The 'Virtuous Spasm' of 1876: Seattle’s Early Critique of Political Greed
An editorial from the Puget Sound Dispatch captures the simmering public outrage over a government scandal in Washington Territory, drawing parallels between national corruption and the mismanagement of local university land grants.
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.
We have ever held to the doctrine that crime is not a party or a sectarian peculiarity. As a party editor, we have ever regarded it our first duty to purge our party of its own sins before assailing others. Macaulay, the English historian, says that the society of England was always subject to virtuous spasms after long seasons of licentiousness; a kind of lenten season, in which the then most prominent offenders were made the victims and scapegoats of the accumulated sins of the people. The same thing is apparent to every intelligent observer in our own social and political system. Everyone is seized with a virtuous spasm and affects horror at the Belknap crime. Belknap is no worse than he was three or four years ago, and his crime was as well known to hundreds of persons then as it is now. Belknap's crime is but the legitimate and inevitable fruit of a system which has been growing upon the country for years. Take another example, with which the people of this section are more familiar: 72 sections of land, amounting to over 46,000 acres, was granted to this Territory for University purposes. In each of the states like Michigan or Iowa, under proper management, this grant has built up universities which are an honor to the nation. In this Territory, under the management of a preacher Republican politician, this magnificent subsidy has been dissipated. Its entire assets today would not command $20,000, and all that is left of it is a school which would be a disgrace to any country village in the land.
“Snobbery and jobbery have grown up together and have gone hand in hand till our social and political system is controlled by snobs who owe their position to public jobs.”
This 1876 editorial reflects a recurring theme in Seattle history: the suspicion that public land and resources—originally intended to serve the common good, like the University of Washington's early land grants—were being carved up by political insiders. It serves as an early mirror to today's anxieties regarding how civic development and land-use decisions often prioritize private profit over public infrastructure.
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