The Paper Attacks Populist Proposals
The Post-Intelligencer editors eviscerate the People's Party's platform, calling for state-owned coal mines and legal tender currency 'the grossest kind of ignorance.'
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.
Among the resolutions adopted by the People's party of King county on Saturday were demands for a ship canal between Puget Sound and Lake Washington funded by legal tender notes, and that the state own and operate coal mines to supply fuel to citizens at cost. These resolutions are instinct with the grossest kind of ignorance. Nobody save a very ignorant man or a hopelessly insane person could have seriously formulated such nonsense. The authors seem to be under the gross delusion that it is the business of government to support the people, instead of the people to support the government. Demanding that the state furnish coal at cost is bedlam; this would be rank state socialism, which would tumble into ruin like a house of cards.
“The delusion that the government can create money, and furnish money ad libitum to the people, is the bee that never stops buzzing in the People's party bonnet.”
This attack on early Populist movements highlights the intense ideological conflict of the 1890s in Washington. The debate over public infrastructure and state-owned resources versus free-market privatism remains a core, unresolved argument in modern Pacific Northwest politics.
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