Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1907 — Josiah Flynt Is Dead. [ARTICLE]

Josiah Flynt Is Dead.

Josiah Fly nt Willard, whose experience as a tramp, author, and sociologist under .the name of “Josiah Flynt,” have given him a wide reputation, died Monday in a hotel in Chicago. Willard had been suffering with pneumonia for several days, but it was not until he became utterly helpless that he permitted a nurse or a do tor to enter his room. Willard had tramped in every civilized country on the globe, wearing the costume of the working class of each particular nation he wandered thru. He was a friend of Ibsen and Tolstoi. He was born in Appleton, Wis., Jan. 23, 1869, his father being Oliver Allerton Willard and Frances E. Willard, the noted temperance advocate, was his aunt. Willard was a graduate of the University of Berlin. Flynt was the greatest exposer of graft in the country, without it was Lincoln Steffens and he had just begun a series of articles in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, exposing that most wide-spread and universally destructive and demoralizing of all the graft system, the infernal horse-racing gambling, or “playing the ponies.” Only the first installment of this series has been published and he was in Chicago obtaining data for future articles when he contracted the sickness that resulted in his death.