Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 231, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1914 — Replying to Democrat Lies About Republican Contest. [ARTICLE]

Replying to Democrat Lies About Republican Contest.

The Republican has waited for more than a week for L. L. McCurtain to put in an appearance and register any complaint he might have because chocks aggregating $136.50, which he sent to this office along with names of alleged subscribers, were returned to his wife. Mr. McCurtain has not come in, although he has been in town and has evidently talked with and made misrepresentations to Editor Babcock, who has been extremely anxious to cast reflections upon the contest, without any grounds for doing so.

Mr. McCurtain’s wife, Mrs. Blanche McCurtain, was a candidate. She has made no complaint,- in fact, stated that she had none, and was very grateful, as she had just dause to be, that she received back checks as above stated. The Republican owes no apology to any person, no explanation to The Democrat, but does owe a statement of facts to the public to controvert the fabric of lies which the ever-snarling Babcock has framed in his effort to cry out “fraud” and “graft.” His snarls, it may easily be judged, are occasioned by the solar plexus blow he had received right in the middle of his fast-dWindling subscription list. The contest coming right at a time when Editor Babcock, claiming his as the official democratic organ, was engaged in roasting about all the prominent men in the party, criticising the candidates, tearing into the last legislature and attacking the local* organization, proved too much for him to pass without employing his cowardly practice of trying to create suspicion. Now for the explanation. •

The evening the' contest closed a number of the candidates were in and about The Republican office. Each was trying to get a line on the amount of subscription* business that was being turned in. The McOurtains, Mrs. McCurtain and Len, were here. They did not leave until after 10 o’clock. Shortly before they left one of their friends called Shelby Comer aside and asked him confidentially how many votes he had. Shelby them about 700,000. ’

The condition of the contest was that the* ballot box closed at 12 o’clock Friday night, and that votes and subscriptions received by mail up to noon of the following day, provided the envelope in which they were mailed bore the postmark of Friday, Sept. 18th, would be accepted. The last mail made up and sent out of Parr in the daytime is the milk train in the evening. The MeCurtains did not return to Parr until between 10:30 and 11 o’clock on Friday night, some five or six hours after the last mail was made up and sent out of Parr for that day. On Saturday morning, however, a letter came from Mrs. McCurtain. It contained one unsigned check for $lO5 and three cheeks for $10.50 each. A list of names to whom The Republican was to be sent accompanied the cheeks. Mrs. McCurtain was called and told that the check was not signed. She came to Rensselaer and to this office. Leslie Clark, one of the publishers of The Republican, waited on her. He told her that he- did not like to have her invest her own money* for she might be disappointed. He told her that he would sooner give her the money out of his own pocket than to have her lose it. She was determined to have the subscriptions counted, however, and signed the check which had been left unsigned when it was mailed. Later in the day Mr. Clark and Mr. Longworth decided that it would not be right to accept the votes for the prime reason that it would have been impossible for the letter, which bore the postoffice mark of Friday, to have been delay-

ed •until Saturday morning in reaching here. Investigation showed that the envelope bore the stamp of Friday a. m. The stamp is the official method the government has ot checking the leaving time of the mail. If the letter had actually been mailed Friday A. M., as the envelope indicated, it should have, been received at The Republican office at 11:05 Friday. There was another chance for it to have arrived at 6:12 Friday evening, but it actually did arrive Saturday noon, 24 hours after the time stamped on the envelope. The McCurtains, as a matter of fact, must have prepared the cheeks after they reached Par® well along toward midnight of Friday, or on Saturday morning. How the letter got in the postoffice (and was stamped with an outstamp on the envelope which registered it twelve hours back, and the letter was mailed twelve hours later are questions for the McCurtains to answer. This contest does look crooked, don’t it? But who was it tried to be

crooked? It looks as jf Len McCurtain, whom The Democrat says is doing the kicking, knows who pulled off a little stunt that was actually crooked, in an effort to make his wife’s vote exceed that of Miss Mary Comer, whom he had been told had only 700,000 votes. - Oh, yes, the money was returned. Mr. Clark, observing the trickery, hunted up Mrs. McCurtain, and forced the checks amounting to $136.50, on her, Checks which The Republican might have retained had we been as crooked as some of the interested parties appeared to be. Mrs. McCurtain was grateful'and almost cried when she said that she had worked hard to save the money, that it was her own money, and that she could not afford to lose it. Mrs. McCurtain is a lady of refinement and intelligence and The Republican treated her In a manner so honorable that it naturally can not be appreciated by a character of Babcock’s type. But Mrs. McCurtain appreciated it, and Len would probably if it was his money and he had worked for it as Mrs. McCurtain did.

Queer world, isn’t it? Return checks amounting to $136,50, which you might have kept, thus protecting the person who received the cheeks back from a loss of that much money and from an ©cposure in the crooked stamping of a letter, which is doubtless a federal offense, and then have some one call you a “grafter” for doing it. That’s idea of a grafter, a fellow who don’t keep the money. Imagine Babcock giving back cheeks amounting to $136.50 or even 50 cents; it is an act that would require a lucid imagination. Babcock held a piano contest; a merchant on the night before claims to have bought all the trading checks Babcock had left and to have voted them straight out for ode of the candidates, when they were presumed to be issued only for legitimate trade. Babcock did not have a committee count the votes. He was the committee, thus making it possible to smuggle through any crooked schemes which he desired to pull off and to conceal the alleged purchase on the night the contest closed of the trading votes. And then the poor girl got a “Banner” piano, a cheap piano which The Republican was offered for $145 and which Babcock had advertised and influenced thQ girl and her frieads to believe, was a $350 instrument, and which the girl planned to sell in order that she might get an education,

and to get which she was to sell the piano. Oh, yes, Babcock has pulled off a number of highly honorable contests, measured by bis dwarfed idea of honesty, and proclaimed with his brazen egotism of personal purity, but he never before heard and is now probably unable to comprehend so generous an act as returning to a good woman $136.50, which might have been kept. Poor old Bab; it’s a long jump between your estimate of yourself and your integrity and the estimate of the public concerning you, and it is greatly to be hoped that you never wake up, for you seem to enjoy the pseudo-notion so intensely. It is probable that a postoffice inspector will be asked to investigate the manner in which the McCurtains procured a postoffice stamp dated back twenty-four hours, and Babcock may have another ehanee to lie and quibble and falsify. We have refrained some times for a year or more at a stretch from mentioning The Democrat and its peewee editor and we hope not to annoy our readers with such pigmy topics much in the future.