The Plagiarism Scandal of the Walla Walla Poet
A local Tacoma salesman is publicly shamed after allegedly passing off someone else's verse as his own.
In your issue of this date you publish some verses entitled 'Ode to the State of Washington,' and purporting to be from the pen of 'H. K. S.,' otherwise H. K. Schertzer, a traveling salesman of Tacoma. I wrote the verses in question myself and by request gave Mr. Schertzer a copy of them in the office of the Simon house, Walla Walla, last February. While I do not regard them as being worthy of controversy, still, seeing that you have thought them deserving of a space in your columns, I feel called upon to expose this dishonesty on the part of Mr. Schertzer. Considering his actions in this matter, I am now forced to believe that those pieces which have formerly appeared over his initials in your paper have been acquired either by the same method or culled from the pages of some obscure Eastern paper and appropriated to himself.
“I feel called upon to expose this dishonesty on the part of Mr. Schertzer.”
Literary theft in the age of print media has evolved into the modern-day internet 'copy-paste' culture, but the social sting of a public call-out remains largely unchanged. This dispute highlights how, even in the 1890s, local newspapers served as the primary arena for both civic discourse and petty, public reputation-shredding.
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