If I Should Die To-night
son, Ohio, and at one time the controversy was quite a cause célèbre throughout the Middle West.
About 1890, the Jackson Standard published a page of local poetry to prove that as an abode of the Muses Jackson was singularly favored. Among these poems, which had, of course, been contributed by the authors, was “If I Should Die To-night,” signed with Mr. Dungan’s name.
Jackson is an altogether undistinguished Middle Western town of a few thousand inhabitants, with a Main Street where most of its business is transacted, and various side streets bordered by the unpretentious homes of its citizens. There were no poetry experts among them, so when Mr. Dungan asserted that he had written “If I Should Die To-night,” nobody thought of contradicting him. For he was one of Jackson’s most prominent men—a lawyer, and sufficiently powerful in local politics to secure the nomination for Congress and actually to be elected for two or three terms in the early ’nineties. The verses with his name attached were copied by first one Ohio paper and then another, for local patriotism is strong among the Buckeyes; and the only untoward development was the announcement by Colonel William Betts, also prominent in Ohio politics in those days, that he had at last dis-
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