You Can Count On It

You Can Count On It
By Dr. Paul Loatman Jr., City Historian

The closeness of the recent Presidential race has reconfirmed an old adage which is often forgotten: every vote should count. Mechanicville voters may not need to be reminded of this often because over the years, we have seen many hotly contended races locally. This condition is guaranteed to hold true for the future by the fact that voter enrollment in our two major political parties is almost dead even here. In the recent past, an incumbent mayor was turned out of office by eleven votes, and a few years later, the City Judge's race was decided by one vote. In that case, a State Supreme Court Justice took several weeks before determining the legitimacy of a handful of absentee ballots, which decided the race long after voters had cast their last ballots.

Over a century ago, local candidates seemed more interested in winning elections than in serving in public office. In 1870, four men elected to village offices refused to serve despite their overwhelming margins of victory. This was a bit unusual, but only because there were four "refuse-niks," not just one. Indeed it was more often than not the noun that at least one winning candidate would turn down the honors of office. The reason for this was that the Village President, the chief elected official according to the village charter, was allowed to fill vacancies by appointment. President Lewis Smith, a prime mover in incorporating the village in 1859 and a dominant political presence for the next two decades, apparently persuaded popular figures to run for office, knowing beforehand that they would resign. This allowed him to appoint their replacements, presumably people who would not have passed muster with voters. Smith was a powerful figure in the community, serving as the chief executive of the American Linen Thread Co., the primary employer in the village of 900 - 1000 inhabitants between 1859 and the early 1880s when the firm left town. About 10% of the total population here worked in the thread mill, an establishment of wide prominence which was the only one of its kind to display its wares at the national Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1876.

The four 1870 candidates who resigned also may have been motivated by pangs of conscience since they garnered almost all of the 969 votes cast in that election. The problem with this large a number of ballots originated with the fact that there probably were less than 200 eligible voters at the time. Voting was restricted to white mates, at least 21 years of age who were willing to pay a $1 poll tax. Apart from the unusual turnout in 1870, the most ballots cast in the village's first two decades prior to 1880 was 182. Obviously, some people enjoyed voting so much in 1870 that they repeated it a number of times, and local editor and lawyer, J. Frank Terry, was disappointed that no one wound up indicted for election fraud.

As the nineteenth century wore on, resignations like those previously mentioned became rarer, but the 1892 canvas proved quite unusual in other ways. William Tallmadge's election as President was challenged because he owned a hotel which served liquor, and state law prohibited "liquor dealers" from holding any public office. Tallmadge rebutted his critics by pointing out that he leased his hotel to others who happened to deal in the liquor trade, and therefore, he was not in violation of the law. One of his victorious mining mates, however, was not so fortunate in claiming the spoils of office following his own election. William Garland had been strongly backed by "the North Adams gang," the large number of railroaders who moved here in the 1890s with the expansion of the Fitchburgh line, the predecessor of the Boston and Maine Railroad. Editor Farrington Mead's reference to this group of largely Irish immigrants as a "gang" did not speak well of his willingness to welcome newcomers here, but he certainly felt justified in his criticism when Garland was forced to resign following his election because it turned out that he was a non-citizen alien, ineligible to vote, much less to hold office.

Whether because of, or in spite of, the first appointment of local partisan election officials in 1897, contests remained quite heated for the next two decades. William Allen defeated John Donnelly by eight votes in 1898, while 32 "blanks" were cast. Frank Ferris became Village President the following year with a 38 vote surplus. Three years later, T.J. Finnegan won the top office by a vote of 562 to 505. A decade later, William Canfield won by 23 votes, possibly the indirect beneficiary of the 78 votes cast for local Socialist Party candidate, Frank Lane, who was supported by fellow Socialist, George Lunn of Schenectady. Lunn, a Protestant minister, was one of a number of Socialists elected to office around the country in 1912, the same year that Teddy Roosevelt broke with Republicans to run his "Bull Moose" campaign against President William Howard Taft. Lunn followed his Socialist mayoral yews in Schenectady by being elected as Lt. Governor of New York in 1920, this time on the Democratic ticket.

Possibly the closest election in Mechanicville history for the top office occurred in 1914 when John Green defeated his Republican opponent by a vote of 745 to 741. The closeness of this race was never repeated again, the narrowest margin in the last 85 years being the eleven vote margin of victory alluded to at the beginning of this article.

Did wider margins of victory after 1914 betoken a greater sense of political decisiveness, or confusion, by local voters? The same year that witnessed a four-vote election victory also saw Mechanicville secure a new city charter which outlawed partisan elections. Hereafter, candidates had to run in a series of nonpartisan "open primaries" before running for elective office. The system, which allowed little time for campaigning, forced "politics" underground and left voters less than enthusiastic. In a short time, proponents of the new system were calling for its abolition, but having it embedded in the new city charter required a complex process to change it. Complaints persisted for decades and finally, party labels and partisan elections were reinstituted in 1962. Since then, both Democrats and Republicans have been willing to take their chances with the local electorate and there has been no support for a return to the non-partisan system in recent years.

Is there a general pattern clearly visible in this voting analysis? Probably not, given the fact that some candidates who won cliffhanger elections were later re-elected by wide margins. And, two who served as municipal executives in the early 20th century seemed to have faded from public view only to see their political careers resurrected more than twenty years after initially leaving office. T.J. Finnegan was elected Mayor in 1929, 1931, and 1933, regaining office almost 30 years after he first became Village President. Homer Eckerson was elected the city's first mayor under the new charter in 1915, retired from office in 1919, but then came back to win three more terms in 1939, 1941, and 1943. In both Finnegan’s and Eckerson's cases, they were elected by strong margins. Thus, when all is said and done, the will of the voters is not easily predicted, but the local electorate more often than not makes its ballots count.