Robert B. Mitchell's Blog, page 10

Contrasting legacies

In the weeks after the House finished its deliberations regarding the Credit Mobilier scandal, the two central figures in the drama defended themselves in entirely different styles.

New York Democratic Representative James Brooks, weakened by illness, scribbled out his bitterness in letters to the press and blamed everyone but himself for his association with the scandal that had preoccupied Washington for months.

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Rep. James Brooks. Library of Congress.

Bloodied but unbowed, Republican Oakes Ames reveled in a hero’s welcome when he returned to Massachusetts.

In February, both had dodged expulsion for their role in the scandal that had engrossed Washington since the New York Sun revealed that members of Congress were stockholders in the Union Pacific’s highly lucrative, distinctively named  – and controversial – construction subsidiary. Instead of being unceremoniously kicked out of the House, they were censured.

As his illness worsened, Brooks chose to point fingers and blame the investigating committee led by Luke Potter Poland of Vermont for his predicament. In a letter to the press published on March 8, he claimed that “Enemies have taken advantage of my physical prostration from malaria contracted in India and too long neglected to offer up Oakes Ames and myself as sacrifices to a public clamor.” At the end of April, he died of stomach cancer.

While the dying Brooks brooded in his Washington home, Ames was feted and cheered. On March 13, the citizens of North Easton, where the Ames family’s shovel-making business was a major local employer and benefactor, turned out to offer a hero’s welcome to the man known as the “King of Spades.”  A brass band played and speaker after speaker hailed the railroad speculator and hometown industrialist. “Like gold from the crucible,” one orator declared, Ames “has passed through the fiery ordeal, and come out brighter and purer.”

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Rep. Oakes Ames. Library of Congress.

Ames – who rarely gave speeches – gratified his supporters with some brief remarks in which he explained the scandal as a byproduct of the spinelessness of those who bought Credit Mobilier shares. The prevarication by his purchasers – many of whom denied ever buying Credit Mobilier stock – created the impression that there was something wrong in doing so, Ames said. If “the parties purchasing the stock had simply told the truth, and said they had a right to purchase it, that would have been the end of it.”

Like Brooks, Ames was in failing health. Newspaper accounts of the North Easton homecoming noted that the congressman arrived at the banquet hall “on the arm” of the master of ceremonies. In late April, Oakes’s son noted that his father was afflicted with stomach pain. Soon he was no longer able to make the short walk from his home to the railroad depot. On May 8, three days after suffering a stroke, he died.

That Brooks and Ames each passed away shortly after Congress concluded its investigations into the Credit Mobilier affair is one of those peculiar coincidences of history. It doesn’t rank with Jefferson and Adams each dying on July 4, but it is a notable and sad aspect of the story. But it is not the end of the tale – because with their deaths Americans began to assess the legacy of each.

Brooks’s passing went largely unremarked. He was a small figure, a bitter partisan and “genuine hater of the Negro,” Republican congressman George Julian remembered years later. Journalist George Alfred Townsend, in his Washington Outside and Inside, dismissed the New York Democrat and Southern sympathizer as a hypocrite. “His political positions have generally been those of a pompous dough-face, extenuating the rebellion, while filching from the Union.”

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Ames presents a more complicated picture. On the one hand, he did sell Credit Mobilier shares to his colleagues with the intent of magnifying the influence of the Union Pacific on Capitol Hill. He admitted as much in his letters to Henry S. McComb – and then he expanded on that idea in testimony to the investigative committee led by Luke Potter Poland.

He is indelibly associated with the defining political scandal of the Gilded Age. But he was not simply an unprincipled, conniving congressman.

Ames supported freesoilers who fought against the establishment of slavery in Kansas in the years before the war. He and his brother, Oliver, backed the Union Pacific Railroad when other men of wealth stayed away – and in doing so helped create the transcontinental railroad.

In its largely favorable assessment of Ames, printed shortly after his death, the Boston Transcript  conceded that the King of Spades was not above pursuing “possible and probable pecuniary gains for himself” in his involvement with the Union Pacific. Nevertheless, patriotism as well as the pursuit of profit drove him. “His heart, as well as his head and pocket, was in the execution of that project; and he risked everything heroically for its accomplishment.”

That Ames sullied his otherwise admirable legacy by his actions in the Credit Mobilier scandal makes the drama all the more tragic – a point made eloquently by the New York Tribune. “His life was active and useful,” and with the exception of Credit Mobilier, “it was an honorable and beneficent one. His friends and neighbors will not soon forget  the industrious, large-hearted and large-handed man, but the country will still longer remember the pitiful story of greed and falsehood in which he bore so prominent a part.”

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I will be speaking about the Credit Mobilier and my book Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at 7 p.m. April 27 at Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minn. If you can’t make it, you can buy a copy of the book at amazon.com.

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Illness and indignation

Representative James Brooks was ill in the winter of 1872-1873. Of that there had been no doubt for quite some time.

The 63-year-old New York Democrat and others believed he was suffering from an ailment contracted the previous year while on a tour of the Far East. The malady hampered his efforts to defend himself from allegations that he had bought shares in Credit Mobilier, the profitable construction subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad, while a government-appointed director of the road. As a government director he was barred from owning an interest in the railroad.

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Rep. James Brooks. Library of Congress.

Illness and indignation, Brooks would demonstrate time and time again over the next several months, do not lend themselves to lucidity.

The path that brought Brooks to Capitol Hill – and the center of the Credit Mobilier scandal – started in Portland, Maine. In the 1830s he became a Washington correspondent – then an unusual position – for his home-town newspaper and eventually became its editor. He gravitated to New York, returned to journalism as publisher and editor of the New York Express and allied himself with Horace Greeley and the Whigs.

In the early 1860s, however, as pro-Southern sentiment percolated in New York, Brooks denounced the Union war effort, joined the Democratic Party, and went to Congress.  “He was a man of ability, a genuine hater of the negro, and a bitter partisan,” Radical Republican George Julian recalled in his memoirs.

Brooks had remained quiet when the New York Sun, in its September 4 exposé, included him among the lawmakers who had obtained shares of Credit Mobilier. The Sun reported that Brooks had obtained 50 shares on his own – unlike the Republican members of Congress who bought their shares from Representative Oakes Ames.

But he felt he could no longer stay silent when the New York Herald reported on testimony by Henry McComb about his acquisition of the shares. McComb testified to the House committee led by Luke Potter Poland that Brooks assured Credit Mobilier officials that he would “take care of the Democratic side of the House” in exchange for the shares.

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An inverted pyramid subhead from the New York Herald refers to James Brooks of New York.

On December 17, Brooks lashed out with a rambling, ill-advised defense of his conduct regarding Credit Mobilier on the House floor. Onlookers grimaced and rolled their eyes as the New York Democrat raised his hand as if taking an oath and pledged “in the presence of God and this House, and before the whole country,” that he had exploited his position in Congress for personal profit.

Although he conceded that his son-in-law, Charles Neilson, owned fifty Credit Mobilier shares, Brooks claimed he was entirely innocent of malfeasance. “I am willing,” Brooks declared melodramatically, “that every transaction of my life shall be scrutinized.”

The speech went over badly. The Boston Globe called it a “blunder,” “ineffective and ill-considered.” It would be the first of many missteps.

One of his biggest mistakes was failing to fully divulge the scope of his Credit Mobilier investments. Unmentioned in his House speech – and undisclosed until Neilson let the cat out of the bag – was that Brooks had already obtained 100 shares of Credit Mobilier stock from Union Pacific Vice President Thomas C. Durant, and turned them over to his son-in-law.

Another blunder involved his claim that he simply acted as an agent for his son-in-law in obtaining Credit Mobilier stock. When Poland presented his committee’s findings to the House it was clear that the arrangement was regarded as a transparent ruse. The evidence, Poland argued, showed that Brooks was the “real and substantial owner” of the stock.

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When Durant testified to the Poland committee about his dealings with Brooks on January 14, 1873, the New York Democrat offered an odd defense. Citing his efforts on behalf of the Union Pacific while out of office, Brooks argued that it was “only natural” that he should want to get some Credit Mobilier stock once it was available.

Almost two weeks later he offered an even more bizarre defense of his conduct that included the admission that he tried to get his son-in-law to take advantage of inside information about the currency he had obtained in his capacity as a member of Congress.  Neilson declined to act on the tip – a decision Brooks said he regretted. “Any man using a large amount of capital could have made tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands,” the lawmaker said.

Statements of this sort left observers wondering what Brooks was thinking. The cynical Sun in late January concluded – harshly but fairly — that Brooks had demonstrated a “fatuity unfathomable” in his attempts to defend himself.

By the time the House debated whether to expel Brooks and Ames, as recommended by the Poland committee, Brooks’s condition seemed to have worsened. While Ames, Poland and Benjamin Butler, an Ames ally, arrived for the first day of debate looking dapper and well-rested, Brooks hobbled onto the House floor “with a slow and feeble step.”

Poland presented the case against Ames in a measured, lawyerly way, but his scorn for Brooks was obvious. When the Vermont Republican closed his case on Feb. 27, he cited Brooks’s histrionic address to the House in December. “After such an attempt to deceive and mislead the House, no man could expect to be believed by anybody,” Poland declared.

But Brooks appeared confident that he would avoid expulsion – and he was right. When the House voted to censure him instead, he indulged in an uncharacteristic burst of tolerance when he shook the hands of African-American lawmakers who voted to support him. “He said that he had heretofore opposed their race, but their course today had made him henceforth their devoted friend,” the New York Tribune reported.

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Thomas Nast’s treatment of the Credit Mobilier scandal in Harper’s Weekly features the bespectacled James Brooks standing at the center next to Oakes Ames.

This burst of sunshine proved brief. On March 8, the Tribune published a letter from Brooks in which he declared his innocence and lashed out at the Poland committee. “Enemies have taken advantage of my physical prostration from malaria contracted in India and too long neglected, to offer up Oakes Ames and myself as sacrifices to a public clamor,” he claimed.

Brooks was in the clear, but he was still bitter. And he was still sick. His condition deteriorated and on April 30 he died at his residence in Washington. The cause of death was not malaria or some other exotic malday.

It was stomach cancer. He had been suffering from the illness, Army doctors concluded, for the past three years.

 

 

I will be talking about the Credit Mobilier scandal at 7 p.m. on April 27 at Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minn.

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The “most damaging exhibition of official and private villainy ever laid bare to the gaze of the world”

The Credit Mobilier scandal started as a newspaper exposé in a presidential election year. It ended up defining many of the major issues that dominated American politics in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

From the late summer of 1872 when the New York Sun broke the story until the Forty-Second Congress adjourned in early March without taking meaningful action against anyone implicated in the tawdry affair, the story of Representative Oakes Ames’s stock sales to his congressional colleagues preoccupied Washington and mesmerized the country.

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The New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.

The Sun claimed its scoop revealed “most damaging exhibition of official and private villainy ever laid bare to the gaze of the world.” By the time Congress limped home, many agreed.

At one level, it is easy to understand why. The three congressional committees formed to investigate how Credit Mobilier touched Congress and conducted its business generated almost daily examples of politicians behaving badly.

Many lied – and were seen to be doing so. The reputations of Vice President Schuyler Colfax, Democratic Representative James Brooks of New York, and Senator James Patterson of New Hampshire never recovered from their implausible denials or outright dishonesty. Even James A. Garfield, the promising Republican congressman from Ohio who would later be elected president, never quite escaped what he called “the shadow” of his involvement with Credit Mobilier.

Ames, the Massachusetts Republican at the center of the scandal, was more honest than his colleagues, but his candor failed to disarm his critics. He fully disclosed his dealings with his fellow lawmakers but also admitted he sold Credit Mobilier shares to them with the goal of garnering support for the interests of the Union Pacific in Congress. “We wanted,” he told one congressional committee, “capital and influence.”

It was a squalid tale that reflected well on no one. Ames “remorselessly told the truth, to his own terrible damage and the ruin of his timid accomplices,” the New York Tribune concluded.

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Rep. Oakes Ames. Library of Congress photo.

None of this could be foreseen when Ames sold shares in the Union Pacific’s profitable construction subsidiary during the winter of 1867-1868 to as many as 11 of his congressional colleagues.

Credit Mobilier shared its name with a prominent French banking house. Thomas C. Durant, the Union Pacific vice president who named it, hoped to borrow some of the glamour and prestige of the European institution. On that score, he failed.

In most other ways, however, Credit Mobilier proved to be an enormous success. Most of Credit Mobilier’s stockholders also owned shares in the Union Pacific. The railroad chartered by Congress under the terms of the Pacific Railroad Act struggled to make money and attract investors. But Credit Mobilier offered a way around that problem by essentially allowing railroad stockholders to pay themselves to build the railroad. By the winter of 1867-1868, the value of its stock had doubled, according to one Credit Mobilier official — well above the price of $100 per share at which Ames sold it to his friends.

Under the headline “The King of Frauds,” the New York Sun revealed Ames’s stock sales in September 1872 – at the height of the presidential campaign – and disclosed the rationale of the lawmaker known as the “King of Spades” for his family’s famous shovel-making business back in Massachusetts. “We want more friends in this Congress,” he advised Credit Mobilier investor Henry S. McComb, who was pressing Ames to provide him with more Credit Mobilier stock and would later file suit to press his claim.

The fact that the scandal began with a newspaper story highlights another noteworthy lesson of the drama. Democrats and Republicans used to jousting with each other encountered another, less predictable, rival that exercised its power not in the half of government but on the printed page.

The American newspaper industry was coming into its own as advances in printing technology, communications, and transportation enabled big city dailies to flourish. The Washington press corps was filled with reporters who covered the war and had a bellyful of vainglorious generals puffing their own accomplishments or attempting to restrict what they wrote. Editors and publishers sought and exercised political influence independent of the political parties that once served as their patrons.

No one in the press was inclined to put up with self-enriching, self-important members of Congress.

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The press flexed its muscle shortly after the first committee charged by the House began to investigate the stock sales by Ames in early December 1872. The committee led by Luke Potter Poland met in secret, provoking howls of outrage from editors. “There is no good reason why such an investigation should be conducted in secret,” the Sacramento Daily Union asserted. “The public, and especially the reporters of the press, should be admitted, that the facts might be given to the world.” The hearings were opened to the public the following month.

Lawmakers who were uncomfortable with the assertiveness and adversarial behavior of the press made their feelings known. Representative Benjamin Butler, the wily Radical Republican from Massachusetts who was an ally of Ames, spoke for many of his colleagues when he angrily declared on the House floor that “I am a man God made, not the newspapers.”

Credit Mobilier was notable for its exposure of the duplicity and sleazy self-dealing of members of Congress, and its demonstration of the new-found power of the press. But the scandal deserves to be remembered as well as a defining event of the Gilded Age because of what it revealed about changing attitudes regarding the economy and government that would shape American politics for the rest of the century.

The United States was undergoing rapid economic change that was reshaping public attitudes and expectations about politics, government and the elected officials who shaped public policy. In the eight years after the surrender at Appomattox, the once predominantly agricultural American economy evolved quickly into an industrial power. “By 1873,” historian Eric Foner has written, “with the United States second only to Britain in manufacturing production and the number of farmers outstripped by nonagricultural workers, the North had irrevocably entered the industrial age.”

Leading that transformation was the enormously well-capitalized railroad industry. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War, railroad investment railroad industry, enormously well capitalized was worth more than the biggest iron and textile mills.

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“Jupiter,” the Central Pacific train that carried Leland Stanford to the Golden Spike. Library of Congress photo.

Railroads radically cut the time it took to ship goods to market – but they also arbitrarily raised freight rates. They exercised enormous power in state legislatures, often with bribes and other forms of boodle. The construction of the transcontinental railroad, heralded as a great national accomplishment, marked the high point of the industry’s standing among Americans. Less than three years later, farmers were flocking to the ostensibly apolitical Granger movement to mobilize against the industry’s monopoly power.

Although the Sun’s exposé made little difference in the outcome of the presidential campaign, its impact outlived the partisan season in which it appeared. The catchphrase “Credit Mobilier” became one of the indictments against the Republican-controlled Congress – the others being the so-called “Salary Grab” and the economic aftershocks of the Panic of 1873 – that helped Democrats ride a wave of popular discontent and recapture control of the House in the elections of 1874.

Credit Mobilier encapsulated the themes of corruption and monopoly power that defined American politics well into the next century. “When monopolies succeed, the people fail; when a rich criminal escapes justice, the people are punished; when a legislature is bribed, the people are cheated,” Journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote.

Lloyd wrote those words in 1881, about John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. But they aren’t too different from the call to arms issued by the New York Tribune to farmers in 1873, less than a year after Congress gently slapped Ames and Brooks on the wrist for their role in Credit Mobilier – and excused everyone else involved.

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From the Chicago Tribune.

“It is the corruption of politics by Railway rings and Credit Mobilier rings which has brought [farmers] to their present distress, and it is only through the purification of politics that they can find permanent relief,” the Tribune wrote. “This is a bad year for Christian statesmen with their pockets full of Pacific railroad bonds, political lawyers who take retaining fees from railway corporations, and professional politicians who strike the corporations for the bulk of their expenses, and then vote themselves back pay for their valuable services. We look to the Farmers, more than any other class, to counteract the mischievous money influence which has filled our public offices with venality and selfishness; and so we say to the Grangers, Don’t keep out of politics, but go in and cleanse them.”

In one way or another, Americans would be fighting that battle for the rest of the century.

 

I will be talking about Credit Mobilier and signing copies of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at 7 p.m. March 27 at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C. If you can’t make it you can buy a copy at amazon.com.

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The salary grab

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Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper displays the congressional finger-pointing that followed passage of what became known as the “salary grab.” Representative Ben Butler (from left) was the chief advocate of the increase. Library of Congress image.

By the end of February 1873, the last gusts of the Credit Mobilier scandal had ceased. Another storm quickly followed.

As an incredulous press and public looked on, the House slapped Oakes Ames and James Brooks on the wrists for their roles in the scandal that dominated the Capitol and the headlines for months since it was first reported in the New York Sun. The Senate, faced with a similar quandary involving one of its own, Sen. James Patterson of New Hampshire, did nothing at all.

After concluding that no one should be expelled over the Credit Mobilier scandal, Congress decided it needed a pay raise.

In one of the last acts of the Forty-Second Congress, lawmakers approved legislation that raised salaries for themselves, the president, Supreme Court justices, Cabinet officers and other top federal officials.

For members of Congress, the pay increase was significant – a 50 percent rise from $5,000 to $7,500 annually. Expressed in terms of 2016 purchasing power, that would be a pay raise taking one’s salary from $103,000 to $155,000. Moreover, the pay raise was retroactive to the beginning of the Forty Second Congress.

The measure was the brainchild of Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts, the wily and controversial Radical Republican who defended Ames during the Credit Mobilier expulsion debate. After failing to win support for the measure, Butler managed to attach it to a legislative appropriations bill coming up for a vote at the end of the session.

Proponents of the pay increase justified it on the grounds of egalitarianism. Without the pay increase, argued Sen. Thomas Weston Tipton, R-Neb., it would be impossible for “a poor mechanic, a poor businessman, a poor lawyer” to serve in Congress, leaving the job of legislation to the “moneyed aristocracy.”

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Rep. Ben Butler. Library of Congress.

There may well have been merit to Tipton’s argument, but the pay increase – coming on the heels of Credit Mobilier — was a stunning political miscalculation. Sen. Aaron Harrison Craigin made that abundantly clear.

On the Senate floor, the New Hampshire Republican waved a telegram he had received from his allies in Manchester that warned “We are beaten forever if the bill passes.” But the reaction would not be confined to his state, he added. Passage of the salary bill endangered Republican prospects in upcoming elections in Connecticut and Rhode Island, he noted. “I begin to believe that [members of] this Congress will never learn wisdom until the people shall teach them.”

Indeed, the reaction was swift and stern. The New York Times called it “plunder” and connected the pay increase – which was widely becoming known as the “salary grab” – with congressional failure to take meaningful action on Credit Mobilier.

Like Craigin, the Times predicted voter wrath would soon make itself apparent.

“The public will not readily forget a piece of rascality so shameless, so despicable, and so conspicuous. Following close on the scandal of the Credit Mobilier – a scandal arising largely from the moral cowardice of Congress in treating it – it has wrought a deep impression on the people, which will make itself felt sooner or later – and we are inclined to think it will be sooner rather than later.”

Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio was particularly vulnerable as one of the lawmakers implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal and the manager of the appropriations bill to which the salary increase was attached. With voters up in arms, Garfield refunded his salary increase to the Treasury – and his allies made sure the local press knew about it.

In the spring and early summer of 1873, as 16 states prepared for local elections, voter fury over the pay hike was reflected in state Republican platforms. In Ohio, Iowa, and other states, the party denounced the pay increase, abuses by railroads and Credit Mobilier.

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James A. Garfield. Library of Congress.

“The Salary Grab – It Is Indefensible and Will Be Punished,” the New York Herald warned in August. “Public indignation has been so thoroughly aroused,” James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s paper warned, “that few politicians will be able to remain in public life unless they have returned the amount into the Treasury and are at the same time recorded as against the measure.”

By the time the Forty-Third Congress convened in December, the salary increase was doomed. Dozens of bills called for its repeal. Republican Representative Moses W. Field of Michigan, tongue planted firmly in cheek, proposed that lawmakers serve without salary or mileage compensation.

Field and his colleagues understood they had to act decisively to repeal the salary increase. The new Congress not only faced voter fury over Credit Mobilier and the salary grab, it also had to cope with the consequences of a severe stock-market panic that threatened widespread unemployment and bankruptcy.

Well might the National Republican newspaper in Washington counsel vigorous action by Congress to address escalating anger with the political status quo. The state elections were difficult for Republicans in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and elsewhere – and a possible foretaste of things to come. “The ‘off-year’ and its results has made many a Congressman feel the possibility, if not the probability, of his early retirement to public life,” the newspaper warned.

I will be at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C., on March 27 to talk about the Credit Mobilier scandal. If you can’t make it, buy a copy of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com

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The verdict

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Luke Potter Poland faced a tough room.

The Vermont Republican encountered widespread skepticism on February 25, 1873, as he opened the debate on whether to expel Republican Oakes Ames of Massachusetts and James Brooks of New York for their role in the Credit Mobilier scandal.

Many felt he had only himself to blame for his predicament. A week earlier, after more than two months of investigation into the sale of the valuable stock in the Union Pacific construction subsidiary to members of Congress, the investigative committee led by Poland recommended the expulsion of Ames and Brooks but cleared everyone else implicated in the scandal of wrongdoing.

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Representative Oakes Ames. Library of Congress.

The report’s shortcomings infuriated many. The New York Tribune, not given to hyperbole, delivered a harsh verdict on the disciplinary recommendation: “It insults the honesty and intelligence of Congress.”

The Tribune believed the investigation was so badly handled that the report ought to be rejected in its entirety by the House and the final verdict left to the voters. The National Republican, a Washington daily angling for the contract to print the Congressional Globe, was also critical of the committee’s findings, but for a different reason. “Mr. Ames’ conduct in this whole matter is far from being as reprehensible as the committee have made it to appear.”

The seriousness of the matter at hand contrasted with the strangely festive atmosphere that pervaded the House. On the opening day of the expulsion debate, Poland lived up to his reputation as a dandified relic of the Revolutionary era by wearing a ruffled shirt and brass buttons. Ames’s chief ally, Ben Butler, a man whose gait was once compared to a “bass walking on its tail,” strutted onto the House floor with a cape draped over his shoulders.

The press gallery was packed and turnout by the public was so immense that room had to be made on the House floor to accommodate the crowd. As for the man at the center of the drama, Ames seemed in good spirits at the outset of the debate but could be seen sobbing at his desk as the proceedings continued.

In his opening remarks, Poland offered a lawyerly summation that disappointed observers by rehashing facts already known about the dealings of Ames and Brooks. But there was no mistaking his conclusions. Ames wanted to buy protection for the Union Pacific and Credit Mobilier by selling shares at discounted prices to his colleagues, Poland asserted. Brooks would not have obtained Credit Mobilier shares from company officials, Poland claimed, unless Credit Mobilier wanted something in return.

Poland needed to convince two-thirds of his House colleagues to vote in favor of expulsion, but it soon became clear how unlikely he was to reach that threshold. One member, John Franklin Farnsworth of Illinois, argued that Ames could not be accused of offering bribes because none of the lawmakers to whom he sold stock were charged with accepting bribes. “It was once considered an established maxim of criminal jurisprudence that in case of murder a dead body must be found,” Representative Seth Wakeman of New York added. “Mr. Speaker, I do not find the dead body. I do not see evidence of a crime having been committed by these men.”

On the second day of the debate, Butler offered a thoroughgoing defense of Ames that swept up even those who believed the Massachusetts Republican should be booted out of Congress. Over the course of two hours, the colorful Radical Republican attacked the case against Ames and held him up as a blameless patriot whose support for the Union Pacific deserved acclaim rather than approbation.

For good measure, Butler also took a swipe at the press — a surefire crowd-pleaser in a room filled with politicians who blamed the newspapers rather than Ames or Credit Mobilier for the scandal that had enveloped them. He pointed to the press gallery and accused the New York Sun correspondent who broke the Credit Mobilier story of stealing the documents on which the story was based. To cheers Butler declared: “I am a made God made, not the newspapers.”

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Rep. Luke Potter Poland of Vermont. Library of Congress photo.

When Poland closed the debate the following day, defeat seemed all but certain. Nevertheless, he offered a somber warning about the issues at stake — issues that went beyond narrow evidentiary questions. The actions of Ames and Brooks highlighted the insidious effect of “money power” in politics, Poland argued. And he warned that its power was increasing as corporate interests — Poland called them “associations” — grew in wealth and influence.

“The people are fast learning that when necessary to secure aims and interests of their own these associations can lay temptations in the way of their public servants too strong for them to resist, and that, unless some check be found, their rights, if not their liberties, will soon be at the mercy of these great and fast-increasing monopolies.”

Poland’s insights failed to sway his colleagues, who were so disappointed in his commmittee’s report that it never came up for a vote. Instead, after much wrangling, the House voted to censure Ames and Brooks. Ames “brightened up” once it became clear the House would not vote on expulsion. Brooks, whose “hatred for the Negro” was well known, was moved to shake hands with black Republicans from South Carolina who voted against condemning his actions.

The verdict — censure, not expulsion, for only two of the members implicated in the scandal — was a stunning anti-climax after months of headlines and hearings. In a withering assessment, the Nation compared the deliberations to “the efforts of a herd of sheep to find an opening in a fence through which they might escape a barking dog.”

The House found a hole. But the barking dog remained uncomfortably near.

I will be at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C., on March 27 to talk about the Credit Mobilier scandal. If you can’t make it, buy a copy of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com

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“A Profound Sensation”

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On Feb. 18, 1873, the Credit Mobilier scandal got real.

The findings of the first – and most significant – of the three investigations into the sale of lucrative stock in the Union Pacific construction subsidiary to members of Congress went to the House. Rep. Luke Potter Poland, the Vermont Republican who led the investigation, had a rapt audience.

“The absorbing interest with which this report is looked for,” the National Republican reported, “is without precedent in the annals of Congress.”

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Rep. Luke Potter Poland. Library of Congress photo.

The drama began Sept. 4, 1872, when the New York Sun published lengthy excerpts of deposition testimony from a lawsuit filed by a Credit Mobilier investor against Rep. Oakes Ames of Massachusetts. Henry S. McComb alleged that Ames sold Credit Mobilier stock his colleagues in Congress – and presented letters showing that Ames did so intending to promote the interests of Credit Mobilier’s parent company, the Union Pacific.

“We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames confided to McComb in one of the letters, “& if a man will look into the law (& it is difficult to get them to do so unless they have an interest to do so,) he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with.”

The Sun’s blockbuster exposé reverberated for months. Poland’s committee went to work behind closed doors in December– and then opened its proceedings in January after the press and public demanded that the investigation be conducted in public. Two other committees – one in the House and the other in the Senate – subsequently launched their own investigations of Credit Mobilier. But Poland’s committee, charged by the House with investigating “whether any member of this House was bribed by Oakes Ames, or any other person or corporation, in any matter touching his legislative duty,” was the most significant.

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The New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.

On Feb. 18, the House gallery was packed with what some reports characterized as the biggest crowd since the days of President Johnson’s impeachment in 1868. After the House waded through some of the legislative trivia that crowds its calendar, Poland stood at his desk, shuffled some papers and signaled that he was ready for his committee’s report to be shared with the House.

It was a moment of high drama. Over the course of the next hour, the House Clerk read the findings. “The report produced a profound sensation and was listened to with silence and painful interest,” James A. Garfield noted in his diary.

The report started strong, with a thorough review of the history of Ames’s transactions with his colleagues. Most of the lawmakers with whom Ames dealt had denied buying Credit Mobilier shares or claimed that they pulled out shortly after agreeing to purchase the stock. Poland’s committee dismissed these claims and concluded that most had indeed obtained shares from the Massachusetts Republican. Notable findings involved:

Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, who bought $1,000 and received $400 in dividends.
Glenni Scofield of Pennsylvania, who agreed to buy $1,000 in Credit Mobilier stock and $600 in cash dividends.
Garfield, the future president, and William D. “Pig Iron” Kelley of Pennsylvania, each of whom bought Credit Mobilier shares on credit from Ames and received $329 in dividend payments after the purchase price of the stock was deducted.
John Bingham of Ohio, who admitted buying Credit Mobilier shares when he testified to the Poland Committee, bought $2,000 in Credit Mobilier stock and received Union Pacific stock as dividend payments.
New York Democrat James Brooks, who bought 150 shares from Thomas C. Durant and the company while serving as a government –appointed director of the Union Pacific. “As such it was his duty to guard and watch over the interests of the Government in the road and to see that they were protected and preserved.”

The report followed the stunning findings with a damning observation. It acknowledged that a number of lawmakers abruptly closed their accounts with Ames. “But the committee believe that they must have felt that there was something so out of the ordinary course of business in the extraordinary dividends they were receiving as to render the investment itself suspicious, and that this was one of the motives of their action.”

 

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Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly renders his verdict on the Credit Mobilier scandal. Library of Congress image.

At this point, it may well have seemed to many in the House that the committee was going to land hard on everyone involved.

Then it pulled back. Immediately after noting the suspicious haste with which members backed out of their Credit Mobilier investments, the report declared that it had “not been able to find that any of these members of Congress have been affected in their official action in consequence of their interest in Credit Mobilier stock.”

That’s because the committee never looked for such evidence. The record suggest at least one member, Henry Dawes, introduced legislation to aid Ames shortly after buying Credit Mobilier stock in 1867. He was never questioned about it.

Poland’s committee called for the expulsion of Ames and Brooks but left everyone else off the hook. “All looked relieved when they found that they came in for no censure,” the New York Tribune reported.

The finding reflected an emerging view on Capitol Hill that the scandal was much ado about nothing. The lawmakers implicated in the scandal may have escaped punishment for their role, but it may have been too soon to relax. In the view of the New York Times, members involved deserved to face “some well-defined measure of condemnation.”

 

I am going on the road in the next several months to talk about the Credit Mobilier scandal — at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C., on March 27 and then Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minn., on April 27. If you’re not able to attend, then you can find Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com

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“I may be a very bad man, but they are not investigating me”

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Thomas Nast’s rendering of the Credit Mobilier scandal in Harper’s Weekly. Rep. Oakes Ames, R-Mass., is seen with his right hand in his vest pocket standing next to the bespectacled Rep. James Brooks, D-N.Y. Library of Congress.

The end was in sight.

By the middle of February, 1873, the investigations into the Credit Mobilier scandal were nearing completion. More than two months of hearings held by three congressional committees had generated countless front page stories, indignant editorials and sputtering speeches.

Washington was obsessed — and the rest of the country was appalled.

The scandal involved surreptitious sweetheart sales of stock in a Union Pacific construction subsidiary with the distinctive name of Credit Mobilier to members of Congress. A dozen or so members of Congress and former lawmakers were implicated, with four emerging as the primary figures of interest, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax, the former Speaker of the House; Rep. James Brooks, D-N.Y., and Republican Sen. James Patterson of New Hampshire.

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Rep. Oakes Ames, from “Behind the Scenes in Washington.”

But Rep. Oakes Ames — a major Credit Mobilier and Union Pacific investor who sold shares to Colfax, Patterson and at least nine others (Brooks obtained his from Ames’s corporate rival Thomas C. Durant) — remained the central character in the drama.

In the final weeks of the investigations, the Massachusetts Republican known as the “King of Spades” for his family’s successful shovel-making business spent a good deal of time providing details of the transactions with his colleagues. He made no secret of his motive.

At the outset of the investigation Ames had been content to obfuscate to protect the reputations of his colleagues. But when it began to look as though he would be made out as the villain of the scandal he lost interest in covering for them. As he put it: “[W]hen I heard it was said they intended to break me down I could not do otherwise than state everything.”

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The New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.

Ames would have stayed out of the headlines altogether had it not been for an explosive scoop by the New York Sun. On Sept. 4, 1872 the feisty four-page Sun filled its front page and most of its inside pages with details of Credit Mobilier’s operations gleaned from the deposition of a Credit Mobilier stockholder who was suing Ames. Among the startling revelations was the disclosure that Ames had sold the valuable stock to his congressional colleagues to promote the interests of its parent company, the Union Pacific, on Capitol Hill.

“We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames wrote to the investor, Henry S. McComb, “& if a man will look into the law (& it is difficult to get them to do so unless they have an interest to do so), he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with.”

In characteristically flamboyant language, the Sun heralded its report on corporate malfeasance and public sleaze related to Credit Mobilier as “the most damaging exhibition of private villainy and public corruption ever laid bare to the gaze of the world.”

That was Gilded Age hyperbole, but the point was made. The story prompted the House to form a committee to investigate the allegations in the story. Before long, two more committees — a second in the House and one in the Senate — joined the inquiry.

In mid-January, after watching one Credit Mobilier purchaser after another deny buying the stock or claiming that it had been quickly returned, Ames went on the attack and provided the Poland committee with ample evidence of his dealings with members of the House and Senate.

On Feb. 11, he doubled down, producing a hand-sized notebook filled with detailed information about stock sales and dividend payments to Colfax, Reps. James A. Garfield, John Bingham, William “Pig Iron” Kelley and Henry Dawes as well as Sens. Patterson and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts (who would soon succeed Colfax as vice president).

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Schuyler Colfax. Library of Congress.

The additional evidence further confirmed what was widely suspected — that members who had denied buying shares from Ames were lying. Many stuck to their stories anyway. Colfax, confronted by evidence that he deposited $1,200 at his bank — an amount corresponding to dividend payments recorded by Ames — offered an implausible tale in his defense. The vice president claimed he had received $200 from a member of his family and then discovered a worn $1,000 bill as he opened his mail at breakfast one morning.

The New York Tribune found this story improbable in the extreme.  “If Mr. Colfax’s statement is true, he is the victim of a train of circumstantial evidence almost unparalleled in judicial history,” the Tribune observed pointedly.

By documenting his transactions with his congressional colleagues, Ames had succeeded to some extent in redirecting the spotlight toward others implicated in the scandal. But how much good it did him was open to question.

That became clear when Ames, testifying before the committee investigating Credit Mobilier’s reach into the Senate, made a jest as he was answering questions from Sen. John Potter Stockton of New Jersey.

Stockton wanted Ames to amplify on the reason he gave for selling the stock in the first place — that he wanted to encourage “men of influence” in Congress to support the interests of the Union Pacific.

“Those were the kind of men you wanted?” Stockton pressed.

“Yes sir,” Ames responded. “Don’t you?”

Stockton was not amused by Ames’s apparent flippancy. “What I do is not under investigation of Congress,” the senator responded. “Mr. Ames, I may be a very bad man, but they are not investigating me.”

Ames and the others implicated in the scandal would learn soon enough what that investigation concluded — and if the House was prepared to act.

 

I am going on the road in the next several months to talk about the Credit Mobilier scandal — at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C., on March 27 and then Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minn., on April 27. If you’re not able to attend, then you can find Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com

Rhetorical flourishes and memorable quotations

The language of American politics in the 19th century was simultaneously more sophisticated and more unvarnished than the polished platitudes served up today.

Finding and reveling in the rhetorical twists and turns of the Credit Mobilier scandal was one of the joys of writing Congress and the King of Frauds. Herewith, in no particular order, are some of my favorites:

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The masthead of the New York Sun. Library of Congress.

— “[T]hey winced, made up pitiful martyr mouths, prevaricated, and tried to wriggle out of it. Now they are wriggling back and trying to explain their last summer’s explanations. Their great error was in making any effort to conceal this matter. There was nothing to conceal.” – Thomas C. Durant, in the New York Sun, Jan. 13, 1873, on the position of lawmakers who lied about their purchase of Credit Mobilier stock.

— “We want more friends in this Congress, & if a man will look into the law, (& it is difficult to get them to do so unless they have an interest to do so,) he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with.” – Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts to Henry McComb, Jan. 25, 1868, explaining his motives for selling Credit Mobilier stock to members of Congress.

— “It is a characteristic of our people that when they want a thing they will have it, cost what it may. If they want a railroad they are always ready to yield a willing ear to the voice of the railroad siren, who whispers them to loan the credit of their counties, towns, cities or farms to aid an enterprise which promises to make all rich, but often results in repudiation, bankruptcy, and ruin.” – Representative Cadwallader Colden Washburn of Wisconsin, on the risks associated with investing in railroads.

–– “To say that I was startled at my ‘find’ would inadequately express my mental state.” – New York Sun correspondent Albert M. Gibson recalling his reaction to the discovery of the explosive testimony of Henry S. McComb – the basis for Gibson’s scoop on the Credit Mobilier stock sales.

— “There is no end to the scandal that the Credit Mobilier investigation is bringing out.” – The New York Tribune after the revelation that Sen. James Harlan of Iowa took $10,000 in campaign contributions from Thomas C. Durant.

— “Money is becoming the god of our idolatry. Honesty and virtue are without influence. Corruption is triumphant, and the downfall of the Republic would seem to be near at hand.” – The Memphis Daily Appeal, Jan. 30, 1873, over-reacting to the Credit Mobilier revelations.

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Rep. Oakes Ames. Library of Congress.

— “I intended to make it as favorable as I could to Mr. Colfax, but when I heard it was said they intended to break me down I could not do otherwise than state everything.” – Oakes Ames, explaining Feb. 11, 1873 to the Poland committee why he changed his testimony about Vice President Colfax and others implicated in scandal.

— “The report produced a profound sensation and was listened to with silence and painful interest.” – James A. Garfield, recording in his diary the reaction of the House on Feb. 18 as it listened to the findings of the Poland Committee’s investigation into the Credit Mobilier scandal.

— “ ‘Avoid the appearance of evil’ is an injunction that, I think, sometimes rogues are more careful to observe than honest men.” – Rep. Glenni Scofield of Pennsylvania, as he claimed to the Poland committee on Jan. 16, 1873 that he didn’t really understand what Credit Mobilier’s relationship to the Union Pacific but that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.

— “Trial of the Innocents.” – The standing headline used by the New York Sun on its daily Credit Mobilier stories.

— “When monopolies succeed, the people fail; when a rich criminal escapes justice, the people are punished; when a legislature is bribed, the people are cheated.” – Journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd, writing in the Atlantic Monthly about the rising danger of monopolies.

— “The charge appeared originally in the Sun, which is prima facie evidence that it is a lie.” – The New York Times, Sept. 10, 1872, dismissing the New York Sun’s Credit Mobilier scoop as fake news.

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Rep. Luke Potter Poland, R-Vt. Library of Congress photo.

— “The people are fast learning that when necessary to secure aims and interests of their own these associations can lay temptations in the way of their public servants too strong for them to resist, and that, unless some check be found, their rights, if not their liberties, will soon be at the mercy of these great and fast-increasing monopolies.” – Republican Luke Potter Poland of Vermont on the underlying issues of the Credit Mobilier scandal.

— “I am a man that God made, not the newspapers.” – Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts, attacking the press for reporting on the Credit Mobilier scandal.

“Revelations of an astonishing character”

On Jan. 22, 1873, Representative Oakes Ames joined an exclusive Washington club.

Ames had already appeared several times before the House committee investigating the Credit Mobilier scandal resulting from his sale of stock in the immensely profitable Union Pacific construction subsidiary to members of Congress.

This time, he testified that the prominent politicians – including the vice president – who claimed that they had not bought stock from him were lying.

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Oakes Ames. Library of Congress photo.

The sensational testimony opened an extraordinary new chapter in the political drama opened by the New York Sun with its exposé of the Credit Mobilier stock sales. The normally restrained Cincinnati Gazette characterized Ames’s testimony as “Revelations of An Astonishing Character.”

Ames’s day-long testimony could be described as one of the first examples of a unique kind of story-changing Washington moment familiar to students of modern scandals and controversies. They include:

Joseph Welch confronting Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin in 1954 about his witch hunt for Communists: “Have you no sense of decency sir?”
Alexander Butterfield, appearing in 1973 before the Senate Watergate committee to reveal the existence of a previously secret tape-recording system at the White House.
Oliver North testifying before the joint committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal.

Each of these episodes fundamentally changed the narrative of the political drama in which they occurred. Welch’s indignant rebuke McCarthy and his attorney, Roy Cohn, marked the beginning of the end of the communist witch hunt. Butterfield’s revelations ultimately made it impossible for President Nixon to hide his role in Watergate behind executive privilege. North effectively deflected his congressional inquisitors as Congress probed the scheme to arm Nicaraguan rebels with proceeds from the weapons sales to Iran.

Ames’s testimony proved just as momentous.

After the New York Sun published its exposé on Sept. 4, 1872, many members implicated by the story denied buying shares from Ames. They included Vice President Schuyler Colfax, who bought stock from Ames while Speaker of the House, James A. Garfield of Ohio, and Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, nominated by Republicans in June to succeed Colfax as vice president.

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Luke Potter Poland of Vermont. Library of Congress photo.

When the investigative committee led by Luke Potter Poland of Vermont began its inquiry, it heard from Ames behind closed doors. The Massachusetts Republican recounted his transactions with his colleagues and testified frankly as to his motivation for selling the stock.

“I strove to use them” – referring to the stock – “in a way that I thought most advantageous in spreading our influence everywhere,” he admitted.

At the time, there appeared to be little danger posed by Ames’s evidence. Although the committee kept a transcript of its proceedings, the closed-door inquiry seemed to guarantee that few would learn of his testimony.

But public outcry over the secret inquiry forced the House to open the proceedings and release the committee transcripts when Congress returned to Washington in early January.

Suddenly, Ames’s testimony was before the public – and the lawmakers he identified could no longer count on the protection afforded by secret hearings.

One lawmaker after another testified under oath to Poland and his colleagues that they did not buy Credit Mobilier stock from Ames – or backed out shortly after agreeing to the purchase. Garfield actually claimed that he didn’t even know what Credit Mobilier was as he talked to Ames.

Ames and others affiliated with the Union Pacific and Credit Mobilier steamed as they watched the parade of prevarication. Thomas C. Durant, once a vice president of the Union Pacific and a corporate rival of Ames, watched the spectacle with contempt.

Members who bought Credit Mobilier stock from Ames could have avoided all the controversy if they had simply admitted to it at the outset. “But they winced, made up pitiful martyr mouths … and tried to wriggle out of it,” Durant told the Sun.

The investigation seemed stalled. Worse, from Ames’s standpoint, he was being made out as the villain while the members of Congress who lined up to buy his valuable stock were seen as no worse than innocent dupes. “His motives,” the New York Times sniffed, “seemed to have been far from pure.”

Ames decided to fight back. The counter-offensive actually began Jan. 21. Sen. James Patterson, a one-time school teacher and scatter-brained New Hampshire intellectual who had firmly denied buying Credit Mobilier shares from Ames when he first testified to the Poland committee, came back to meekly concede that he had, in fact, bought the stock after all.

Trembling “like one of the delinquents he used to torture in the classroom,” Patterson looked on as Ames destroyed his claim. “The senator’s case looked well when he finished it,” the New York Tribune reported, “but Ames demolished it in a few minutes.”

That was just the beginning. The next day, Ames rebutted claims made by Garfield, Sen. William Boyd Allison of Iowa and others with testimony about payments received and stock dividends distributed to congressional Credit Mobilier shareholders.

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Schuyler Colfax. Library of Congress photo.

Colfax, the vice president who would soon be succeeded by Wilson, looked particularly bad. As the Poland committee’s first public witness, Colfax claimed he never bought Credit Mobilier shares from Ames, although he admitted paying $500 toward the purchase. On Jan. 22, Ames testified that not only did Colfax buy the stock, he received $1,200 in dividends.

Despite some initial discomfort, Ames seemed to revel in his new role. “He does not shrink with the air of one ashamed,” the Washington Evening Star noted. “His fills out his wide arm-chair to its capacity. He is the most self-possessed man at the table.”

Mortified members of Congress gathered in small groups in the Capitol to speculate about the implications of Ames’s new aggressiveness.

Garfield, for one, had no doubt as to what it meant. “He is evidently determined to drag down as many men with him as possible,” the future president noted in his diary. “He seems to me as bad a man as can well be.”

Garfield had good reason to fume. Ames’s testimony undercut attempts by his purchasers to avoid the fallout from the scandal. Durant may well have been right – if they had simply told the truth at the outset they would have stayed out of trouble.

The investigation by Poland’s committee had weeks yet to go. There would be more damaging information from Ames. In the Sun, Ames ally John Alley offered an ominous warning: “Some of these weak-kneed congressmen will wish they had pursued a different course.”

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Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, now available at amazon.com.

 

Credit Mobilier in the headlines

Writing Congress and the King of Frauds required an immersion in the journalism of the early 1870s. It was a different world.

Overt partisanship and reckless rhetoric were common on the front pages and in the editorial columns of the era. One looks in vain for words like “alleged,” or phrases along the lines of “accused of.” The profession of journalism, as historian Mark Wahlgren Summers has written, was “just out of the eggshell.” Accuracy and impartiality — two of the pillars of modern journalism — were not widely practiced or even understood.

Before anyone concludes I am some sort of Pecksniff who advocates the “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” school of journalism, herewith are a collection of the Credit Mobilier headlines I found most entertaining during the course of my research. They are a guilty pleasure — not the sort of thing I would want to see on today’s front pages, but nonetheless funny, creative (in one instance, typographically so) and a welcome diversion from unbroken columns of 8-point gray type that filled the newspapers of the era.

All headlines below are from the Library of Congress.

[image error]Charleston Daily News, Charleston, S.C., Sept. 11, 1872: “King of Frauds” was the headline used by the New York Sun atop its Credit Mobilier scoop on Sept. 4, 1872. That the same headline was used by another paper a week later testifies to its power. “The King of Frauds” was becoming a catchphrase for Credit Mobilier — surely the sign of an effective headline.

 

[image error]New York Herald, Jan. 16, 1873: Under James Gordon Bennett Jr., the Herald was one of the wildest and most colorful big-city papers in the country — a worthy rival of the New York Sun in that regard. More than a year later, the Herald filled its news columns with a detailed and entirely fictional account of escaped zoo animals rampaging through the streets of the city. Here it gives new meaning to the phrase “inverted pyramid,” with an elaborate sub-head appearing below its headline on the day’s Credit Mobilier news. A similar style of sub-head also appeared in the Cincinnati Gazette.

[image error]New York Sun, Jan. 10, 1873: Many papers would run their stories on the scandal under the nondescript headline “Credit Mobilier.” In this, as in many other ways, the New York Sun was different. This was a standing headline for the Sun‘s daily Credit Mobilier coverage, appearing on Page 1 many times above the day’s coverage of events on Capitol Hill. It succinctly conveys the newspaper’s cynicism about the congressional investigation — as well as the biases of Charles A. Dana’s sheet.

[image error]Stark Democrat, Canton, Ohio, Nov. 5, 1874: The Ohio newspaper was proudly Democrat — a holdover from the days when the first and foremost duty of a newspaper was to promote the interest of a political party and objectivity be damned. Here the newspaper revels in the party’s sweeping triumph in the elections of 1874.

[image error]Chicago Times, Sept. 21, 1872: Wilbur F. Storey’s newspaper was so committed to the Democratic Party that it rejected Horace Greeley’s candidacy at the top of the party’s ticket in 1872 in favor of Charles O’Conor. Headlines in the Times were notable for their use of alliteration, as Summers notes in his history of Gilded Age journalism, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878, but it is the obvious bias against Greeley (“A Personal Explanation of His Secession Record”) that makes this headline remarkable to the modern reader. The Times was one of the few Democratic papers that took a skeptical view of the Sun‘s Credit Mobilier scoop.

[image error]Cincinnati Gazette, Jan. 23 1873  Understatement could also be an effective way to grab a reader’s attention. The Cincinnati Gazette, the newspaper of the influential Washington correspondent Henry Van Ness Boynton, was an important news outlet in Ohio and along the Ohio River. When Oakes Ames returned to the Poland committee with his pocket ledger that detailed his transactions with members of Congress, the stunning nature of his testimony is captured in the sub-head that declares “Revelations of an Astonishing Character.” Sub-heads, as we will see, were often more inflammatory than the one-column, two-word headlines that topped the story.

[image error]The New York Sun Sept. 4, 1872: “The King of Frauds” was eye-catching enough, but the sub-heads are what give the expose its breathless, indignant tone. “Colossal Bribery,” “How the Credit Mobilier bought Its Way Through Congress” and — my personal favorite — “Congressmen who Have Robbed the People, and who now Support the National Robber,” stoke the indignation the reader would need to wade through column after column of gray and dense prose. The Sun did not employ the inverted pyramid approach when publishing its investigative stories, as historian Janet Steele writes in her study of the Sun and its mercurial editor, but favored a chronological approach to organizing its stories. Readers would have to be plenty angry to get to the end.

 

Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, now on sale at amazon.com

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