WOMAN MAYOR IN KANSAS.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 135, 24 May 1911, Page 11

WOMAN MAYOR IN KANSAS.

SWEEPING PROGRAMME. New York, April 13. In Hunnewell, Kansas, there is a woman Suffragist municipal administration. and the first meeting was held last night, under the presidency of the woman Mayor, Mrs, Ella Wilson. Her Worship, in taking over the seals of office, roundly denounced Hunnewell’s last administration of mere men, and said that nothing in all their official lives in the local Mansion House better became them than leaving it. Under the corrupt and worthless administration of men, Mrs Wilson declared, the conditions of Hunnewell had become ' insupportable, I and it was ample time that Kansas women rallied together to clean out the Augean stables and uplift public morals which had never been lower. With great vivacity, Mrs Wilson attacked the local gambling halls and exposed their corrupting influence on the young. She proposes to stop gambling halls byi imposing a high license, and she has an equally - vigorous programme as regards whisky selling. She said she had appointed her friend and neighbour, M#s Osborne as Chief of Police, and would give her an opportunity of proving that

with women in control of the police, graft, bribery and blackmail which are now rampant throughout America under male mayors would surely disappear. Mrs Osborne, it is understood, will accept the job, providing she can get Mrs Williamson, “her friend and neighbour,” to act as assistant commissioner.

The Council meeting was, unfortunately, cut short because the I woman mayor was obliged to leave by train for a distant suburb, where she had contracted to deliver a lecture, under the chairmanship of her husband, entitled “ Woman’s place in municipal government; what she is doing and what she will do.” The Councillors of Hunnewell are only lukewarm in support of Mrs Wilson’s municipal plan. They consider a woman police commissioner ridiculous, regarding as far preferable a strong man w’ho knows something about local vice and the practical methods of dealing with it.

It is a coincidence that while Mrs Wilson was declaring a State-w’ide w r ar upon municipal graft, Mr. Gaynor, Mayor of New York, was addressing a meeting in the American metropolis, boasting that he had recently deprived the New York police of £l,25o,00() of graft, meaning that he had stopped the collection by the police of hush-money from gambling houses and other disorderly places. Mr. Gaynor further intimated that the columns

of talk printed in the New York papers alleging that a big wave of crime was sweeping over New York and urging that it was necessary to appoint a mayor who could secure a better state of things were inspired by the very men whom he had deprived of tens of thousands of pounds of ill-gotten gains, who resented his action.