Reform
While the new political faction identified themselves as reformers it seems more likely that they wanted to reap the profits of the whiskey trade for themselves. Mayor Alonzo B. Webster, elected mayor in 1881 owned two saloons himself. The new mayor lost no time in firing Bat's brother, Jim Masterson, as city marshal and posting a series of new 'moral' ordinances, complete with a warning.
"To all whom it may concern: All thieves, thugs, confidence men, and persons without visible means of support, will take notice that the ordinance enacted for their special benefit will be rigorously enforced on and after tomorrow."
Read more about this topic: Dodge City War
Famous quotes containing the word reform:
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone’s sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.”
—Alison Neilans. “Justice for the Prostitute—Lady Astor’s Bill,” Equal Rights (September 19, 1925)
“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)