Robert B. Mitchell's Blog, page 11

“The generous glow of Christmas”

Washington luxuriated in a period of relative calm during the Christmas season of 1872.

Congress adjourned for the holiday on December 20. Because some lawmakers had begun celebrating a wee bit early, the House had trouble summoning a quorum to approve a motion to adjourn for the Christmas recess. Eventually, according to the New York Times, more than half of Congress left town for the holiday, and “save for the generous glow of Christmas, the city is almost completely devoid of interest.”

[image error]

Rep. Oakes Ames.

The nation’s capital needed a break. When Congress returned to town earlier in the month to begin the third and final session of the 42nd Congress, it was consumed immediately by the Credit Mobilier scandal. In practically its first order of business in early December, the House voted to create a five-member committee to investigate whether Massachusetts Republican Representative Oakes Ames had attempted to bribe colleagues to whom he sold shares in Credit Mobilier, the Union Pacific’s lucrative construction subsidiary.

House Speaker James G. Blaine and other Republican leaders – including James A. Garfield – hoped to get ahead of the headlines with a demonstration of resolute integrity. Things didn’t work out as they hoped.

Right out of the box, the committee led by Luke Potter Poland blundered by voting to conduct its business in secret. Poland believed meeting behind closed doors would allow the committee to pursue its investigation in a business-like fashion. Garfield, implicated in the scandal, also favored a closed-door investigation for obvious reasons.

Meeting in private, however, did absolutely nothing to inhibit the press from reporting on the Poland committee’s deliberations. Leading newspapers in New York filled their news columns with reports based on sources from inside the committee room. For much of December, newspapers reported – with varying degrees of accuracy – on the testimony of Henry S. McComb, Ames and others.

[image error]

Henry S. McComb. Photo courtesy of the McComb Railroad Museum.

Some of the sources were not hard to identify. A fawning interview in the New York Sun with Jeremiah Sullivan Black, the Democratic lawyer representing McComb , made plain from whom the newspaper was getting its information. Others papers were more circumspect but clearly getting their impressions from sources whose perspectives were just as biased as Black’s.

News that one witness had testified that Democratic Representative James A. Brooks of New York had been implicated in the scandal led to a maudlin drama on the House floor on December 17. Ailing, not entirely lucid and oozing self-pity, Brooks delivered an hour-long defense of his conduct that included a vow before the House and God that he had never tried to profit from his position in Congress. Onlookers and journalists, well accustomed to displays of sanctimonious hypocrisy, grimaced and rolled their eyes.

Accurate reporting of the secret investigation wasn’t the biggest problem faced by Poland, Blaine and other Republican leaders. Of greater political significance was the universal editorial condemnation of the closed-door proceedings. Headlines in Cairo, Ill., and Memphis referred sneeringly to “secret deliberations” of the Poland panel. Henry Van Ness Boynton’s Cincinnati Gazette reported that no one in Washington – even those implicated in the scandal – supported opening up the deliberation. Out in California, the Sacramento Union offered a scathing assessment. “We expect nothing from this investigation as it is being conducted.”

Most tellingly, one of Washington’s leading newspapers in the capital concluded that the closed-door investigation was all wrong. This was a city whose daily press was so cozy with the powers-that-be that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed one of the newspapers in their novel The Gilded Age: a Tale of Today as “The Washington Daily Love-Feast.” Nevertheless, the Washington Evening Star concluded that the closed-door investigation was all wrong. Many critics of the closed-door proceedings “say more harm is likely to be done the accused parties through the sensational guessings at the evidence, and wholesale fabrications without any guessing, than would be by a full report of all that takes place in the committee room. And they are quite right.”

[image error]Shortly before Christmas, the influential Boynton – who had dismissed the Sun’s Credit Mobilier scoop as a partisan smear during the presidential campaign – admitted in print that he had been wrong to do so. “It is not pleasant to write about the Credit Mobilier,” Boynton began in a column that reviewed the disclosures that emerged since the investigation began. The evidence that had emerged “aroused suspicions that nothing but the most searching investigation will either meet or satisfy,” he wrote.

The question hanging over Washington at the end of 1872 was whether Congress could — or would — investigate with the rigor Boynton and others demanded.

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

[image error]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dana, Grant and Credit Mobilier

A day after the death of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, the reckoning began.

Perhaps no newspaper faced a more complicated task in assessing the Union war hero and former president than the New York Sun, the newspaper whose 1872 expose of the Credit Mobilier scandal marked the beginning of the Gilded Age. Its idiosyncratic owner, Charles A. Dana, oscillated wildly over the years when it came to the quiet, unassuming Midwesterner whose unflinching prosecution of the war against secession saved the Union.

Americans have struggled for decades with the life and legacy of Grant, the subject of Ron Chernow’s remarkable new biography. That struggle played out in the editorial columns of the Sun as the nation mourned the loss of its former president and military hero.

[image error]

Charles A. Dana. Library of Congress photo.

Grant’s personal battles against economic ruin brought on by an ill-advised business partnership with Ferdinand Ward and the cancer that ultimately took his life transfixed the nation in his final years, Dana’s newspaper noted.

“A generation has passed away and another has come upon the stage since the reports of Grant’s successes in the field filled the columns of the daily press and made every one of that time familiar with his brilliant military exploits,” the Sun recalled.

But there was more to say.

“Unfortunately for the country, as well as for him, the lustre of his great fame as the conqueror of the rebellion has since been dimmed by his conspicuous failure as a statesman and businessman; and through this failure his countrymen have come to regard him with less partiality and perhaps less respect than are justly his due.”

That assessment may well be regarded as judicious and measured. But its appearance in the Sun seemed more than a little ironic — because there were few publications that pummeled Grant the politician more vigorously than the feisty four-page broadsheet led by Dana. The paper’s contempt was made plain by its withering nickname for the president: “Useless S. Grant.”

[image error]

The New York Sun, Aug. 15, 1871.

It wasn’t always like that. Dana first became acquainted with Grant during the war. At a July dinner in Memphis, Dana would recall years later, he encountered “a man of simple manners, straightforward, cordial, and unpretending.” In March 1863, as rumors swirled of Grant’s alcoholism and doubts lingered about his responsibility for the carnage at Shiloh, Dana was assigned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to join Grant’s retinue. “The ostensible function I shall give you will be that of special commissioner of the War Department to investigate the pay services of the western armies,”  Dana said he was told, “but your real duty will be to report to me every day what you see.”

[image error]

Grant in 1863 as Dana might have encountered him. Photo: Photographic History of the Civil War.

Grant, Dana recalled, welcomed him to his official family. “He did not like letter writing, and my daily dispatches to Mr. Stanton relieved him from the necessity of describing every day what was going on in the army.”

That cordiality continued to define their relationship for the next several years. Dana supported Grant’s bid for the White House in 1868, but their relationship took a sharp turn for the worse shortly after Grant took office.

The new president, Dana believed, had failed to honor a promise to offer him the lucrative patronage job of collector at the Port of New York. But Dana also recognized that the sympathies of the working class readership of the Sun lay with the Democratic Party. “To stake a claim in the cut-throat New York newspaper industry, Dana needed to define and win a loyal audience,” writes Janet E. Steele in The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles A. Dana. “For a variety of reasons, personal as well as pragmatic, he would choose to keep that audience a Democratic one.”

Even by the wild and woolly editorial standards of the era, Dana over-achieved in this regard. No accusation, no opportunity to cast aspersions on the president or his party went unexploited. Grant’s family was characterized as a pack of shameless office-seekers and self-promoters (although, as Chernow points out, there was some truth to this when it came to Grant’s father). His appointments were blasted as incompetent and corrupt. Grant wanted to annex the Dominican Republic; the Sun wanted the U.S. to back Cuban rebels fighting for independence from Spain.

This is the context in which the Sun’s Credit Mobilier scoop appeared. The lengthy (albeit error-ridden) account by Albert M. Gibson detailed the operations of the Union Pacific Railroad’s shady construction subsidiary — and how a member of Congress sold shares in the company at advantageous prices to his colleagues with the goal of cultivating support for the railroad.

[image error]

Headlines atop the New York Sun’s Sept. 4, 1872 Credit Mobilier story.

The hyper-partisanship of Dana’s newspaper was the reason the rival New York Times could plausibly dismiss the storyl; its appearance in the Sun, the Times asserted, was “prima-facie evidence that it was a lie.” Even the New York Tribune, whose editor — Democratic presidential candidate Horace Greeley — stood to benefit politically was initially reluctant to endorse the story. The Tribune  grudgingly reprinted a condensed version of the story on an inside page and noted in its editorial columns that it did so “with all possible reserve.”

But the Tribune took note of something else. The basic allegation of the story — that Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts peddled Credit Mobilier stock to his colleagues to help the Union Pacific’s interests in Congress — was true. Letters from Ames to fellow Credit Mobilier investor Henry S. McComb confirming that this was his motivation were “genuine documents,” the Tribune acknowledged.

The Tribune went on to make a prediction. “The public will look with deep interest at further developments in the case.”

In the months that followed, newspapers of all partisan persuasions began to understand the seriousness and validity of the Sun‘s blockbuster. Even the Times conceded that the members of Congress implicated in the scandal deserved some sort of sanction.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge Dana’s newspaper by the editorial conventions of the twenty-first century. The newspaper industry was on the cusp of explosive growth in influence and political power when the Sun published the Credit Mobilier story. The principles of objectivity, fairness and impartiality that govern modern newsgathering had yet to take root.

But there may well have been less resistance to believing the story had the Sun been less overtly hostile to Grant and his party. Its journalistic legacy, combining aggressive, adversarial reporting and shamelessly shrill partisanship, is at least as complex as the statesman it memorialized in August 1885.

 

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

[image error]

The press begins to grow up

The Credit Mobilier scandal marked an important watershed in the political life of the United States — the moment in the years after the Civil War when Americans began to react against what Luke Potter Poland and others called “money power” in the halls of government.

But the scandal displayed another important change taking place in the country. The political melodrama was hatched, fed and kept alive by an aggressive and independent press. Indeed, there would have been no scandal — no investigation, no revelations, no national debate about corruption and money power — without the persistent reporting of Washington correspondents and adversarial editorial commentary.

[image error]

The New York Sun,Sept. 4, 1872.

For me, as a lifelong journalist, this aspect of the story is particularly fascinating. The story of Credit Mobilier illustrates how the press was growing up, abandoning old conventions and moving toward the professional norms accepted and practiced by responsible news organizations today.

“Moving toward” is the key phrase. There was still plenty that the Poynter Institute would find objectionable. Sensationalism, partisanship and, in some instances, overt corruption characterized much of the press of the early 1870s. For example, Washington correspondent Uriah Hunt Painter learned early on that Oakes Ames was selling valuable shares in Credit Mobilier on Capitol Hill — but instead of breaking the story he bought some of the stock himself.

William Shaw, correspondent of the Boston Transcript, bragged to a congressional committee about how he used his access to the Treasury secretary George Boutwell to profit from insider knowledge. After weeks of even-handed coverage of the scandal, the National Republican suddenly decided it was all much ado about nothing — just as it was bidding for a contract to print the Congressional Globe and the mood of the House was clearly against taking drastic action against Ames or anyone else involved.

Indeed, the scandal resulted from an expose by the New York Sun printed at the height of the bitter 1872 presidential campaign pitting Republican President Ulysses S. Grant against Democrat-Liberal Republican Horace Greeley. The Sun hoped the scoop by Washington correspondent Albert M. Gibson would help defeat Grant. On that score, it failed miserably.

[image error]

The Washington Evening Star, Feb. 28, 1873.

Recklessness and irresponsibility are easy to spot in the newspapers of the period — but there was also smart reporting and imaginative efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal. At the same time, there was a dawning realization that the press played a vital role in keeping the pressure on Congress so that, in the words of the Sacramento Union, “politicians will find it impossible to keep the issue down.”

Henry Van Ness Boynton, the Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette, provided authoritative and searingly honest coverage of the affairs of Washington. A recipient of the Medal of Honor for his service at the battle of Chickamauga, Boynton had been dismissive initially of the Credit Mobilier story. In an important column in December, 1872, he conceded that  “It is not pleasant to write about the Credit Mobilier,” but he did — and conceded that he had been wrong to wave it off.

Newspapers used divergent styles to bring the news of Credit Mobilier to their readers. The Sun combined snarky partisanship with its front-page coverage. “Trial of the Innocents” was the paper’s hilariously cynical standing headline for stories about the congressional investigations. Other papers, particularly the New York Tribune, offered front page “scene” pieces that described the mood and atmosphere during dramatic moments in addition to routine coverage of debates and hearings.

[image error]

George Alfred Townsend, circa 1870. Library of Congress photo.

One of the most interesting Credit Mobilier stories appeared under the byline GATH, the pen name for George Alfred Townsend, a famous Civil War and Washington correspondent. In 1872 the Chicago Tribune assigned him to get to the bottom of the story. Townsend filed a remarkably smart piece that represents an early example of sophisticated media reporting.

Townsend headed to Philadelphia, where the lawsuit that formed the basis of Gibson’s story had been filed. He retraced Gibson’s steps and concluded that the scoop had been orchestrated by Jeremiah Sullivan Black, the attorney whose client was suing Ames.

As the story unfolded in the winter of 1872-1873, it was clear that the press was performing precisely as the Sacramento Union had hoped. Pressure from newspapers forced the House to open its investigation to the public. A daily stream of pointed headlines and embarrassing front-page stories kept the heat on.

This was something new. Lawmakers didn’t like it, and Ben Butler knew that. Speaking on behalf of Ames as the House debated whether to expel him and Representative James Brooks of New York, Butler shook his fist at the press gallery and melodramatically declared: “I am a man God made, not the newspapers!”

The House cheered.

 

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

[image error]

Washington, the “pet child of the Republic”

When I was a reporter covering Congress in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the regular assignments was to write a “letter from Washington” highlighting some revealing aspect of the city’s life.

The idea was not new. Explaining and decoding the political culture of the nation’s capital has been the pastime of journalists since correspondents perched in the Capitol. In the years after the Civil War, as Washington took on increasing importance and newspapers were capable of covering events with new speed thanks to the telegraph, interest in the byways and business of Washington increased enormously.

[image error]Authors stepped in to meet the demand with books that were part travelogue and part political commentary. Their work shared a common theme. There was much about which to be proud in the nation’s capital – and much cause for shame. The Credit Mobilier scandal figures prominently in two of these volumes.

“The pet child of the Republic, Washington City, is unknown to the majority of the American people,” Dr. John B. Ellis declares in the introduction to his The Sights and Secrets of the Nation’s Capital, published in 1869. In 512 pages, Ellis set out to remedy that situation with chapters covering everything from the architecture of the U.S. Capitol to the Smithsonian and Cabinet departments.

Ellis holds up Pennsylvania Avenue, the boulevard linking the Capitol and the White House, as a model urban thoroughfare. “It is handsomely built up, and contains some building which would do credit in any city,” he gushed.

[image error]

A Washington gambling establishment from Behind the Scenes in Washington.

But Ellis did not confine himself to landmarks and important institutions. Washington was a “paradise” for gamblers and filled with “houses of ill fame,” he notes with disdain. The city’s politically powerful numbered among the patrons in both establishments. And his scorn for lobbyists comes through in his description of the hotels where they congregated.

“The halls, sitting-rooms and parlors are crowded to excess with a noisy, boisterous crowd, all talking at the same time, and producing a very Babel of sounds,” Ellis says. “The air is hazy with tobacco smoke, and the floors are slippery with tobacco juice.”

Four years later, as Washington reeled from the tawdry dealings revealed in the Credit Mobilier investigations on Capitol Hill, two more books – cast with the same template used by Ellis – rolled off the presses to satisfy the nation’s curiosity about its capital.

Edward Winslow Martin’s Behind the Scenes in Washington  appeared in 1873. In addition to detailed descriptions of the city’s landmarks and history, it covers Credit Mobilier in some detail. The scandal’s major personalities – Oakes Ames, Schuyler Colfax, James A. Garfield, among others – are profiled. But the verbatim republication of a long New York Herald story about the scandal reveals the hasty manner in which the book was put together.

[image error]

Oakes Ames in Behind the Scenes in Washington.

Of far more interest is George Alfred Townsend’s Washington Outside and Inside, also published in 1873. Townsend was a prominent Washington correspondent whose work appeared in newspapers under the byline “GATH.” In addition to the detailed (and frankly tedious) review of the city’s historic sites, Townsend recounts the journey he took across the northern Virginia to the site of First and Second Bull Run in Manassas.

Like Martin, Townsend reviews the Credit Mobilier scandal in some detail, but his perspective is of far more interest since he actually covered it. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Townsend traveled to Philadelphia to retrace the steps of the New York Sun correspondent who broke the story and concluded that Democratic super-lawyer Jeremiah S. Black was behind it.

Townsend republished his piece and reviews the cases against each of the lawmakers implicated in the scandal, absolving Garfield and Henry Dawes of wrongdoing in spite of the fact that the House committee investigating the scandal concluded they both bought and profited from their investments in Credit Mobilier.

Even though he gave Garfield and Dawes a pass, Townsend is far from satisfied with the manner in which Congress conducts business. The last-minute passage of the retroactive pay raise that came to known as the “salary grab” comes in for particular scorn.

“This most scandalous action was worthy of a body of men which has become diseased and corrupt by the advantages of war, and has wholly lost its own self-respect and the confidence of the country.”

In the spring of 1873, two authors put the finishing touches on a different kind of book about Washington. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner concocted a sprawling novel full of humor and Victorian melodrama to tell the story of one family’s futile pursuit of riches.

Credit Mobilier is never mentioned but informs the characters and much of the humor. It mocks the failure of the House to expel Ames when one of the characters asks after the failure to punish a congressman named “Fairoaks” if Congress “could convict the devil of anything if he were a member?”

The relatively gentle humor of the book left the literary critic of the Washington Evening Star unimpressed. “There are good parts in it, but no real merriment,” the critic sniffed. “The essence of comedy is wanting.”

The title of the novel: The Gilded Age: a Tale of To-Day.

Now available to pre-order at Amazon.com: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age.

 

[image error]

 

 

For want of “a thorough and honest investigation”

The normally feisty editorial page of Charles A. Dana’s New York Sun seemed unusually downcast.

It was Nov. 29, 1872. Horace Greeley, the great editor of the New York Tribune who had once employed Dana as his managing editor, lay at death’s door. Greeley died later that day – bringing an end to one of the most remarkable careers in the history of American journalism – only weeks after voters overwhelmingly rejected his quixotic bid for the White House.

[image error]

The staff of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley (third from left, sitting) and Charles A. Dana (second from left, standing). Library of Congress photo.

In the midst of the presidential campaign, the Sun – which backed Greeley and was an outspoken critic of President Ulysses S. Grant – published an explosive story detailing sweetheart stock deals involving members of Congress and a lucrative subsidiary of the Union Pacific.

Oakes Ames, a financier heavily invested in the Union Pacific and a Republican member of Congress from Massachusetts, sold the shares in the company – Credit Mobilier – to Republican colleagues with the expectation that ownership of the stock would make them more inclined to support the interests of the railroad. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames indiscreetly confided to Henry S. McComb, a Credit investor who would later sue him.

The story implicated many of the biggest names in Washington, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax; his successor, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts; James A. Garfield and John Bingham of Ohio, Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, and William “Pig Iron” Kelley of Pennsylvania. The Sun also named House Speaker James G. Blaine and Treasury secretary George Boutwell as Credit Mobilier purchasers, although no evidence would emerge to implicate them.

The Sun’s scoop attracted considerable attention but ultimately made no difference in the outcome of the campaign. Grant carried all but six states and led Republicans to a massive majorities in the House.

[image error]

Horace Greeley. Library of Congress photo.

Now, as Dana’s mentor lay dying weeks after voters seemed to have shrugged off the Credit Mobilier story, the Sun raised the white flag. A “thorough and honest investigation of the Credit Mobilier is not to be expected at the hands of this Congress,” the Sun predicted. The Sun endorsed the call by the liberal Springfield Republican for the expulsion of Ames even as it cast doubt on its likelihood.

“But is it probable that Mr. Ames would consent to be expelled without attempting to defend himself?” the Sun asked. “And would not the mischief done to prominent members of both parties, and especially of the Republican party, by such a defense be greater than any possible harm that might come from ignoring the whole subject and letting Ames remain quietly in his place for the few months remaining to the present Congress?”

It turned out that Dana’s pessimism was premature. Before spring returned to Washington, no fewer than three congressional committees were investigating Credit Mobilier’s business practices and reach on Capitol Hill.

The Sun’s editorial rested on sound, if cynical, political logic – and raises one of the great questions surrounding the story of the Credit Mobilier scandal: why would Republicans pursue an investigation into a scandal when there were powerful incentives to ignore it?

In fact, there were several reasons, involving politics and principle, for congressional Republicans to get to the bottom of the affair.

For one thing, there had long been unease about Credit Mobilier among Republicans and blue-stocking opinion leaders. In 1869, Republican Representative Cadwallader C. Washburn of Wisconsin denounced Credit Mobilier (named after a prominent French banking house) for inflating railroad construction costs to allow its stockholders – who were also Union Pacific investors – to fraudulently enrich themselves.

Through Credit Mobilier, Washburn charged in a House speech, the Union Pacific “practically contracts with itself to build the road, and that the enormous figures they exhibit as representing the cost of the road are absolutely fictitious.”

Washburn’s speech followed a scathing article about railroad finance by Charles Francis Adams Jr. in the North American Review that took direct aim at Credit Mobilier. Government-backed railroad construction threatened the honest operation of government, Adams warned, and Credit Mobilier exemplified why. “The members of it are in Congress,” Adams wrote of Credit Mobilier. In “Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the Plains they expend them, and in the Credit Mobilier they divide them.”

Republicans like Washburn who represented the farm states of the Old Northwest were also well aware of the rising anger with monopolistic railroad practices. Membership in the nominally apolitical Patrons of Husbandry – known more commonly as the Grange – spread like wildfire in the Mississippi Valley and South in 1872 and into 1873, fueled by disenchantment with railroads.

The Grange was not a partisan organization, but that did not mean its members were disinterested in politics. When it came to politicians, Grangers wanted to know one thing, a Nebraska newspaper noted: “Is he liable to be bought by the railroads? In other words, is he the staunch loyal friend of the husbandman?”

Republicans also realized that the scandal – by detailing the tawdry eagerness of elected representatives to pocket a tidy sum from a shady business – cast a dark cloud over Congress. Republican Representative George McCrary of Iowa, a member of one of the committees that investigated Credit Mobilier, noted that respect for law depended on respect for those who wrote the law. McCrary’s chairman, Republican Luke Potter Poland of Vermont, warned his colleagues that they needed to act vigorously to convince the public that they were not in thrall to the “money power” of wealthy corporations and speculators.

Perhaps no one exemplified Republican concern about Credit Mobilier more than Garfield. Even though he was implicated in the scandal – and would later be found to have bought Credit Mobilier shares, despite his denials under oath – Garfield met with Blaine to urge an investigation.

[image error]

The U.S. Capitol from Behind the Scenes in Washington.

It was a risky move, but Garfield had been advised by Jeremiah S. Black, an influential Democratic lawyer who was representing Henry S. McComb in his suit against Ames, that he had nothing to fear. Ames may have intended the sweetheart sale as a bribe, Black reasoned, but since Garfield did not know the motives for the sale, he was not guilty of taking a bribe.

But things did not go according to plan. Pressure from newspapers forced the closed-door proceedings to open to the public. Members of Congress who denied buying shares from Ames were shown to have lied when Ames produced proof of their transactions. The committee led by Poland focused on the motives of Ames and a leading House Democrat, James Brooks of New York, but made no attempt to examine how the stock sales may have affected the actions of those who bought the shares. In the end, only Ames and Brooks were sanctioned by the House, and their punishment — censure — was less severe than the expulsion recommended by Poland and his colleagues.

The political melodrama transfixed Washington and the rest of the country. One Garfield ally advised the lawmaker that back home, “People have been asking, whereunto shall this thing grow?”

The failings of the House investigation into the scandal infuriated the public and contributed to voter anger with Republicans in 1873 and 1874. The well-intended plan of party leaders was overshadowed by unhappiness with the outcome. In the end, Republicans paid a high price for Credit Mobilier – not for ignoring the scandal, which Dana predicted and would have made short-term political sense, but because they botched the job.

 

Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age is now available for pre-order at amazon.com.

[image error]

The volcano erupts

[image error]

Ben Butler in uniform. Library of Congress photo.

In a scandal featuring personalities Oakes Ames himself said were perceived as “scoundrels and swindlers,” perhaps it was inevitable that Ben Butler would get involved.

As Congress weighed what to do about the Credit Mobilier scandal in the early months of 1873, the Massachusetts Republican emerged as Ames’s chief defender in the House.

With the possible exception of Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York, few figures on Capitol Hill were more controversial, colorful – or unusual. A droopy eye, receding hairline and prodigious paunch gave Butler a decidedly un-heroic appearance. One observer likened his gait to a “bass walking on its tail.” He often wrapped himself in a cape as he strode onto the House floor.

Despite — or perhaps because of — his idiosyncrasies, Butler was a valuable ally for the embattled Ames. After weeks of hearings and testimony, a House investigative committee led by Luke Potter Poland of Vermont called for the expulsion of Ames and Representative James Brooks of New York for their role in the scandal involving the lucrative construction subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad.

Butler seemed attracted to controversy much as a moth is drawn to flame. In 1860, he was a Democrat who attended the party’s convention in Charleston and supported the nomination of a Mississippi senator named Jefferson Davis. After the fall of Fort Sumter, he rallied to the Stars and Stripes and rose to become one of Lincoln’s “political generals” – officers who earned their rank through clout or influence rather than merit.

Butler was widely regarded – particularly below the Mason-Dixon Line – as a villain and a thief. As the Union commander in New Orleans, he enraged Confederates for ordering that any woman who showed contempt to occupying U.S. soldiers was to be “treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.”  His brother “was getting rich on confiscated cotton,” Shelby Foote writes, and Butler received the nickname “Spoons” for his alleged habit of pilfering silverware.

But the South had another reason for hating him. In the early days of the war he refused to return runaway slaves to their former owners. Butler declared they were “contraband of war” and allowed them to remain behind Northern lines. Congress endorsed the policy – “a signal,” James McPherson notes, “that if the conflict became an antislavery war it would become a Republican war.”

After the war, he became a leading Radical Republican who led the unsuccessful efforts to impeach President Andrew Johnson. In February, 1873 he rallied to the defense of Ames.

[image error]

Representative Oakes Ames. Library of Congress photo.

Butler spokes on Ames’s behalf during the second day of the expulsion debate. His much-anticipated speech packed the House gallery.  “Gen. Butler was not eloquent, but he was savage – as savage as a meat ax,” Representative Julian Burrows would recall after Butler’s death in 1893. “It was not what he said that made the House listen to him, but the expectation of what he was going to say. He was like a volcano – always smoking and always giving a hint of an impending eruption.”

Butler offered a characteristically impassioned defense of his Massachusetts colleague. Ames was not a scoundrel, but a hero whose support of the Union Pacific warranted praise, not condemnation. His transactions with his colleagues were not bribes but business deals. The whole controversy, Butler declared, was concocted by scurrilous newspaper reporters and their editors who acted as if they, not the elected representatives of the people, understood best what Congress should do.

Butler’s “eruption,” to employ Burrow’s simile, played well in the House, where lawmakers were already inclined not to expel Ames or Brooks. “Everybody hung intently on his words,” the New York Tribune reported. “He made his hearers shout with laughter.”

In the end, the House voted to censure Ames rather than expel him. Butler, however, was not done. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass a retroactive pay raise at the end of the session. The ill-advised measure proved politically toxic and became, with Credit Mobilier and the aftershocks of a brutal stock market crash in September, 1873, another political liability for congressional Republicans.

In 1874, voters rendered their verdict on Credit Mobilier, the economy, and what became known as the “salary grab” when Democrats went from a 110-seat minority in the House to a 60-seat majority. It was the biggest partisan swing of the nineteenth century – and one of the Republicans who went down to defeat was Butler.

—

[image error]Order your copy of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com.

div.wpmrec2x{max-width:610px;}
div.wpmrec2x div.u > div{float:left;margin-right:10px;}
div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;}


Advertisements

Credit Mobilier’s place in history

As Americans we seem uniquely unwilling to accept the complexities of our historical figures — particularly the personalities of the distant past.

The men who wrote the Constitution are regarded as “The Founders,” touched by God to formulate a uniquely successful plan of government. Abraham Lincoln was a folksy saint who drew on unknown reserves of grit, eloquence, and principle to prosecute a horrifying war only to be martyred by a madman’s bullet.

Our villains are also two-dimensional. Many dismiss nineteenth-century populists as raving anti-Semitic bigots. Radical Republicans are vengeful zealots. Ulysses Grant was supposedly a hopeless drunkard who ineptly presided over a corrupt presidency.

[image error]

The Lincoln statue in Grant Park, Chicago.

Much of this reflects our collective ignorance of history. But the events of the past year have made me realize that perhaps there is another reason for the reflexive simplification of our past.

The United States is unique as a nation founded on an ideal — “all men are created equal” — that it failed to live up to from the moment it became independent. The legacy of slavery is one of the most important and difficult issues for Americans to come to terms with, and it colors our views of the past in ways that still play out today.

In short: the horror of slavery makes it almost impossible for Americans to hold nuanced views of our past. The legacy of human bondage and endemic racism is so toxic that we feel compelled to either deny or reflexively minimize the existence of these evils or lionize anyone who stood against the South’s “peculiar institution.”

It is, of course, long past time for Americans to recognize the insidious influence of slavery on our development as a nation. Slavery is increasingly and correctly accepted as the root cause of the war — not states’ rights, taxation, tariffs or any one of the other spurious theories offered over the years to absolve slaveholders and the Confederacy.

That, in turn, has resulted in an overdue re-evaluation of the figures of the era — particularly the Northern politicians who presided over the Civil War and its aftermath. Ron Chernow’s marvelous new biography of Grant, for example, follows on the work of H.W. Brands and others to portray a brilliant, if flawed, military commander and a committed opponent of slavery who as president succeeded in suppressing the white terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.

But there is a danger here. Re-evaluation — the “revisionism” scorned by some — can lead to over-correction. As we finally recognize that figures from the nineteenth century once dismissed as hopelessly venal and corrupt took principled stands against slavery and worked to bring about its end we run the risk of overlooking their failings. Sleaze is sanitized. Biography becomes hagiography.

And this is where — in case you were wondering — the Credit Mobilier scandal comes in. Many of the leading figures in the scandal played important roles in the 1860s as opponents of slavery. As Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax presided over passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. James A. Garfield fought in the Union Army and rose to the rank of general. Oakes Ames supported the work of the anti-slavery Emigrant Aid Society in Kansas.

[image error]

Thomas Nast’s cartoon on the Credit Mobilier scandal, with “Justice” pointing an accusatory finger at the members of Congress implicated in the scandal.

Each deserves credit for standing courageously against human bondage; each deserves to be called to account for compromising that commitment by engaging in ethically dubious financial transactions. A mature understanding of human nature — and our own history — demands that we accept the virtues and failings of figures from our past.

Some of the modern literature on Credit Mobilier has tended to discount the significance of the scandal, casting it as a partisan distraction aimed, ultimately, at undermining Reconstruction.

My purpose in telling the story of the scandal is not to endorse the race-fueled cynicism of nineteenth-century Democrats, delegitimize Reconstruction or cast all Republicans from the period as corrupt. Indeed, in a story in which no one or no institution seems completely free of ulterior motives, some of the most principled voices come from the party of Lincoln: Elihu Washburne of Illinois and his brother, Cadwallader, from Wisconsin; Luke Potter Poland of Vermont, and Lot Morrill of Maine, among others.

[image error]

Headlines from the Cairo, Ill., Bulletin.

My goal is to restore a complicated story to its rightful place as a defining event pointing toward a new political landscape in the decades after the Civil War ended. The racial and regional issues raised by the war remained significant but would soon have to share the stage with political and economic questions arising from industrialization.

Those questions — particularly as they pertained to the use of corrupt “money power” by financiers and big corporations to advance their interests in state legislatures and Congress — were brought into sharp focus by the New York Sun‘s exposé on Sept. 4, 1872. Like the poisonous heritage of human bondage, they haven’t gone away.

 

 

Coming soon: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age  ( Edinborough Press), by Robert B. Mitchell.[image error]

The captain of the “little tub”

When House Speaker James G. Blaine wanted someone to lead the House investigation into the Credit Mobilier scandal, he turned to a Vermont Republican who personified rectitude.

was a former senator and one-time judge who had led congressional investigations into Ku Klux Klan terrorism in the South. Favoring brass buttons, blue coats and ruffled shirts, he looked more like a relic of the American Revolution than a politician from the era of the telegraph and the steam engine.

“He is a fine looking man,” Grace Greenwood (the pen name for Sara Jane Lippincott) wrote in the New York Times, “erect and stately, with hair as white as the snows of his own Vermont hills, or as his own judicial ermine. I suspect, from his tone and manner, that he was once a Methodist minister of the best type, but that, in some hour of weakness, this ornament of the American pulpit let go of the saving doctrine of the ‘perseverance of the saints’ and backslid into the American Congress.”

[image error]

Luke Potter Poland of Vermont. Library of Congress photo.

Poland had the experience, demeanor and reputation to tackle the thorny scandal arising from the New York Sun’s exposé of sweetheart stock sales to members of Congress by Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, a railroad financier heavily invested in Credit Mobilier and the Union Pacific. The Sun published letters from Ames to fellow Credit Mobilier investor Henry S. McComb in which Ames explained he was distributing Credit Mobilier stock on Capitol Hill because “we want more friends in this Congress.”

In early December, 1872, the House put the Vermont Republican in charge of a five-member committee assigned to investigate “whether any member of this House was bribed by Oakes Ames, or any other person or corporation, in any manner touching his legislative duty.”

Things went wrong from the start.

Poland and his colleagues decided at the outset to conduct their investigation behind closed doors. The practice might have been acceptable at one time, but a scandal that resulted from a newspaper exposé could not be conducted in secret. Weeks of negative headlines and commentary pushed the House into opening up the deliberations to the public when lawmakers returned from their Christmas break to Washington in early January, but the damage was done. The private deliberations raised questions about the legitimacy of the investigation that never went away.

That was bad enough, but there were other failings. In the course of its investigation, Poland’s committee focused entirely on the question of who bought Credit Mobilier shares while ignoring the more serious question of whether the sales influenced the legislative actions of anyone who bought the stock.

[image error]There is evidence to suggest they did. In December, 1867, at the time he was arranging to buy Credit Mobilier shares from Ames, Representative Henry Dawes of Massachusetts introduced legislation that would allow the Union Pacific to move its headquarters from New York. The measure favored Ames and his allies on the Union Pacific board who had just concluded a bitter struggle for control of the railroad with Thomas C. Durant.

Poland’s committee never looked into this issue, nor did it explore other instances in which lawmakers voted on issues related to the Union Pacific as they arranged to buy or actually owned Credit Mobilier shares.

These failings came back to haunt Poland in February when the committee released its findings. The panel recommended that the House expel Ames and a Democratic member, Representative James Brooks. While it chastised those who bought Credit Mobilier shares – “No member of Congress ought to place himself in circumstances of suspicion, so that any discredit of the body shall rise on his account” – Poland’s committee recommended no sanction against anyone who obtained Credit Mobilier stock from Ames.

[image error]

Representative Oakes Ames. Library of Congress photo.

The press was incredulous. “It is a gross perversion of the facts to assume that the congressional participants in the spoil of the swindle did not know from where these spoils were derived,” the Sacramento Union seethed. “This part of the report is whitewash of the purest wash, and it will deceive no one.”

Poland’s failure to follow through on the committee’s instructions undermined support for the committee recommendations. There was little appetite in the House for expelling Ames or Brooks – and less because of the failure of the committee to follow through on its instructions. In the end, the House censured Ames and Brooks but took no other action.

To be fair, Poland and his colleagues faced a daunting task. They were assigned to investigate a sprawling and complicated scandal at the end of the 42nd Congress without benefit of staff. They faced an explosive scandal implicating some of the biggest names in the House. Representative Job Stevenson of Ohio aptly likened the committee to “a little tub” whose crew was unable to haul in “all these leviathans of the great deep in their net.”

But while Poland may have mismanaged the investigation, he understood all too well the issues at stake as the House deliberated on the Credit Mobilier scandal. As the House prepared to reject his committee’s report, Poland warned that the public was fed up with politicians who seemed in thrall to the enticements used by big corporations – in this case, the Union Pacific and its profitable subsidiary – to influence the legislative process.

As the evolution from an agricultural to an industrial economy proceeded, “the country is filling with gigantic associations which command great influence and great money power,” and public was convinced that these interests threatened their rights and liberties, Poland observed. Unless his colleagues acted convincingly to demonstrate its independence of these interests, he warned, “they will soon encounter a tempest of public judgment that will utterly overthrow many of their schemes, and there may be danger that the innocent will suffer with the guilty.”

Poland was a better prophet than an inquisitor. In 1874, Democrats rode a wave powered by public disgust with Credit Mobilier, an ill-considered retroactive pay raise and rising public anxiety about the economy following the Panic of 1873 to regain control of the House.

 

Coming soon from Edinborough Press: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age” by Robert B. Mitchell.

[image error]

“Corruption is triumphant”

The Credit Mobilier scandal landed on American politics like a match flung onto a pile of dry straw.

The political drama opened by the New York Sun on September 4, 1872 erupted less than a decade after the end of the war and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Congress had attempted to remove Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, from office in an impeachment trial that fell short of conviction by only one vote and was shadowed by the suspicion of vote-buying.

On top of the traumas of war, Reconstruction, and impeachment, the American economy was stumbling into industrialization, displacing livelihoods and widening the gap between rich and poor. Government, politics, the economy – nothing seemed to be working as it should.

The tawdry story of sweetheart stock sales involving a lucrative and shady railroad subsidiary confirmed the worst fears of many Americans.

[image error]

The bespectacled Representative James Brooks and Representative Oakes Ames (hand in vest pocket) stand in front of other members of Congress implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal in this cartoon for Harper’s Weekly by Thomas Nast. Library of Congress image.

“Money is becoming the god of our idolatry,” the Memphis Daily Appeal warned at the end of January 1873. “Honesty and virtue are without influence. Corruption is triumphant, and the downfall of the Republic would seem to be near at hand.”

Few went quite so far as the overwrought editors of the Daily Appeal. But many Americans agreed – with good reason – that the scandal pointed to something troubling at work in the political system.

After months of investigations, the public learned that Representative Oakes Ames sold valuable Credit Mobilier stock to his colleagues at advantageous prices with the intent of furthering the legislative interests of the Union Pacific Railroad on Capitol Hill.

The members to whom Ames sold the stock lied about their purchases, and were shown to have done so when Ames documented his dealings with his colleagues. Their inept attempts to cover their involvement in the sales suggested consciousness of guilt, or at the very least, a vague awareness that something was wrong.

The Credit Mobilier stock sales pointed to the pervasive power of well-heeled corporate interests to subvert the legislative process. As the Baltimore Sun put it: “that the legislation of the country should be influenced and controlled – notoriously and undeniably so – by such agencies and means, comes home, or should come home, to the breast of every citizen and patriot.”

Views regarding who or what was to blame for this state of affairs varied. Democrats, Liberal Republicans and agrarian activists each pointed in a different direction.

The Democrats

Democrats, who championed small government and white supremacy, blamed their partisan rivals for the Credit Mobilier scandal. Eager to discredit the vigorous federal effort by congressional Republicans in the years after war to protect the political rights of newly freed slaves, the partisan heirs of Jefferson and Jackson seized on any evidence they could find to contend that the Republican Party was irredeemably corrupt.

[image error]

Jeremiah S. Black. Library of Congress photo.

Jeremiah S. Black, the Pennsylvania lawyer and Washington power broker who learned of the Credit Mobilier sales as the attorney for Henry S. McComb, reflected this attitude. In an 1868 letter to fellow Democrat Samuel Tilden in which he outlined what he knew about the Credit Mobilier stock sales on Capitol Hill, Black deplored the stock sales as evidence of irredeemable corruption in the “Abolition Party.”

The Democratic view that the abuses of the Credit Mobilier scandal were linked to the behavior of a party trying to protect African-Americans was made explicit in the late summer of 1873 as Democrats and Republicans campaigned in Ohio’s critical off-year election.

Democratic Senator Allen G. Thurman connected Credit Mobilier to the federal crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan in a campaign stem-winder that recounted the scandal in painstaking detail and cautioned against believing “that this Credit Mobilier business is the only rascality.”

Liberals

Modern-day small-government conservatives are the ideological descendants of 19th-century liberals who looked on in horror as the government promoted railroad construction with land grants and government-subsidized bonds. They believed that the Credit Mobilier scandal was the inevitable result of government involvement in the economy.

The Nation, the weekly magazine edited by E.L. Godkin, was perhaps the most prominent liberal voice of the era – and it made its views in an editorial entitled “The Moral of the Credit Mobilier Scandal.” The lesson to be learned, the magazine argued, was that government had no business being in the “ ‘protective’ business and the ‘subsidy’ business and the ‘improvement’ and the ‘development’ business … It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.”

Agrarians

[image error]

Subhead from the Credit Mobilier expose in the New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872

While Democrats blamed Republicans and liberals blamed government itself for the abuses highlighted by Credit Mobilier, another segment of public opinion focused on the monopoly power of railroads.

The agrarian uprising against the railroads had been long in the making but reached its zenith just as Congress was concluding its investigations into the Credit Mobilier scandal. The Washington Evening Star, in a prescient editorial published in February 1873, noted that the farmers across the Mississippi Valley were rising up against the political and economic power of the railroads.

“The movement of the western people against the great railroad monopolies begins to assume definite shape,” the Evening Star observed, “and it is pretty certain that the control of railroad fares and freight will be the issue on which the next legislatures of several of the western states will be chosen.”

The rapid growth of an ostensibly apolitical fraternal organization for farmers known as the Patrons of Husbandry, also known as the Grange, confirmed the analysis of the Evening Star. Thousands of Grange lodges opened across the old Northwest and South as farmers looked for a way to fight back against monopolistic abuses by railroads. Grangers were less interested in partisan politics than whether a candidate for office “is liable to be bought the railroads,” one newspaper noted.

Liberal critics of the Grant administration had joined forces in an uneasy alliance with Democrats in 1872 to take down President Ulysses Grant. They nominated Horace Greeley as their candidate and failed miserably. Newly militant agrarians, animated by fears of monopoly power, gave impetus to the crusade against corruption that it failed to get from Democrats and liberals.

At least one liberal voice understood this. The New York Tribune, the newspaper over which Greeley presided until he ran for president, urged on farmers in the summer of 1873. “We look to the Farmers, more than to 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.”

 

 

Coming soon from Edinborough Press: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, by Robert B. Mitchell.

 

The “long looked-for moment” and its aftermath

In May 1869, Americans prepared to celebrate a great national achievement.

Work crews from the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific converged at an otherwise unremarkable spot in the Utah desert known as Promontory Summit. When the tracks joined, the United States would have a railroad system that spanned the continent without interruption.

Last-minute glitches delayed the ceremonial completion by a couple of days. But Americans were ready to celebrate, even if the railroads were not.

In Springfield, Mass., workers at a railroad car factory paraded through the streets carrying signs telling the world “our cars unite the Atlantic and Pacific.”  Jubilant westerners fired 100-gun salutes in San Francisco and flocked to Sacramento to celebrate.

[image error]

The Jupiter, the Central Pacific train that carried Leland Stanford and other railway officials to the Golden Spike Ceremony in 1869. Library of Congress photo.

On May 10, the lines were joined. After years of war, assassination and impeachment, the completion of the transcontinental railroad marked an extraordinary national accomplishment. “The long looked-for moment has arrived,” the New York Times  reported. “The inhabitants of the Atlantic seaboard and the dwellers on the Pacific slopes are emphatically one people.”

While the ceremonies at Promontory represented a triumphant national achievement, they also proved to be a watershed moment in the mid-19th century’s romance with the railroads.

The transcontinental railroad project was born in the 1840s when politicians, merchants and visionaries were enraptured by the promise of a form of transportation that could send products and people hurtling across the far-flung United States at unheard-of speeds.

In 1860, as the United States stood on the brink of civil war, Republicans and the Douglas and Breckinridge Democrats each endorsed government support for construction of a transcontinental railroad. In July 1862, the Republican Congress made good on the party’s commitment with passage of the Pacific Railroad Act.

But as the decade progressed, the passion faded. Long-simmering doubts and fears about the economic behemoth driving the transformation of the American economy began to move to center stage.

As early as the 1850s, farmers from the mid-Atlantic to Illinois protested against railroad freight rates. “We believe,” Illinois farmers declared in 1856, “that the producer of a commodity and the purchaser of it should, together, have more voice in fixing its price than he who simply carries it from one to the other.” Legislators in Iowa, another state where politicians embraced railroad construction, debated regulating freight rates.

Less than a decade later, these concerns were amplified by growing worries about the influence of railroads in the halls of government. Railroads dominated state legislatures from New York to California. Critics warned they were beginning to exercise undue influence on Capitol Hill as well.

In 1864, as Congress debated amendments to the Pacific Railroad Act, Representative Elihu B. Washburne issued a stinging denunciation of railroad lobbyists “scheming and plotting to fill their own pockets while the nation is verging toward bankruptcy.” Five years later, drawing on events in Albany, New York Republican Charles Van Wyck warned his colleagues against blithely acceding to every demand made by the Union Pacific on Capitol Hill.

[image error]

Elihu B. Washburne in 1859. Library of Congress photo.

“The Central railroad in New York controls that state and buys up its Legislature year after year, so as to increase its tariff on passengers,” Van Wyck warned. “You ask us to wait until we get both our hands within the jaws of this lion, when we shall be powerless to control it.”

This was the undercurrent tapped into by the revelations of the New York Sun on Sept. 4, 1872, when it published its blockbuster scoop detailing the operation of the Union Pacific’s construction subsidiary, Credit Mobilier.

The story revealed that a handful of lawmakers – including the sitting vice president and his successor – had obtained Credit Mobilier shares from a Massachusetts congressman on highly advantageous terms. Representative Oakes Ames asked for nothing in return – but he believed he didn’t need to.

The stock sales, Ames confided to a rival investor named Henry McComb, would promote the interests of the Union Pacific in Congress by giving lawmakers an ownership interest in the highly lucrative construction business. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames advised 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.”

The Sun,  it turned out, got some basic facts wrong – not the least of which was grossly overestimating the amount of stock by Ames’s colleagues. But the explosive story touched on something beyond the relatively small amounts of money involved.

The Sun called its revelations “the most damaging exhibition of official and private villainy and corruption ever laid bare to the gaze of the world.” There was more than a grain of truth under the hyperbole. As Americans would come to learn, the insidious influence of what was then called “money power” on Capitol Hill was widespread and seemingly unstoppable.

—

Coming in October from Edinborough Press: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age by Robert B. Mitchell.