Robert B. Mitchell's Blog, page 12

“Whom rogues love”

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James G. Blaine and the Mulligan letters of 1876 as rendered by cartoonist Thomas Nast. Library of Congress image.

He orchestrated the investigation of the Credit Mobilier scandal.

He was the first witness before the first House committee to investigate the scandal – and his denial of involvement was front-page news even though the committee was meeting in secret.

When the House neared a vote on whether to expel Representatives Oakes Ames and James Brooks for their roles in the scandal, he ensured that lawmakers understood that sanction was not an option.

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James G. Blaine. Library of Congress photo.

As the drama of the Credit Mobilier scandal preoccupied Washington throughout the winter of 1872-1873, House Speaker James Gillespie Blaine lurked off stage, manipulating events – often to his advantage – while attempting to protect his party and its members. How successful he was is open to question.

The Maine Republican relished the rough-and-tumble of politics, unlike his studious and conscientious friend from Ohio, James A. Garfield. That was evident after the New York Sun published its scoop on September 4, 1872, regarding the sweetheart stock deals between Ames and about a dozen of his colleagues.

As Congress straggled back into town for a lame-duck session following the re-election of Ulysses Grant, Blaine contrived an elaborate plan with Garfield for getting ahead of the scandal. On the House’s first day of business, Blaine stepped down from the speaker’s chair and called for an investigation into “whether any member of this House was bribed by Oakes Ames, or any other person or corporation, in any matter touching his legislative duty.”

The investigative committee led by Luke Potter Poland initially met behind closed doors (eventually opening its proceedings only after a sustained outcry from the public and the press) and heard Blaine as its first witness. Blaine categorically denied that he had ever bought Credit Mobilier shares – and forced Ames to confirm his assertion.

The effect was immediate. An anonymous member of Poland’s committee told the New York Tribune that “whoever might be implicated, Blaine was innocent.” Throughout the rest of the investigation, Blaine stayed out of the headlines.

But he was still deeply involved in managing the House response to the scandal. When the House Judiciary Committee issued a report urging against a move to impeach Vice President Schuyler Colfax for his part in the scandal, House members were required by the speaker to sit and listen to the committee’s report “with the gravity and decorum of a well-regulated Sunday School,” in the words of the Tribune.

In addition to arguing against a move to impeach Colfax, the report urged lawmakers to reject the Poland committee’s recommendation to expel Ames and Brooks for their role in the scandal. The implication was clear: the House leadership did not want lawmakers to impose the most serious sanction available – expulsion – on Ames and Brooks.

The House agreed, opting to censure them instead. No one else implicated in the scandal was punished. The outcome may have been deemed satisfactory on Capitol Hill, but it didn’t play well in the press or across the country.

In the months to come, as public fury exploded over a last-minute attempt by Congress to award itself a retroactive pay raise and the Panic of 1873 triggered the worst economic crisis in American history until the Great Depression, Republicans would pay a steep price for prevaricating on Credit Mobilier. In the 1874 congressional elections, Democrats went from being a 110-seat minority in the House to a 60-seat majority. Blaine fell from the position of Speaker to become Minority Leader.

The legacy of Credit Mobilier continued to haunt Blaine in 1876 as he sought the Republican presidential nomination. Implicated in another railroad stock scandal – this time involving a troubled Arkansas road – Blaine waved and read selectively from incriminating letters in a performance Garfield hailed as the most dramatic he had ever seen in the House.

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The New York Tribune, June 6, 1876.

Blaine carried the day on Capitol Hill, but the specter of scandal coming so soon after Credit Mobilier proved fatal to his presidential bid and left a lingering scar on his reputation. After leading on six ballots, Blaine lost to little-known Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio.

Blaine went on to a career that included election to the Senate and two separate stints as Secretary of State, but his efforts to avoid the aftershocks of the Credit Mobilier scandal did not prove entirely successful. In 1884, the Times broke with its party to endorse Democrat Grover Cleveland over Blaine, who had finally secured the Republican nomination.

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Blaine and the Mulligan letters. Courtesy of Hervey Priddy.

The Times‘s endorsement reflected the growing outrage with political corruption tapped into by the Credit Mobilier scandal and which shaped the politics of the Gilded Age.

“Shall the next president be a man who has weakly yielded to temptation, or a man who has unswervingly adhered to the right against powerful inducements to do wrong?” the Times asked. Shall Americans elect a “Grover Cleveland, whom honest men respect, or a James G. Blaine, whom rogues love?”

Americans would struggle with that question — whether to elect candidates “whom honest men respect” or those “whom rogues love” — in one form or another for the rest of the century.

 

Read more about Blaine and the machinations of the Credit Mobilier scandal in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, by Robert B. Mitchell. Coming this fall from Edinborough Press.

 

“Fake news,” Gilded Age-style

Reaction to the New York Sun scoop that broke the Credit Mobilier story in the late summer of 1872 has an all-too-current feel.

If the phrase “fake news” had been coined, it would have certainly been employed to diminish the importance of the New York Sun‘s scoop about the sweetheart stocks deals in Credit Mobilier involving members of Congress.

Foes of the Grant administration pointed to the Sun story as additional proof that Republican rule in Washington was irredeemably corrupt. Republican newspapers dismissed the story as partisan slander.

Demonstrating its contempt, the Republican New York Times scoffed that the Credit Mobilier expose was nothing more than a “stupid falsehood” because it originated in the Sun. That amounted to “prima facie evidence that it is a lie,” the Times declared.

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The headlines atop the New York Sun’s Credit Mobilier scoop.

Indeed, there were reasons beyond partisan politics to be skeptical of the Sun‘s blockbuster. Charles A. Dana’s nominally independent newspaper was well known as an outspoken, and often over-the-top, foe of the Grant administration.

The story itself was riddled with — and badly compromised by — sloppy errors and explicit editorial bias that may have conformed to the journalistic standards of the day but did little to reassure readers of the paper’s objectivity.

The errors included the nonsensical charge that Oakes Ames sold valuable stock in the Union Pacific’s construction subsidiary in 1868 to win support for amendments to the Pacific Railroad Act passed in 1864. This and other mistakes gave the targets of the story an easy way to dismiss the scoop in its entirety.

Moreover, the “smoking gun” — letters from Oakes Ames acknowledging that he was selling the shares to cultivate support for the Union Pacific among members of Congress — were not mentioned until the very end of the lengthy exclusive.

While many dismissed the Sun‘s scoop as nonsense, others knew better. The New York Tribune, for example, shared the Times‘s patrician disdain for the Sun but recognized the story’s basic truthfulness.

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Horace Greeley in 1872. Library of Congress photo.

Admittedly, the Tribune had a partisan incentive of its own for embracing the Credit Mobilier scoop with its editor, Horace Greeley, running against Grant’s re-election. But it had different reasons for endorsing the story.

Four years earlier, a top editor of the Tribune had warned Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois about evidence that Credit Mobilier shares had been used to bribe congressmen. The Tribune, still a loyal Republican paper at the time, decided to sit on the story rather than disclose the allegations and run the risk of hurting Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for the White House.

Four years later, when the Tribune validated the Sun‘s blockbuster by printing a condensed version of the story on an inside page, it did so “with all possible reserve” but felt it necessary because it knew that Ames’s incriminating letters to Henry McComb were genuine.

In the months that followed, the fundamental facts of the Sun’s scoop were confirmed. Ames had, in fact, sold valuable stock on advantageous terms to members of Congress. He confirmed in testimony before one of the investigative committees set up by Congress that he did so to amplify the influence of the Union Pacific on Capitol Hill. Members who bought shares from Ames denied doing so but were shown to be lying by Ames himself.

Much of the Sun‘s blockbuster proved correct.  Even the New York Times eventually came around. As the investigations into the scandal wrapped up, the Times demanded that everyone who bought stock from Ames should at least face censure for their involvement in the scandal. The “plain duty of Congress,” the Times argued, required punishment for “all who took Credit Mobilier stock from Oakes Ames.”

 

 

Read more about press coverage of the first great Washington scandal of the modern era in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, by Robert B. Mitchell,coming this fall from Edinborough Press.

 

 

“Politicians will find it impossible to keep the issue down”

The tale of Credit Mobilier is, in many ways, a story about the birth of modern adversarial journalism.

The second half of the 19th century was an exciting period in the history of American journalism. Major metropolitan newspapers proliferated as advancements in printing, along with the telegraph, made the collection and dissemination of news possible in ways never before seen.

[image error] The masthead of the Washington Evening Star, Feb. 28, 1873.

News became a commodity. Daily newspapers enjoyed newfound power and influence. Editors were well-known public personalities.

[image error] Horace Greeley. Library of Congress.

To be sure, the daily journalism of the Gilded Age was significantly different than what Americans have come to expect from the media today. Editors may no longer have been party hacks, as they often were in the antebellum era, but they battled openly and eagerly in the political wars of the period. Politically neutral objectivity was hard to find.  Washington correspondents often put fattening their pockets ahead of keeping the public informed.

Nothing illustrated the ambiguous position of the Gilded Age press – reporting, commenting on and participating in politics – like the presidential campaign of legendary New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. Sometimes, the media went beyond politics. Newspapers occasionally concocted hoaxes to create sensation and simply sell newspapers.

Nevertheless, the daily press was a new power in American society – one to be reckoned with as the United States confronted the complex issues of industrialization and the racial and sectional questions that lingered after the Civil War.

The Credit Mobilier scandal was born on the front pages when a scoop by the New York Sun, published in the final weeks of the 1872 presidential campaign, revealed that Oakes Ames was selling stock to members of Congress with the intent of cultivating support for Credit Mobilier’s parent company, the Union Pacific. For weeks after the explosive story, politicians were reacting – prevaricating about or denying (usually unwisely) — allegations that they had been buying Credit Mobilier stock from Ames.

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The headline atop the Credit Mobilier story in the New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.

The press kept the heat on when Congress returned to Washington for its lame-duck session. When the House launched an investigation into the revelations of the Sun, its chairman, Luke Potter Poland of Vermont, closed the proceedings to the press and public. The outcry from editors around the country was immediate and harshly critical.

When the House came back from its Christmas break, it made opening the investigation to the public its first item of business. Acknowledging that the press made conducting business in secret politically unwise, Democrat Samuel S. Cox of New York observed that there was “a new sentiment in this country, and we should make our practice conform to it.” Cox added: “We might as well close our own doors, as shut out the public from investigations of this character.”

As the investigations continued, newspapers kept the heat on with daily coverage, pointed headlines and indignant editorials. When the House debated whether to expel Oakes Ames over his role in the scandal, Ben Butler, who spoke at length in defense of his Massachusetts colleague, reflected the sentiment of many of his colleagues when he defiantly denounced the press and proclaimed: “I am a man that God made, not the newspapers.”

Despite the indignation of Butler and his colleagues, the press refused to be intimidated. The editor of the Sacramento Union summarized both the new attitude of newspapers and their ambivalent position in American society — part observer, part participant — in forecasting their impact on the Credit Mobilier scandal. The newspapers leading the coverage of the scandal “will soon find allies among the leading journals of every State,” the Union predicted, “and be able to work up such a sentiment of opposition that the politicians will find it impossible to keep the issue down.”

The Union proved correct. The scandal could not be managed or discreetly buried. Washington — and the rest of the country — was entering a new era.

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The New York Tribune building, 1873. Library of Congress.

Read more about the rough-and-tumble world of Gilded Age politics and journalism in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal, by Robert Mitchell. Coming this fall from Edinborough Press.

Judge Black

In the years after the Civil War, few figures wielded more influence in Washington than Jeremiah Sullivan Black.

He was known as “Judge Black” for his tenure on the bench in Pennsylvania, but the moniker would have been appropriate even if he had never wielded a gavel.

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Jeremiah S. Black. Library of Congress photo.

Tall, stern, and given to lacing his rhetoric with Biblical quotations, Black radiated gravitas and moved comfortably in the rough-and-tumble political world of post-Civil War Washington. A partisan Democrat who had served in the Cabinet of James Buchanan, Black counted friends on both sides of the aisle – including rising House Republican star James A. Garfield of Ohio.

Black and Garfield were both members of the Protestant Campbellite denomination (today known as the Christian Church – Disciples of Christ). Together, they made their mark in civil liberties law by successfully representing Indiana copperhead Lambden P. Milligan before the Supreme Court in a case that established the supremacy of civilian courts over military tribunals.

In 1868, Black had another client – Henry S. McComb, who was suing Oakes Ames over the distribution of Credit Mobilier stock. The case put Black squarely in the middle of the biggest political scandal Washington would see for decades – and his fingerprints are all over the story.

Almost four years later, in the summer of 1872, McComb testified that Ames had sold Credit Mobilier stock to members of Congress on advantageous terms. McComb had a list of lawmakers Ames to whom Ames claimed to have sold the stock – and he had letters from Ames in which the congressman confided that he was placing the shares strategically to magnify the interests of Credit Mobilier’s parent company, the Union Pacific railroad.

Black was behind the leak of this explosive testimony to Albert M. Gibson of the New York Sun. He advised Garfield as to his political and legal exposure after the Ohioan was linked publicly to the scandal. He sat in as the committee formed to investigate the stock sales held its initial meetings behind closed doors. When that committee rendered its judgment – that Ames should be expelled for selling the shares to his colleagues while the lawmakers who bought the stock were innocent of wrongdoing – it echoed the assessment made confidentially by Black to Garfield in the earliest days of the controversy.

Although there is reason to believe that Black’s zealous advocacy made McComb occasionally uncomfortable, the Delaware-born railroad speculator had nothing but praise for his attorney. At one point he dubbed Black the “noblest Roman of them all!”

Ames and his allies would no doubt have agreed with this sentiment, albeit for entirely different reasons. McComb surely intended to be complimentary, but the phrase, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, describes the leading conspirator in the killing of the Roman dictator. The Credit Mobilier scandal, Ames and his supporters believed, amounted to nothing more than character assassination.

 

Read more about Jeremiah Black, Henry S. McComb, Oakes Ames and others in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, by Robert B. Mitchell. Coming this fall from Edinborough Press.

 

 

 

Indiana’s Genial “Smiler”

In early 1872, Schuyler Colfax could be excused if he considered his prospects promising.

Four years earlier, Ulysses S. Grant tabbed the one-time South Bend, Indiana, newspaper editor and House Speaker as his vice-presidential candidate. As murmurs of dissatisfaction with Grant grew louder in Republican ranks, some speculated that the vice president, known as “Smiler” for his ready grin and genial demeanor, might replace the Civil War hero at the top of the Republican ticket.

It didn’t turn out that way. Not only did Grant get nominated for a second term, Republicans dumped Colfax in favor of Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson.

In the fall, Colfax’s elderly mother died. One day after she passed away, Colfax appeared with Wilson – the man who supplanted him on the Republican ticket – at a rally in South Bend.

In the midst of this wave of disappointment and personal tragedy, Colfax was implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal.

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Schuyler Colfax. Library of Congress photo.

At first he tried to shrug it off. But as Democratic presidential candidate Horace Greeley – who published stories by Colfax as editor of the New York Tribune – inveighed against Credit Mobilier on the campaign trail in Indiana, studied indifference was no longer possible.

In a forceful statement made in South Bend, Colfax said he had never bought the stock or profited from it. Perhaps he got carried away appearing before a friendly audience in his hometown. He later admitted that he had paid Oakes Ames $500 for Credit Mobilier stock.

As congressional hearings probed the scandal, evidence accumulated that not only did Colfax buy Credit Mobilier shares – he profited handsomely from them too. Oakes Ames produced documentation showing that he paid Colfax dividends totaling $1,200. Bank records showing that Colfax deposited the identical amount in cash shortly after Ames said he disbursed the dividend payment seemed to confirm the veracity of the King of Spades.

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“Another Entry of a Dividend Paid to Schuyler Colfax Discovered.” A New York Herald headline from February 12, 1873 shows how Colfax had been sucked into the Credit Mobilier scandal.

Colfax offered an alternative explanation for the bank deposit – involving the surprise receipt of a worn $1,000 bill in the mail – that was so convoluted and unlikely that virtually no one believed it. “If Mr. Colfax’s statement is true,” the New York Tribune concluded, “he is the victim of a train of circumstantial evidence almost unparalleled in judicial history.”

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Headline from the Chicago Tribune, Feb. 20, 1873

Every attempt made by Colfax to explain away the evidence of his involvement with Credit Mobilier only deepened his difficulties. As the House voted on sanctions against members implicated in the scandal, a proposal to instruct the House Judiciary Committee to draw up articles of impeachment against the vice president fell just short of passage.

On March 4, 1873, when Colfax’s term as vice president ended, the once perpetually sunny Colfax looked “pale, careworn and sad,” according to one observer. His reputation never recovered from the stain of Credit Mobilier, the Washington Post concluded after Colfax’s death in 1885. “He went out of Congress under a cloud, which he lacked the vigorous powers of self-assertion and repulsion to ever entirely dissipate.”

The story of Colfax and others implicated in the scandal that rocked Washington in the early 1870s is told in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, coming this fall from Edinborough Press.

“Nature designed him for a large part in life”

With his white hair, open face, and genial bearing, Henry Simpson McComb looked and acted more like a senator than a railroad speculator. “Nature designed him for a large part in life; he is the equal of any to whom he speaks, and courteous to all,” journalist George Alfred Townsend wrote in 1872.

As with many of the other figures in the story of the Credit Mobilier scandal, though, it wasn’t that simple. Townsend would later offer another, far harsher, verdict about McComb. In 1882, Townsend noted that McComb was litigious, “jealous of money, and belligerent when deprived of his share of it.”

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

Delaware-born McComb played a central role in the Credit Mobilier scandal as the aggrieved stockholder whose suit against Oakes Ames eventually found its way into the pages of the New York Sun.

In the fall of 1867, as Credit Mobilier officials put the finishing touches on a new and highly lucrative contract with the Union Pacific, the company’s directors authorized the issuance of additional shares of stock to Ames and Thomas C. Durant. McComb signed off on the distribution, but said he did so reluctantly – and immediately began to pester Oakes Ames for more stock.

Ames tried to put him off, and in the process wrote three short, damaging letters in which he said he was distributing shares on Capitol Hill “where they will do the most good.” Ames confessed to McComb that he sought to protect the interests of Credit Mobilier’s sole contractor, the Union Pacific, on Capitol Hill through the distribution of the stock.

The letters failed to calm McComb, and he kept up his campaign. At one point, he claimed, an exasperated Ames told him, “There is no stock for you. You consented to give it to me for members of Congress.” In November 1868, McComb filed suit, setting in motion the events that would lead to the scoop by the Sun, three congressional investigations, months of headlines, and a scandal that announced a new era in American politics.

There is some reason to believe that McComb was as mortified as Ames by the Sun’s exclusive. In an interview with Townsend, McComb bemoaned the many errors and exaggerations in the story. Jeremiah S. Black, McComb’s attorney, went so far to blame Ames for implicating members of Congress in the shady stock sales.

McComb’s genteel facade occasionally slipped during the course of the congressional investigations. After one witness directly challenged McComb’s truthfulness, he responded with a snarl. “Oh, I wish you were about twenty-five years younger,” McComb warned. “I would comb you down in more ways than one.”

In the years to come, McComb busied himself with railroad investments in Mississippi but could not avoid bankruptcy. His business partners viewed him with suspicion, but at his passing his suit against Credit Mobilier was remembered for helping to improve the ethical climate in Washington.

Whether that actually was the case is open to question. But the suit itself ended in failure after it was quietly dismissed in federal court in Philadelphia in 1878.

Ironically, McComb and Ames, rivals whose dispute over Credit Mobilier shares fueled one of the great political scandals of the nineteenth century, share one thing in common. There are communities today named after each – McComb, Mississippi, and Ames, Iowa.

 

Read more about McComb, Oakes Ames, James A. Garfield and others in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, coming this fall from Edinborough Press.

 

A locus of power and influence

Much of the drama surrounding the Credit Mobilier scandal occurred in the chambers and hearing rooms of the U.S. Capitol or unfolded in the pages of the nation’s increasingly muscular daily newspapers.

But some of the scandal’s more interesting episodes and meetings took place about 15 blocks west of the Capitol amid the hotels and newspaper offices that sprung up in the vicinity of the White House and Lafayette Square.

[image error] The Willard, from Washington Outside and Inside, by George Alfred Townsend.

For one congressman, it all started at the corner of 14th and F Streets.

“Pig Iron” Kelley, a Pennsylvania Republican to whom Oakes Ames sold Credit Mobilier shares, recalled bumping into his colleague from Massachusetts at the intersection during the winter of 1867-1868 while waiting for a streetcar. It was there, Kelley said, that Ames, known as the “King of Spades” because of his family’s shovel-making business, first broached the subject of investing in Credit Mobilier.

The location is interesting because it was a locus of power, wealth and influence in the nation’s capital. Much of the city’s most important business was transacted in the neighborhood. Two of Washington’s most prominent hotels – the Willard and the Ebbitt House – were located nearby. A third hotel, the Arlington, looked over Lafayette Square from the spot where the Department of Veterans Affairs is now located.

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The Ebbitt House, from Washington Outside and Inside, by George Alfred Townsend.

“Newspaper Row,” the warren of offices occupied by out-of-town reporters, was also in the vicinity. Kelley could not recall when he encountered Ames but remembered that they met as he emerged from the Ebbitt House or Newspaper Row.

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A young William D. “Pig Iron” Kelley. Library of Congress photo.

Newspaper Row figured prominently in the Credit Mobilier story as the location from which correspondents wrote stories and transmitted them by telegraph back to their newspapers. Upon his return to Washington in the autumn of 1872, and after learning he had been implicated in the scandal, one of the first stops James A. Garfield made was to the office of Henry Van Ness Boynton, the influential correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette.

Several months later, when testimony by Ames undercut professions of innocence by the lawmakers with whom he had done business, Newspaper Row was a busy place. “The innocents were popping in and out of newspaper offices like jacks-in-boxes,” the New York Sun noted with amusement, referring to the congressmen. “They also had any number of friends engaged in the same service. They all wanted to be let up on, just for a day or two, until they could be heard from.”

There would be no let up.

One of the scandal’s most dramatic confrontations occurred at the Arlington. In April 1872, Ames met with Henry S. McComb, a fellow Credit Mobilier investor suing Ames to obtain more shares in the valuable company. McComb offered to drop his lawsuit and turn over incriminating evidence to Ames in exchange for the shares he wanted. Ames didn’t budge.

Four months later, as the nation was consumed by the presidential election pitting President Grant against Horace Greeley, the story of Credit Mobilier exploded in the Sun.

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