Talk:Joseph Schubert (politician)

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"Acting" mayor

Please note that despite Schubert having held the title "acting mayor", there is no historical evidence that Médéric Martin ever actually stepped down as mayor, or that Schubert ever actually assumed the office even temporarily. Rather, what the historical sources actually demonstrate is that in that era, "acting mayor" was a routine title which was always held by a city councillor even while there was still an actual mayor above him, and in actual practice the role was that of a deputy mayor. The "acting mayor" thus would fill in when Martin was unavailable due to scheduling conflicts and such, but Martin retained the position and continued to perform the responsibilities of the position and Schubert was never, not even temporarily, considered the mayor of the city.

It's true that in contemporary usage "acting mayor" is commonly used to denote a person who temporarily assumes the office of mayor when the previous mayor has resigned — but indeed, it also still denotes the "deputy mayor" when he or she is actually running city hall for a day or two because the mayor is out of town at a conference or on vacation but has not surrendered the office. The fact that the sources of the era used a title whose meaning is ambiguous does not change the fact that the sources need to be evaluated for the context of what his role actually was in actual practice — and the sources about both Schubert and Martin are quite clear and unmistakable that Schubert was "acting mayor" in the latter sense, not the former, as Martin never stepped down and Schubert never formally assumed the leadership of the city.

This is not a question of "protecting" Michael Applebaum (as if anybody on Wikipedia wanted to do that in the first place); it's a question of what the sources actually show. Bearcat (talk) 17:50, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]