Cheers, Hisses and a Canal: The Night Tacoma Cheered the Ditch It Was Told Would Ruin It
At a packed Republican mass-meeting in Germania Hall, speaker after speaker dared the crowd to believe the Lake Washington canal would destroy Tacoma — and the crowd roared back that it would not.
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TACOMA, Aug. 26. — [Special.] — All of the speakers who spoke at the Republican mass-meeting tonight and touched upon the Lake Washington canal were encouraged and applauded. When the canal proposition was first broached, the subject was received by some sullenly, and by one or two in the crowded galleries with hisses. But in every instance when the matter was explained and elucidated, the canal proposition was cheered to the echo.
Germania hall was crowded in every part, although the few anti-canal enthusiasts tried today, and especially this afternoon, to draw from the attendance by counter meetings and receptions. This proved to no avail. Several accompanied Mr. McGraw and Mr. Burleigh from Seattle. Chairman Albert E. Joab called the meeting to order and proposed three cheers for the ticket from the president down; in a ringing chorus the audience responded again and again.
A. F. Burleigh was presented as the Demosthenes of Seattle. He ripped up the Democratic national and state platforms, then said, in a pleasant, insinuating manner: "There is something else in these state platforms, Republican and Democratic, that you would like to hear me speak about." "You bet," shouted one, and then everybody cheered. He said he was for the Lake Washington canal because he believed it right, and would continue for it until he was convinced to the contrary.
"Whence come these people?" he asked. "Why came they here to build them such a beautiful city as Tacoma? Do these magnificent structures look as if they were to be blown away, to be torn up in the morning and moved somewhere else? But you have been told that because Seattle desires water connection between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, your town is to be deserted and ruined!"
"If you do believe it," Burleigh continued, "why is it that while the Great Northern railroad is advertising for and trying to secure 500 or 300 men to work on its railroad near Snohomish — if this is so, why is it you do not desert Tacoma and go over to Snohomish? This is your chance, a chance such as it is said would come if the Lake Washington canal were built. Why don't you desert Tacoma?" Applause was sufficient assurance. It was evident the speaker had the audience with him.
"And we of King," continued Mr. Burleigh, "will meet you on the banks of the Puyallup river the night of the election with the biggest majorities for Doolittle and Price ever rolled up in any county for any candidate in the state."
Colonel Patrick Henry Winston kept the audience in a continual uproar. When some Democrats present spoke out for Tom Carroll, saying Tom had helped to fight for the Union, Colonel Winston retorted: "Yes, and some of his Democratic friends in South Carolina shot him." He added: "And I hope if Mr. Carroll becomes feeble and impoverished Grover Cleveland will not be in the presidential chair to veto his application for a pension." When he said the building of the Lake Washington canal was in keeping with the policy of the Republican party in aiding internal improvements, he was cheered with a vim.
Applause lasting fully a minute greeted Mr. McGraw. Under his administration as governor, he said, he would promise honesty in every department, and he declared himself for small internal improvements to the state, to which the government owes money.
W. H. Doolittle assured the audience that he had been nominated for congress without making any pledges or promises. "Any blunderbuss could sit around on the grass and find fault," he said, and "those who are grinding out their tale of woe will have no share in Republican victory this fall or thereafter." Mr. Doolittle said he had just returned from the Chehalis county convention and brought word that Chehalis would roll up a bigger Republican majority than ever before.
Senator Claypool proved the great joker of the evening. He lashed the petty kicks of certain Tacomans unmercifully, and he did it so smoothly and adroitly as to precipitate hilarious applause. He could see no crime in the federal government's appropriating money for the Lake Washington canal.
The meeting closed with three cheers for the ticket, which were even louder than those given at the opening.
“Why is it you do not desert Tacoma and go over to Snohomish? This is your chance, a chance such as it is said would come if the Lake Washington canal were built. Why don't you desert Tacoma?”
The 'Seattle ditch' was the 1892 equivalent of a regional megaproject — pitched as ruin by its opponents and as salvation by its backers. That a Tacoma crowd cheered a Seattle canal once it was explained to them shows how much of the era's politics was theater and how much was self-interest dressed as doom. The Lake Washington Ship Canal is now the spine of Seattle's waterfront, and the Seattle-Tacoma rivalry it inflamed still shapes how the two cities bargain over ports, transit and growth.
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