Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1889 — HE IS A RAILROAD MAN. [ARTICLE]

HE IS A RAILROAD MAN.

CANDIDATE [HUTCHISON, OF THE HAWKEYE STATE. While iu the Senate the Republican Nominee for Governor Was the Willing Servant • of the Big Corporations—The Rickety Platform. [Des Moines special to Chicago Herald]. There is likely to be a genuine uprising of the grangers of lowa as they realize how completely they were outgeneraled in the Republican State Convention. For the nomination of Hutchison for Governor they are largely responsible, as it was the Wheeler forces which nominated him. They voted for Hutchison because they believed he was Larrabee’s second choice. This is probably true, but that doesn’t alter the fact that during Hutchison’s career in the Senate he has uniformly been the supporter of the railway interests—so much so that he voted against a bill to compel them to cut down the Canada thistle along their tracks, This and many other of his acts will come out in the early stages of the campaign and will serve to stir up the Grangers to active hostility. But the platform is likely to receive quite as much attention as the candidate, and it is pronounced on every hand the weakest and most meaningless political document ever born in a political convention. It means everything or nothing. Its utterances upon the tariff are almost imbecile. It favors a protective tariff where it does not foster a trust; but has nothing to say against a protective tariff where it does foster trusts. It opposes such trusts as injuriously divert trade from our own Borders to other commercial centers; but has nothing to say against trusts which can be successfully worked within the State. This is doubly interesting in view of the fact that Hutchison was a bitter opponent of a bill to suppress trusts which passed the last Legislature. Then the -way the platform was doctored after it had been adopted by the committee is likely to provoke a heated quarrel. The document was drawn by “Tama Jim” Wilson and its history is this: It was adopted by the committee early in the afternoon on Wednesday, the 14th day of August. In the platform as originally adopted by the committe appeared these words: “We approve the action of the Twenty-sec-ond General Assembly on the subject of railway legislation.” The Herald correspondent procured a copy of the resolutions as they were adopted by the committee on the evening of the 14th, and that language was part of the platform. The deadlock in the balloting prevented the reading of the platform that day, and it was carried oyer until the 15th. When the resolutions were read to the convention by Attorney General Stone, the declaration indorsing the acts of the Twentysecond General Assembly had been stricken out and only the proposition to amend the laws allowed to stand. The convention was tired out by its arduous labors for two days and a night in a crowded and heated opera house, and more than half of the delegates had retired when the platform was read and hurriedly adopted without debate. It was evidently patched up and doctored by the men who never sleep, and withheld from the convention until an auspicious moment for its adoption. The intentional striking out of the clause approving the railway legislation of the last Legislature, after it had been formally adopted by the Committee on Resolutions, is of special significance to the jobbers and farmers of lowa, but they will, in good time, show their position on this question. The Republican managers are very much chagrined at the exposure of duplicity, and are feebly denying that the change was made, but the evidence is all against them.