The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1890-04-27
Republican Club Celebration.

PITTsBURG, April 26.-The fourth annual
dinner of the Republican club in com
memoration of the sixty eighth birthday of
General o. S. Grant was given to- night.
"Our guests who are absent" was res
ponded to by Colonel J. M. Schoonmaker,
of this city; Grant" by Governor James
A. Beaver. and ''The Republican Party,''
by Hon. Thomas B. Reed, speaker of the
House of Representatives. Reed spoke at
length on election frauds and ballot box
stuffing in the south. The remedy, he said,
was the passage of the Senate bill enlarg-
ing the powers of United States supervisors
over state elections.
Assistant Postmaster General Clarkson
spoke to the toast, ''The Republican
press" Brice was much derided
for his phrase in 1888, that the
campaign of that year was an in
tellectual one, yet his statement was true
Political contests, said the speaker, are
coming more and more to be fought in the
arena of discussion and in the newspaper
press. The torch light and the red light
as political arguments are being superseded
by the intellectual discussion of the press
The campaign of 1892 will be newspaper
campaign, and it has already begun. The
Democrats saw this before the Republi-
cans. For any close observer must have
seen the marvellous manner in which the
Democratic party has been strengthening
Its lines in newspapers or magazines. In
the large cities of the east they have cap
tured nearly all the magazines and all the
ILLUSTRATED papers; all mercenaries of the
press and literature have been turned into
their service. A reinforced Democratic
press is startling thing for the party to
face and 1t must face it with courage and
wisdom. In New York city 400, 600 copies
of daily newspapers are printed daily, less
than two hundred thousand of them are
Republican. This means that two
tifths are Republicans. New York
reading Democratic papers, taking
the Democratic version of things, and the
people of the households are being edu-
Gated unconsciously against the party OF
their fathers. In Boston the papers of the
greatest circulation are also Democratic.
The same is true of nearly every large city
in the country. Democracy has also pressed
its conquests to the agricultural press, and
in the last three or four years many of the
farmers papers in the west have become
advocates of free trade. 1t was largely
through this line and farmers al
liances that the Democrats first based
their claim that the northwest
was for free trade, and changing
to the Democratic party. Even as good an
organization as that of the farmers was
utilized and farmers alliances established
systematically with all the Democrats and
all the weakened Republicans in the
neighborhood gathered into its folds. Then
they were supplied with free trade litera-
ture, secretly and constantly. Such pro-
paganda has never been known in America
as that of the Democrats in their hunt in
secret, and through changing press in
behalf of free trade in the west to day :;
and submit to you, as Republicans that
it is time for our party to take notice of
what the opposition party is doing by in
creasing and strengthening its press.n