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My connection with the Globe-Democrat had many aspects, chief among which was my rapidly developing consciousness of the significance of journalism and its relation to the life of the nation and the state. My journalistic career had begun only five months before and preceding that I had had no newspaper experience of any kind. The most casual reader of a newspaper would have been as good as I in many respects.

But here I rather sensed the significance of it all, the power of a man like McCullagh, for instance, for good or evil, the significance of a man like Butler in this community. I still had a lot to learn: the extent of graft in connection with politics in a city, the power of a newspaper to make sentiment in a State and so help to carry it for a Governor or a President. The political talk I heard on the part of one newspaper man and another “doing politics,” as well as the leading editorials in this and other papers, which just at this time were concerned with a coming mayoralty fight and a feud in the State between rival leaders of the Republican party, completely cleared up the situation for me. I listened to all the gossip, read the papers carefully, wondered over the personalities and oddities of State governments in connection with our national government. Just over the river in Illinois everybody was concerned with the administration of John P. Altgeld, governor of the State, and whether he would pardon the Chicago anarchists whose death sentences, recorded a few years before, had been commuted to life imprisonment. On this side of the river everybody was interested in the administration of William Joel Stone, who was the governor. A man by the name of Cyrus H. Walbridge was certain to be the next mayor if the Republicans won, and according to the Globe, they ought to win because the city needed to be reformed. The local Democratic board of aldermen was supposed to be the most corrupt in all America (how many cities have yearly thought that, each of its governing body, since the nation began!), and Edward Noonan, the mayor, was supposed to be the lowest and vilest creature that ever stood up in shoes. The chief editorials of the Globe were frequently concerned with blazing denunciations of him. As far as I could make out, he had joined with various corporations and certain members of council to steal from the city, sell its valuable franchises for a song and the like. He had also joined with the police in helping bleed the saloons, gambling dens and houses of prostitution. Gambling and prostitution were never so rampant as now, so our good paper stated. The good people of the city should join and help save the city from destruction.