no concern whatever, vents his spite by mailing us in our family and church relations. He says of us: 'Only last week, we are most creditably informed, he was clandestinely going around among those whom he dared approach to get signatures to a round robin, to be presented to the Bishop and meant to ask the removal of the Rev. Mr. Summers, the venerable clergyman in charge of the Methodist Church in this city.' It is not necessary to say to those who know anything of the church or its mission that what we are accused of doing is a willful and malicious lie.
“The mendacious meddler, after devoting columns of his paper to assaults upon the personal character of a lawyer in this city, in a matter in which he had no concern whatever, vents his spite by mailing us in our family and church relations.”
This vitriolic exchange highlights the brutal, hyper-partisan nature of 19th-century frontier journalism, where editors often traded personal insults as freely as political policy. Today’s social media feuds echo this era's 'meddler' culture, showing that the struggle to maintain professional boundaries in a small, tight-knit city like Seattle is a timeless civic hurdle.
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