The State's Duty to Your Dinner Plate
An 1878 editorial debate in the Seattle press over a 'Colusa Sun' piece satirizes the radical notion that government should provide housing and ensure personal satisfaction for citizens.
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.
Our little namesake down at Colusa can't keep on the track. He professes to be the special champion of the workingman, but he is at heart the greatest enemy they have. In his paper of Wednesday, he takes up for the defense of a 'socialist' ego, and is as usual, silly. There is a movement in Colusa to compel the state to provide homes for the people and it is an argument for government paternalism that is quite common. The Colusa editor quotes the old hymn: 'Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, while others fight to win the prize, and sail through bloody seas?' But our contemporary gets worse as he goes along and in the next paragraph says: 'It is a sad, sad state of affairs, and indicates the impractical character of our state legislation. Its first care should be for the comfort and happiness of its people; homes should be provided for them, and they made satisfied with them.' The state must not only provide homes, but it must make people satisfied! Whenever they find a fellow who has got drunk because he has not had enough of female society, or because he has had to eat a dinner cooked by a Chinaman—whose wages someone else has paid—take him up and give him a good home and keep doing for him until he is satisfied! If the females do not want his company, give them a little wholesome coercion! Nice doctrine.
“The state must not only provide homes, but it must make people satisfied!”
This 1878 editorial echoes today's heated debates over 'housing first' policies and government-subsidized living. While the historical text mocks the idea of the state providing homes for the working class as 'paternalism,' the underlying anxiety regarding housing affordability remains a central, unresolved struggle in modern Seattle.
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