Ouster Ousted

To be Mayor of Seattle is almost as perilous politically as to be Governor of Oklahoma. Two Oklahoma Governors have been impeached in eight years. Last week another Mayor of Seattle was job-less--the second to be recalled in 20 years --when Seattlites by a 3-to-2 majority voted Frank Edwards out of City Hall.

Seattle strongly favors municipal ownership of public utilities. It operates its own electric power and light plants, its own street railway system. For 20 years James Delmage Ross, onetime Yukon gold rusher, has served as Superintendent of City Light. A stout advocate of public ownership, he has fought many a gaudy fight with Stone & Webster's Puget Sound Power & Light Co. He has built up a political machine of his own; in fact no man or woman has within recent years been elected Mayor of Seattle without first promising the reappointment of Superintendent Ross. Frank Edwards, running as the "businessman's candidate" in 1928, made that same pledge. Last March on the eve of municipal election Mayor Edwards summarily dismissed Superintendent Ross for "inefficiency, disloyalty and wilful neglect." Nobody questioned Mayor Edwards' authority to discharge his Superintendent of City Light. What was questioned, though, were the reasons the Mayor gave for his action. Two ambitious young lawyers, M. A. Zioncheck and Frank Fitts, organized the Citizens' Municipal Utilities Protective League with the avowed purpose of having Mayor Edwards recalled. The charges were, among other things, that he had dismissed Mr. Ross under false pretenses and that he appointed an incompetent manager of the street railway system. Petitions were circulated and signed by more than 25,000 citizens.

Mayor Edwards' foes accused him of having gone over bag & baggage to the Power Trust. The Mayor raised a cry of "Communists!" against his accusers, charged them with being foes of private property. Vainly he tried to get the courts to block the recall ballot. William Randolph Hearst's Post-Intelligencer and the Scripps-Canfield Star vociferously favored the Mayor's recall while the conservative home-owned Seattle Times fumed against "foreign-owned press caterwauling." Many a Seattlite was grieved to see this dirty municipal contest come to a head at the height of tourist season. In fact the recall election was postponed a week on protest of the Seattle Lodge of Elks, hosts for their order's national convention, because "the turmoil and agitation would have a most adverse effect" on the brother Elks' appreciation of the city.

With Edwards out, the City Council proceeded to choose its little presiding officer, Robert Harlin, to be Mayor of Seattle until the next election. Bom in England, Mayor Harlin sorted coal there in his youth, later served for years as president of the United Mine Workers of Washington State.

Immediately restored to office as Superintendent of City Light was James Delmage Ross, the 58-year-old Canadian whose dismissal started the municipal eruption.

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