President Woodrow Wilson asked voters to elect a Democratic Congress, but Spokane’s Republicans had a particularly critical response to that, since it would mean re-electing a “disloyal man” and a “vilifier,” according to a headline.

The Spokane Daily Chronicle was referring to Rep. C.C. Dill, who voted against the declaration of war. He was embroiled in a fierce re-election fight against Judge J. Stanley Webster, a Republican.

Webster said, “It would hardly seem to follow that the election of a congressman on the Democratic ticket who opposed the war, impugned his country’s motives in going into it, and belied the public utterances of the president, while at the same time saying that Great Britain’s 500 years of history had left a bloody trail on every continent in the world, and that he was unwilling to be associated with the monarchical government of Italy, would be calculated to please our allies across the sea.”

The local Democratic chairman countered that President Wilson had expressed “a warm personal interest” in the re-election of Dill.

Meanwhile, good news continued to stream in from the European war front. American and British troops continued to push back the German lines. Victory appeared to be near. However, a visiting director of federal war industries said he was making plans for two more years of war.

From the flu beat: The Spanish flu death toll continued to rise.

In one Spokane family, an 8-year-old girl succumbed one day after her mother died.