Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/317

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GOVERNOR, 1903

appeared after the first sub-head in the Press' Schwenksville story on Sunday morning. I telegraphed them only the preceding matter, and some one in the office added the other details.”

7. Three clippings from successive issues of the Press, August 22, 1907, containing a dispatch from Johnstown purporting to give statements made by J. M. Shumaker, and showing the modifications made by “some one in the office” so as to reflect upon me.

8. The dispatch as sent from Johnstown inserted so that the comparison may be made.

9. The denial by J. M. Shumaker of the alleged statements.

10. An anonymous letter August 23, 1907, from an employee in the Press office to me, signing himself as “an admirer,” in which he says that the Johnstown dispatch “was read to the managing editor or at least he was given the gist of it over the telephone, and he ordered that it be re-written so as to identify you as the person meant in the alleged statement of Shumaker's friend.” He further says that the writer “lost his nerve and eliminated these two paragraphs from the later issues.”

All of these original papers found their way to me and I had them bound for preservation. The volume will never be purposely destroyed, because it is a curiosity and has a market value. As is apt to happen, in all probability, it will finally reach some public library and there be kept where the future investigator of morals will be able to see some of the causes which brought about the passage of the “Salus-Grady Press Muzzler” of 1903.

Another word about Smith and then I think he will disappear from these pages. On the 4th of October, 1906, I gave a dinner at the Executive Mansion to Roosevelt, then President of the United States. Penrose came to me and asked me whether I would not invite Smith to be there, saying that for political reasons the party managers were

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