Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary
No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our town—generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question, even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the opposing side.
Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good many times—every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office—that whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at six o'clock, the General swings the Statesman into line against it. If he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years; and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could see that justification in the Statesman's position. To us it seemed merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us more tolerant of his shortcomings.
Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the Statesman for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A. Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies, he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he started, gave him the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home, whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics, capital letters and black-faced lines.
