The Fake Canal Subscribers That Exposed a Seattle Newspaper War
In 1892 the Seattle Telegraph touted a popular subscription fund for the Lake Washington canal. The Post-Intelligencer called the list a confidence game built on the names of prominent citizens who never pledged a cent.
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.
Never was a newspaper placed in a more humiliating position than that occupied by the Seattle Telegraph at the present time. Having sold its opinions and betrayed the city in which it is published, it undertook to mislead the people of Seattle as to the true issues involved in the campaign in which we are now engaged—to deceive them by a persistent course of falsehood too shameless for belief.
Having taken the ground that it was impossible or undesirable to secure the construction of the Lake Washington canal by government aid, it argued that the work should be done by popular subscription. In order to give an appearance of soundness to this utterly unbusiness-like and impracticable proposition, it published from day to day a list of alleged subscribers to a fund for building the canal. It took the names of prominent citizens and published them in this list, setting opposite them various sums which they were alleged to have subscribed. Having done this, it called on other citizens to add their subscriptions. In short, it played the boldest kind of a confidence game on the people of Seattle.
When its falsity and double-dealing are exposed, the Telegraph weakly and whiningly says that it was told by somebody, whom it does not name, that the gentlemen whose names it entered on its list as subscribers would give, or might give, or ought to give, the amounts charged up to them. A more wretched excuse could not be imagined. A thief caught with his plunder on his back could not be in a more pitiable position. Are any of the people of Seattle to be longer misled by the falsehoods of this alleged Seattle journal, whose opinions are bought and paid for with Tacoma gold?
“It played the boldest kind of a confidence game on the people of Seattle.”
Public works funding fights are still fought through the press, and the line between boosterism and misinformation can be just as blurry. The Lake Washington Ship Canal was eventually built with federal help, not through the fake subscription list the Telegraph promoted.
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