Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 October 1901 — A Red Rag to Populists. [ARTICLE]

A Red Rag to Populists.

The would-be Democratic news- ' papers that. have deserted old line Democracy and gone. out after Socialism and Bryanism are hateful toward those who refuse to desert their Jacksonian principles. The South Bend Times, one the few Democratic organs that dares to be true to Democratic convictions, occasionally flaunts a red rag at the Bryanites as follows: The sentiment is steadily gaining ground that Silly Billy Hearst’s papers—the New York Journal, Chicago American and San Francisco Examiner —are public nuisances. It has been well said that these yellow sheets are putrid in the eyes of all good citizens, and Hearst himself has long been a sickening stench. His papers reflect the fears of only the putty-hearted, and they emblazon as canonized virtues, all the morbid tendencies of mankind.” In a later issue the Times contained the following: “If Hearsfs yellow papers published those hideous cartoons about President McKinley before the murderous assault was made upon him at Buffalo in the belief that his official conduct merited such caricaturing, then the fulsome laudations that appeared in these yellow sheets immediately after the shooting, extolling Mr. McKinley as the greatest, grandest and noblest of all public characters, must have been mere hypocritical cant. There is no escape from this dilemma—Hearst’s yellow sheets either slandered and maligned the president before the shooting, or they were guilty of the rankest hypocrisy when they printed those fulsome laudations after the shooting.”