The Mayor's Political Purge
Mayor Ronald faces backlash for attempting to oust a Republican member of the Board of Public Works in a transparent grab for partisan control.
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.
The animus of Mayor Ronald's attack upon the Republican members of the Board of Public Works is too apparent for any intelligent person to be for a moment deceived by his high professions. It is a partisan move, pure and simple. Mayor Ronald requested the resignation of Mr. Heilbron, a gentleman of wide business experience whose integrity has never been called into question. When Mr. Heilbron refused to comply with the request, the mayor—who had only days before expressed his high personal esteem for the man—suddenly formulated a list of trivial charges, accusing him of 'misfeasance, malfeasance and non-feasance in office.' It appears the mayor simply wishes to clear the board of Republicans to turn the office into a political machine for the Democratic Party. The mayor’s own party organ, the Telegraph, has inadvertently given the game away, admitting that Mr. Heilbron's only real 'offense' was his active role in Republican committee victories.
“It is a partisan move pure and simple, and the pretense that it is anything else is altogether too transparent to be seriously considered.”
The tension between an elected mayor and independent-minded boards remains a staple of Seattle governance. Today's debates over public oversight and institutional independence echo this 1892 friction over who holds the levers of city power.
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