Voters Reject Party Bosses
Both the Colored Men's League and the German-American Club move to cut ties with the Democratic machine over insults and corruption.
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.
The Colored Men's League held a large and enthusiastic meeting last evening in the municipal court room. It was understood that a strong effort would be made by heelers of the Collins faction to capture the meeting and pass resolutions that would commit the league to the Democrats. The trick did not work, and through the persistent work of B. Csendline, L. L. Welcker, and others, these resolutions were turned down, and a set of pro-Republican resolutions was passed unanimously. Meanwhile, the Independent German-American Club, which has a membership of 500, showed its appreciation of John Collins' complimentary allusion to the 'damned Dutch' by unanimously adopting resolutions refusing to support the Democratic party, which is managed not by its best elements but by a party boss who has the effrontery to publicly insult and malign the German element.
“We emphatically deny the right of any man or men to control the Negro vote of Seattle.”
This 1894 election coverage highlights a recurring Seattle dynamic: the friction between grassroots ethnic and labor organizations and the 'party boss' machine. Today's civic debates over neighborhood representation and the influence of political PACs mirror these late-19th-century attempts to wrest control from centralized power structures.
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