Boss Bennett’s Moving Birthplace
A Tacoma political boss keeps relocating John H. McGraw’s birthplace—Bermuda one week, New Brunswick the next—as a Seattle paper cries foul in the 1892 governor’s race.
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.
Mr. Nelson Bennett, the boss with prize-ring propensities, has discovered a new mare’s nest. Despairing of preventing his election by any ordinary method of campaigning, he has undertaken to prove that Mr. McGraw is not an American citizen.
Editor Bennett’s paper, the Tacoma Ledger, yesterday published a telegram from its Olympia annex to the effect that Mr. McGraw was born in New Brunswick, has never been naturalized, and is therefore not eligible for the office to which he will be elected in November.
Only a few weeks ago the Ledger was declaring with all positiveness that Mr. McGraw was born in Bermuda. This was a dodge to prevent his nomination. It failed. Now the Ledger has shifted the scene of his birth and declares with equal positiveness that he was born in New Brunswick. This is a dodge to prevent his election. It will also fail.
The truth is that Mr. McGraw was born in the county of Penobscot in the very American state of Maine. There is absolutely no question of this, and the clumsy concocter of the Olympia story published in the Ledger had no more reason for asserting otherwise than he would have for asserting that Grover Cleveland was born in Jericho or Nelson Bennett in the United States.
Their insane desire to defeat McGraw is apparently driving Mr. Bennett and his agents into such a state of frenzy that they are not responsible for the stories which they circulate. There is only one other possible explanation for the New Brunswick roorback, and that is that Boss Bennett is so proud of his own Canadian origin that he cannot refrain from the temptation to claim as a fellow-countryman so excellent and able a man as John H. McGraw.
“This was a dodge to prevent his nomination. It failed. Now the Ledger has shifted the scene of his birth and declares with equal positiveness that he was born in New Brunswick. This is a dodge to prevent his election. It will also fail.”
Birthplace and naturalization attacks are still a staple of American campaigns, though the legal stakes are usually clearer than they were in 1892. The exchange also captures the era’s Seattle-Tacoma newspaper war, where editors treated a rival city’s candidate as fair game for fabrication.
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