Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1889 — Tax Shark Millikan [ARTICLE]

Tax Shark Millikan

. The Kokomo Dispatch, with characteristic enterprise, has collected and published the details of the career of MrFrank M. Millikan, the new secretary of the republican state central committee, wh j, for some ten years past, has operated as a tax-title shark in Howard county. A tabulated statement, taken from the counts records, shows that Millikan has purchased at taxsales 182 town lots and more than 6,(XX) acres of land in Howard county, paying for this property the sum of $7,299,51. The greater part of it has been redeemed at the extortionate rates allowed by law, so that he has, probably, received in cash from that source more than his entire in vestment. In addition to this he has obtained title to thirty nine lots and 1.044 acres of land, wh:'ch a r e valued at over $70,000. The amount paid for the land to which he has title was a little over SI,OOO. It would appear, therefore, that this Shylock has found tax titles as profitable as hold ing one of the Dudley letters. The character of the dealer in tax titles is well known in Indiana. He is a man who starts out to make money by taking advantage of the * misfortunes of his fellow-men If he has any native instincts of decency and humanity, he invariably quits the business after his first investment, and always blushes when he remembers that he ever engaged in it. When a man continues in the business he may al ways be set down as a heartless, rapacious money-grab oer—a Frankenstein of the business world, in whose scales mercy and compassion bob up to the ceiling like feathers when a dollar is placed on the other end of the balance. Millikan stuck to it , There is a peculiar appropriateness in p itting this style of man in charge of the affairs of a party which represents the organized cormorants of the country—a party whose organ is devoted, or can easily be induced to be, to the interests of the coal operators, the school-nook trust robbers, the gas monopolists, the tariff ring, and all the others of that goodly gathering of corporate and individual capitalists who are seeking to amass fortunes bv the sweat of other people’s brews. He is their kind of citiz n. He understands and unites in their feelings. When their hearts |beat| his beats — once a month on an average. It was ah eminently lit flection. Il Mr. Millikan can fry the fat out of republican capi talistsj as he has out of the Howard county unfortunates, the republican committee will be able to pay as much for Vot es as it did in the last campaign.—lndianapolis Sentinel.