A Partisan Dust-Up at the Occidental Block
A power struggle within the King County Democratic Party results in a knife-edge vote and the birth of a rival political club.
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.
Fifty-seven Democrats met in the Occidental block last night for the purpose of having a talk. It was proposed to organize the King County Democratic Club, but the 'kid committee' objected on the ground that there were Democratic organizations enough, to-wit, the Central club and the kid committee. Colonel Crockett, J. F. McElroy and J. A. McDonald fought the project vehemently, but A. D. Warner, of Snohomish, and T. H. Cann, no less vigorously supported it. The question was finally put to a vote and the kids got away with the Democratic party by a majority of one, the vote standing 29 to 28. The victorious majority declared that they had now 400 members in the Central club, and any more clubs would only tend to split the party. The eight-and-twenty who lost were not satisfied with making the kid committee raw, but gleefully 'rubbed it in,' in the vernacular, by naming their organization the 'Cleveland and Lewis Republican Club,' and announcing that they would be heard and seen on Saturday night in the 'perceshun.' The club thus established will meet tonight at rooms 203 and 204 Occidental block.
“The eight-and-twenty were not satisfied with making the kid committee raw, but gleefully 'rubbed it in,' in the vernacular, by naming their organization the 'Cleveland and Lewis Republican Club.'”
Internal party squabbles and the struggle for organizational control over local political machines remain a fixture of Washington politics today. This clash captures the transition from informal clubhouse politics to the formalized party structures that would come to define the 1890s.
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