Baltimore Evening Sun (8 October 1913): 6.
Various correspondents object to the “seven wonders of Baltimore” printed in this place yesterday, most of them because they favor rival candidates. I append a typical alternative list:
- The Katzenjammer Tower.
- The Sunpaper.
- The case against the ex-sheriffs.
- LExington Market.
- Col. Jacobus Hook.
- The Royal Family.
The Hon. Frank Brown, Jr.
The Sunpaper appears in two other lists and the Katzenjammer Tower in one. Among the other prodigies voted for are the old shot-tower, the Hon. Eugene Levering, the Walters Art Gallery, Hollywood, the Druid Hill Park zoo, the Hon. Jack Flood, the Maryland Club, the Baltimore Southern Methodist, Greenmount Cemetery, the Hon. Ed. Hirsch, Johns Hopkins Hospital and the late grand jury. Why not a voting contest? Send in your list. Let the seven crullers go to the seven indubitable marvels.
Some anonymous correspondent of The Evening Sun, objecting to my performances in this place:
- It is beneath the dignity of a time-honored paper like The Sun to permit one of its columns to lower its previous high code of ethics and morals.
- If the press of our country, and especially of our city, attempts to deprecate and ridicule every attempt at moral reform, the situation is grave indeed.
- * * * Private citizens, and even public officials, have been subjected to personal insults and abuse. * * *
And a lot more windy rubbish of the same sort. I pass over this brave gentleman’s coupling of a personal accusation with a nom de plume, and consider only the charge that I have deprecated and ridiculed honest efforts at reform. Is it true? It is not. I have never printed a word in this place against any man who labored with true faith and ardor for the betterment of the world. But I have printed many a word against the bogus moralists and low-comedy platitudinarians who infest this town of ours, and against the predatory “experts” who get a living out of the pious, and against the clever fellows who use reform as an avenue to personal advertisement. And for that attack I have no apologies to offer.
I am not so dense that I cannot observe the difference between the unfair and disingenuous bluff and bluster of the Hon. Charles J. Bonoparte and the sober judgment of the patient men who have devoted time and intelligence to the study of prostitution. I know the difference between the grandiose announcements and grotesque performances of a Kenneth G. Murray and the hard, fruitful labor of such men as Captain Logan and Mr. Grgurevich. And I know how much there is of sincere well doing and how much of mere bally-ho and rough house in the campaigns of such organizations as the Lord’s Day Alliance, the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Anti-Saloon League. I have not been a newspaper reporter in this town for 15 years for nothing.
All this by way of answer to a complaint which bobs up weekly--always over a sonorous nom de plume. If any honest man believes that I have misrepresented him, let him come forward and say so and I shall make amends to him. But if it is a crime against good morals to call the Hon. Dashing Harry a mountebank, or to prick the bubbles of bosh blown by the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, or to laugh at the preposterous pretensions of the Hon. Eugene Levering, or in take the Hon. William H. Anderson to task when he forgets the punctillio, or to denounce the Lord’s Day Alliance as a pack of busybodies and nuisances, or to haul up the suffragettes when the smell of blood makes them neglect their cause, or to protest against the intolerable tomfooleries of the vice crusaders, or to defend earnest men who are attacked by these and other charlatans, then I shall remain a criminal in eager practice until the inevitable tin-can is attached to my taffrail.
A bold, bad, melodramatic defiance? A touch of Murray in these high, astounding terms? May be so. Constant contact with whirling dervishes has made me privy to their technique and filled me with some of their gases.
The estimable Hot Towel on the Anderson-Wilkinson whooping match:
Mr. Anderson * * * roughly referred to what he called the city ring.
Thus the dear old Towel gives its docile ratification to the doctrine laid down in the Hon. Dashing Harry’s Chestertown speech. The so-called “city ring” is no more than a figment of the Sunpaper’s disordered imagination. Harry himself hath said it—and Harry is an honorable man. So are they all—-all honorable men.
Meanwhile, who will arrange a debate between the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte. LL. D., and the Hon “Frank” Kelly? Or between the Rev. W. W. Davis, D. D., and the Hon. Mitchell Levy?
The betting in the kaifs is 7 to 6 that the Society for the Suppression of Vice will have a new president after the next annual meeting–and a new vice-president.
The Concord Club has adopted the Hon. Dan Loden’s new overcoat as its flag and will carry it in all future parades.–Adv.
Boil your drinking water! Give a cheer for the ex-Sheriffs!
Delayed but poignant moral for the Rum Demonists: Find some one as clever as Anderson.
The Hon. Charles Levister, D. D., one of my Sunday-school pupils, challenges me to print a daily list of my potations, and I hasten to accept and oblige. I shall count Monday as the first day of the week, and put two or three days together when space is short. Thus the record to date:
- Monday.
- Three cups of coffee.
- Tuesday.
- Three cups of coffee.
- One pint of California champagne.
The estimable Democratic Telegram of this week honors its readers by offering them a large aquatint of the Hon. Woodrow Wilson. Ph. D., showing him wearing a pearl stickpin and with a silk handkerchief peeping out of his breast pocket. In its literary section, the Telegram argues that the Hon. Tom Parran has been badly burned by monkeying with local option, discusses the oyster situation, pays a doserved tribute to the Hon. Henry D. Harlan, J., and predicts that the folks of the counties will be enchanted by the eloquence of the Hon. Dashing Harry. A very creditable issue of a popular and passionate weekly.—Adv.
Kiss the Rum Demon good-by, gents! The Hon. William H. Anderson has got him groggy. In 10 years a sloshed man will be as rare in Baltimore as an honest man.—Moral Adv.