The Legislature Went Home Without a Senator
Washington's lawmakers adjourned deadlocked, leaving U.S. Senator John B. Allen unseated — and handing the blame to a 'factional minority' that refused to yield.
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.
NO SENATOR ELECTED. The legislature adjourned without electing a successor to United States Senator Allen. Of the seventy-five Republican votes cast, Senator Allen received fifty, Judge Turner twenty-four, and Judge Dunbar one. Two-thirds of the Republicans of the legislature have voted steadily from first to last for the re-election of Senator Allen, and the wishes of a large majority of the Republicans of the state have been thwarted by the action of an obstinate, sectional and factional Republican minority. The responsibility for this situation belongs wholly to this minority, who refused to vote for the choice of two-thirds of the Republicans of the legislature without the slightest reason that can be considered a public justification. From first to last the personal worth or the public capacity of Senator Allen has not been impeached. The Republicans from Pierce county, with a few honorable exceptions, voted for and against Allen because Allen had, in the just execution of his duty, favored a federal appropriation in aid of the improvement of the harbor of Seattle; the partisans of Judge Turner persisted in voting against Allen because two-thirds of the Republicans had preferred him to Judge Turner, and the Republicans who were tools of the Northern Pacific labored to perpetuate the deadlock, because it naturally helped to delay the discussion and enactment of railroad legislation until the last moment, and because Senator Allen was an upright and able man who had never been a dweller in the tents of the incorporated plunderers of the people. The Republican majority that have steadily refused to abandon Senator Allen are the loyal Republicans of this state; they stood in an impregnable position before their party.
“Party organization for influential, effective effort is dead the moment it surrenders to every fellow who says if the majority refuse to eat the loaf offered them by the minority, then the minority will see to it that the majority don't get any bread at all.”
A legislative majority couldn't seat its own choice for the U.S. Senate because a small faction refused to budge — leaving the seat empty and the state unrepresented. It's a familiar shape: the standoff over a contested seat, the accusation that a 'sore-heads' minority governs by threat, and the suspicion that railroad money was quietly steering the delay. Modern readers will recognize the gridlock and the finger-pointing instantly.
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