Robert B. Mitchell's Blog, page 8
April 9, 2019
The Hairy Nation goes to war
After the fall of Fort Sumter on April 13, 1861, residents of a county in southern Iowa rallied to the flag. I wrote about it for America’s Civil War: https://www.historynet.com/the-hairy-nation-goes-to-war-davis-county-iowa-in-the-civil-war.htm
April 3, 2019
‘Social experimentation on a vast scale:’ One critic’s prescient view of Pullman
In the 1880s, the new community of Pullman, Ill., located south of Chicago, seemed to have everything.
The housing stock was in good shape. Streets were well paved. An “Arcade” – something like a 19th-century mall — housed offices, a bank and market space for residents to buy food and other necessities. A well-built school provided education for the young. Young trees lined the streets, promising to provide welcome relief from the sun as they grew. “Very gratifying is the impression of the visitor who passes hurriedly through Pullman and observes only the splendid provision for the present material comforts of its residents,” economist Richard Ely wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 1885.
Jack Kelly’s excellent account of the Pullman strike of 1894 — which he calls “the most consequential labor conflict of the nineteenth century” — puts front and center once again one of the most interesting but fatally flawed social experiments of the Gilded Age.
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Worker housing in Pullman, Ill. Library of Congress.
The Pullman strike has long interested me. Its cast of characters — industrialist George W. Pullman; labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and Samuel Gompers; and President Grover Cleveland — are among the most fascinating personalities of the era. What began as a boycott of Pullman sleeper cars organized by Debs’s American Railway Union morphed into a generalized uprising, marred by instances of mob violence, against the railroads. Cleveland called out U.S. troops, ostensibly to protect the U.S. mail but in reality put down the strike.
The story of the strike is a rich text. It raises questions about the role of government in labor disputes. It casts a harsh light on the establishment press of the day. It highlights divisions between craft unions and unskilled workers that plagued organized labor for decades. It put Debs front and center in the nation’s politics.
At the center of this epochal event in the history of the 19th century is the town of Pullman and the experiment in plutocratic paternalism that it represented.
Ely was an early – and prescient – critic.
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Hotel Florence, Pullman, Ill. Library of Congress.
Kelly writes that the Ripley, N.Y., native and European trained economist who taught at Johns Hopkins University checked into Pullman’s Florence Hotel in 1884. He arrived with his new bride to honeymoon and investigate the outwardly thriving town for the article he was writing.
Many features of Pullman pleased him. Ely praised the layout of the town for its variety and beauty. He wrote:
Unity of design and an unexpected variety charm us as we saunter through the town. Lawns always of the same width separate the houses from the street, but they are so green and neatly trimmed that one can overlook this regularity of form. Although the houses are built in groups of two or more, and even in blocks, with the exception of a few large buildings of cheap flats, they bear no resemblance to barracks; and one is not likely to make the mistake, so frequent in New York blocks of “brown-stone fronts,” of getting into the wrong house by mistake. Simple but ingenious designs secure variety, of which the most skillful is probably the treatment of the sky line. Naturally, without an appearance of effort, it assumes an immense diversity. French roofs, square roofs, dormer-windows, turrets, sharp points, blunt points, triangles, irregular quadrangles, are devices resorted to in the upper stories to avoid the appearance of unbroken uniformity.
After cataloguing Pullman’s many appealing features, Ely took note of its darker side.
There was no freely elected municipal government. While Pullman residents chose their school board, the town was poorly governed by an appointed administration dominated by Pullman corporate officials. “Change is constant in men and officers, and each new superior appears to have his own friends, whom he appoints to desirable positions,” Ely wrote. “Favoritism and nepotism, out of place as they are in an ideal society, are oft-repeated and apparently well-substantiated charges.”
Many communities were (and are) poorly governed. But they may also have newspapers to check on abuses and give vent to criticism. They might have pastors who could righteously inveigh against corruption from the pulpit. No such outlets existed in Pullman, Ely noted, and the one Baptist preacher who dared criticize the administration of Pullman was forced to leave when his congregation began to abandon him.
“Here is a population of eight thousand souls where not one single resident dare speak out openly his opinion about the town in which he lives,” Ely wrote. “One feels that one is mingling with a dependent, servile people. There is an abundance of grievances, but if there lives in Pullman one man who would give expression to them in print over his own name, diligent inquiry continued for ten days was not sufficient to find him.”
Ely identified an additional peculiar feature of the town. Every square inch of the community was owned by the Pullman companies. George Pullman expected the community to turn a profit and set rents accordingly. “With the exception of the management of the public school, every municipal act is here the act of a private corporation,” Ely observed.
Ely noted that the community was still young and offered the hope that its flaws could be remedied. Nevertheless, invoking the specter of Otto von Bismarck, he rendered a damning verdict on George Pullman’s experiment in plutocratic paternalism.
“In looking over all the facts of the case the conclusion is unavoidable that the idea of Pullman is un-American. It is a nearer approach than anything the writer has seen to what appears to be the ideal of the great German Chancellor. It is not the American ideal. It is benevolent, well wishing feudalism, which desires the happiness of the people, but in such way as shall please the authorities.”
George Pullman, Kelly writes, was furious about the piece and ordered company officials to find Ely’s sources and punish them.
Nevertheless, the feudal system worked fine as long as the money was coming in. But in 1893, a devastating Wall Street panic (coming 20 years after another panic crippled the American economy) slowed work at the Pullman Palace Car factory. Pullman cut pay — Kelly puts the range of wage cuts between 20 to 35 percent — but left rents alone. Workers, Kelly writes, were subsisting on bread and water and collapsing in the plant from hunger because they had little left to buy food after paying to keep a roof over their headThe workers turned to the American Railway Union, a new force in organized labor led by Debs. The ARU had just won a significant victory in a strike against the Great Northern. Pullman ARU workers voted to strike — and the union responded by refusing to handle trains with Pullman cars.
The boycott paralyzed railroad operations across the country and in some instances led to violence — a development Debs deplored. At this stage in his career as a labor leader he disliked strikes and abhorred violence (a feeling he would retain throughout his life). Goaded by his attorney general, Richard Olney, Cleveland dispatched U.S. troops to protect delivery of the U.S. mail. As the strike escalated, he issued another order demanding an end to any kind of support or encouragement of strikers.
“It was not a declaration of martial law — not exactly,” Kelly writes. But it gave Gen. Nelson Miles, the commander of U.S. forces deployed against the strike, “ample authority to act as he saw fit,” according to Kelly. ” ‘Whoever disobeys it,’ Miles said, ‘is a public enemy and will be treated as such.'”
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An illustration from Harper’s Weekly showing at the top (from left) portraits showing George Pullman, Cushman K. Davis, and Eugene Debs. Below, illustrations of scenes from the strike. Library of Congress.
In the end, the strike failed. The ARU never recovered from the defeat and disappeared from the scene. Debs spent six months in the McHenry County, Ill., jail. On Jan. 1, 1897, he announced that he had embraced socialism. George Pullman was ostracized by his fellow Chicago plutocrats for the inflexibility that led to the tumult. And the town of Pullman was never the same.
After the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that the Pullman Palace Car Company violated its corporate charter by operating a company town, the town at the center of the labor dispute began a rapid decline, Kelly writes. Property was sold, corporate subsidies for social activities dried up and the aesthetic aspects of the community began to deteriorate. Pullman eventually became another neighborhood on Chicago’s sprawling South Side.
But if the beauties of Pullman did not survive, the ill-feeling caused by the strike did. “As late as 1900,” Kelly writes, “men who had taken different sides refused to speak to each other.”
The experiment was a failure.
Books by Robert B. Mitchell are available at amazon.com
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Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver.
March 27, 2019
Grant and the coming storm
On Dec. 1, 1873, a little more than a year after the New York Sun broke the story of Credit Mobilier, President Ulysses S. Grant tried to find some good news to share with Congress when he submitted his annual message. It wasn’t easy to do.
A Wall Street panic had hurled the economy into reverse. Agrarian anti-monopolists clamored for something to check the power of railroads. Grant claimed, astonishingly, that “political partisanship had almost ceased to exist.” But that may only be due to the fact that no one in either party had much good to say about Congress after the Credit Mobilier scandal and the ill-advised retroactive pay raise lawmakers awarded themselves just before the Forty-Second Congress left town.
The nation’s governing charter requires the president to present to Congress “information on the State of the Union, and to recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
Although George Washington and John Adams delivered their reports in person, presidents beginning with Thomas Jefferson fulfilled their constitutional obligation by submitting a written report to Congress. Washington’s first in-person report on the state of the Union, delivered in 1790, clocked in at a little more than 1,000 words. By contract, Grant’s fifth report totaled an astounding 10,035 words.
At least no one could accuse him of being superficial.
Grant could point to some successes — in particular the peaceful resolution of the seizure of the cutter Virginius by Spain three years earlier. But there was no getting around the fact that it had been a tough year.
“The year that has passed since the submission of my last message to Congress has, especially during the latter part of it, been an eventful one to the country,” the president conceded with considerable understatement.
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From left: President Ulysses S. Grant, Jesse Grant, and Julia Grant, in Long Beach, N.J., in 1872. Library of Congress.
Much of the annual message dealt with trivial diplomatic matters (the reception of foreign diplomats by the young emperor of China, U.S. commissioners sent to an industrial exposition in Vienna, instructions that U.S. diplomats remain strictly neutral in a war between the Netherlands and an East Asian sultanate, for example).
Of more interest is what Grant said about economic conditions.
In September, following the sudden closure of the banking house run by Jay Cooke, Wall Street was seized with fear. The ensuing panic shuttered the New York Stock Exchange for 10 days, closed banks, threw tens of thousands out of work in basic industries. It would evolve into the most serious economic crisis faced by the United States until the Great Depression.
The devastation caused by the panic would unfold slowly, but it was already clear that job losses and bank closures would be severe.
Grant acknowledged in his summary of the year that had just passed that “In the midst of great national prosperity a financial crisis has occurred that has brought low fortunes of gigantic proportions.”
Instead of blaming Cooke and other Wall Street speculators for the crash, however, Grant pointed to the Agrarian outcry against the monopolistic practices of railroads. In the early years of the decade, a new organization — The Patrons of Husbandry, commonly known as The Grange — spread across the Midwest and the South as farmers organized to fight railroad abuses.
As the Grange gained power and influence, Democrats and Republicans scrambled to win support from farmers by calling for policies that would ensure “cheap transportation” that would allow farmers to get their products to markets affordably.
This, Grant charged, was responsible — somehow — for the state of the economy.
” ‘Cheap transportation’ ” is a subject that has attracted the attention of both producers and consumers for the past few years, and has contributed to, if it has not been the direct cause of, the recent panic and stringency,” the president asserted.
Like most Americans of the 19th century, Grant fixated on monetary policy as the key to recovery and the prevention of additional panics. But the message sent mixed signals on the topic.
On the one hand, Grant acknowledged the need for “elasticity” in the money supply — a point on which he and champions of paper money — so-called “soft money” — agreed. But he asserted that a specie-based currency, one linked to gold (silver would soon be demonitized) was ideally suited to keep currency supplies flexible.
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Promotional material for Patrons of Husbandry, also known as The Grange. Library of Congress.
“Undue inflation … while it might give temporary relief, would only lead to inflation of prices, the impossibility of competing in our own markets for the products of home skill and labor, and repeated renewals of present experiences. Elasticity to our circulating medium, therefore, and just enough of it to transact the legitimate business of the country and to keep all industries employed, is what is most to be desired. The exact medium is specie, the recognized medium of exchange the world over.”
In making this assertion, Grant foreshadowed one of the most momentous decisions of his presidency. In 1874, Congress passed legislation to inflate the currency by extending the use of paper money, known colloquially then as the “Greenback dollar.” The measure added $64 million to the currency and represented a compromise by lawmakers eager to accommodate the concerns of soft- and hard-money advocates.
Grant vetoed the bill. “I am not a believer in any artificial method of making paper money equal to coin when the coin is not owned or held ready to redeem the promises to pay,” he asserted. Paper money “is nothing more than promises to pay, and is valuable exactly in proportion to the amount of coin that it can be converted into.”
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The Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1874.
The veto gobsmacked Washington and put the “currency controversy into the foreground as the overshadowing issue of American politics,” the New York Herald concluded.
That proved an understatement. The currency question and the broader issue of the economy — helped drive the wave election that put Democrats in control of the House for the first time since before the Civil War.
Americans would debate questions about currency — Greenbacks and free silver vs. gold — almost to the end of the century. The issue fueled two third parties — the Greenback-Labor Party (1876-1884) and the People’s Party, also known as the Populists. Williams Jennings Bryan rocketed from obscurity to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896 on the strength of his call for free silver.
Buried in the 10,000-plus words of Grant’s annual message in 1873 were hints of the firestorm that would consume American politics for the next two decades.
The Panic of 1873 and its after-effects figure prominently in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, and Skirmisher: the Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver. Both are available at amazon.com
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Congress and the King of Frauds
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March 20, 2019
Who you calling paranoid?
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Some time ago, while researching a Retropolis post about the Anti-Masonic Party, I was drawn to Richard Hofstadter’s classic work on the “paranoid style” in American politics.
In a collection of essays written over a decade starting in the mid-1950s, Hofstadter traces the prevalence of conspiracy theories and the fear that sinister forces secretly control the American political system to the earliest days of the Republic.
His immediate concern was to find a way to explain the rise of McCarthyism and the Goldwater phenomenon of 1964, but it is his survey of U.S. political history that is of interest here.
“Paranoid” is a loaded word. Hofstadter goes to some lengths to explain that he does not use it in a clinical sense or even to imply that those who hold views he would characterize as paranoid suffer from mental illness. His primary focus is on the style of rhetoric that characterizes a political movement or party and what that tells us about the group’s beliefs.
But it is clearly an undesirable trait – and it got me wondering. How many of the third parties with which I have been preoccupied over the past decade were characterized not only by rhetoric that could be called paranoid but also by a set of beliefs or principles that could be so labeled?
It is not an insignificant question. From the 1820s through the 1890s, American politics was shaped and influenced by third parties in a way that seems unimaginable in our red-and-blue world.
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The Anti-Masonic movement is satirized (second from right) as one of the “hobby horses” of American politics in this cartoon from 1838. Library of Congress.
The Anti-Masonic Party, the first third party in American history, appeared as western New York was swept by fear of the secret society following the kidnapping and apparent murder in 1826 of the author of a book that purported to expose secret Masonic rites. The party was clearly animated not only by paranoid rhetoric — “at this very moment, its foot is on the neck of our liberties,” a Delaware newspaper warned in 1831 — but by a limited political program. Anti-Masons wanted to stamp out a fraternal order whose members included George Washington and 21 signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The Anti-Masonic Party quickly faded from the scene, but it was followed by third parties opposed to slavery. Abolitionists, steeped in the Bible, borrowed heavily from Scripture to paint slaveholders in the darkest possible terms that could be seen as paranoid. When Sen. Daniel Webster, a Massachusetts Whig, appeared before a meeting of Virginia Whigs in 1840, a Vermont newspaper referenced a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice to describe his behavior. “Behold Daniel Webster at last prostrate before the Southern Moloch, with Senator [Samuel] Phelps [W-Vt.] behind him!”
Abolitionists invoked the threat of the “slave power” when they sought support for their anti-slavery stands. The phrase sounds like an example of the paranoid style except for this: There was a combination of political and financial forces at work that profited from and defended the institution of skavery.
Moreover, the profound evil of slavery demanded stark denunciation from its foes. It was fundamentally different than controversies over tariffs or government expenditures. Hofstadter’s analysis mentions abolitionists in passing but does not dwell on them — perhaps because opponents of slavery could not really be called paranoid, either rhetorically or programmatically.
A more serious case can be made against the silver champions of the second half of the nineteenth century. Silver coinage was one of the monetary policies considered essential by Agrarians as an antidote to the lingering effects of the Panic of 1873. Populists and other silver champions routinely referred to the “Crime of ’73,” legislation that took the silver dollar out of circulation.
“The [Coinage Act] of 1873 was simply an attempt to codify the fractional currency, which was in a chaotic state at the end of the Civil War,” Hofstadter writes. “The abandonment of the standard silver dollar, which meant the end of legal bitmetallism, was not objected to by any of the representatives of silver states in Congress in 1873 nor by anyone else.”
Populist theoreticians like William Hope “Coin” Harvey, whose free-silver tracts were wildly popular in the early 1890s, painted the The Coinage Act of 1873 — the measure that demonitized silver — in the darkest, most sinister light. “Demonitization,” Hofstadter writes, was seen as “the work of ‘men having a design to injure business by making money scarce.’ ” The measure, Harvey and his readers believed, “accomplished exactly what had been intended: it had created a depression and caused untold suffering.”
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Puck satirizes the Greenback-Labor Party and Benjamin Butler, its 1884 presidential nominee. Library of Congress.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding monetary policy in the late 19th century was indeed paranoid in style — and worse: it was often accompanied by anti-Semitic fulminations about the Rothschild banking house. But it would be a mistake to define the populist movement of the late 19th century by its paranoid or bigoted claims.
Throughout the 19th century, debate about monetary policy had long carried a significance that exceeded economics: it was the battleground for passionate debate about the nature of American democracy itself. When Andrew Jackson championed specie-based “hard money” and campaigned against the Bank of the United States, he exploited for political purposes the bank as a symbol of a privileged, moneyed elite. Opposition to the bank became a rallying cry for Democrats.
In the years after the Civil War, the same battle — the interests of average men and women versus the elite — was fought on different grounds. Small-d democrats and Agrarian radicals backed silver and paper greenback dollars, while financiers and their allies in Congress backed hard money and contracting the currency.
While economists can take issue with the arguments used by free-silver and soft-money advocates, aggrieved Agrarians and populists correctly diagnosed tight money as a serious economic problem for farmers and the communities that depended on them to prosper. As historian Richard White notes in The Republic for Which It Stands, deflation produced by the gold standard “transferred wealth from debtors to creditors and hurt producers, particularly in the South and West.”
Populists in the 19th century often employed dark language and spoke about sinister conspiracies, but their objective was not the persecution of a group — as it was for the anti-Masons — but economic justice for Americans crushed by tight money and deflation. Dismissing them as paranoid fanatics — which is what Hofstadter’s analysis of Coin Harvey invites — misses the mark and does them a disservice.
Nevertheless, we have come to learn in the years since Coin Harvey and the Anti-Masons that paranoid rhetoric has consequences. It cannot simply be laughed at or dismissed. Hofstadter’s work reminds us of its long presence in American history. We have to ask, when we encounter it, what lies behind it.
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My books on the Credit Mobilier scandal and 19th-century Iowa populist James B. Weaver are available at amazon.com.
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Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver
March 12, 2019
The Trent Affair
I took a dip into Civil War naval and diplomatic history for America’s Civil War with this piece on the Trent Affair: https://www.historynet.com/rule-britannia.htm
March 7, 2019
Rogues, scoundrels, rascals and cynics
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The list of colorful characters who populate the history of 19th-century U.S. politics is longer than a William Jefferson Smith filibuster.
Many are famous (or infamous): Roscoe Conkling, Ben Butler, “Bully” Brooks, Simon Cameron, Oakes Ames, Thomas Durant, Boss Tweed, Samuel Pomeroy, Boss Shepherd, Dan Sickles and James Harlan come immediately to mind.
The notoriety of these and other personalities obscures minor but no less colorful characters whose actions or words earn them a place on the Rogues Roll of Honor.
I have come to know a variety of these lesser — but no less interesting — figures in writing about 19th-century politics. Herewith, in no particular order and without any claim to being a complete list, a guide to some of the colorful personalities I have encountered.
Philip Barton Key
The son of Francis Scott Key figured in two of the biggest scandals of pre- Civil War Washington. As the district attorney for Washington D.C., Philip Barton Key was responsible for prosecuting Rep. Philemon T. Herbert (more on Herbert below) in the fatal shooting of an unarmed waiter at the Willard Hotel in 1856 – a responsibility he badly bungled when Herbert was acquitted after two trials despite overwhelming evidence.
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Philip Barton Key. Library of Congress.
Not long thereafter, Key figured in another act violence – one in which he lost his life. When Rep. Daniel Sickles, D-N.Y., discovered that Key was having an affair with his wife, the lawmaker accosted Key near Lafayette Square in front of the White House and killed him. “The tragic affair produced a great sensation,” the New York Herald reported.
But the story would take another surprising twist. Sickles assembled a top-flight defense team that included future Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and offered an unprecedented defense — that he was temporarily insane at the time of the shooting. To the amazement of the press and others following the sensational trial, the jury bought it. Sickles walked away a free man — and later reconciled with his wife.
George Washington Jones, D-Texas
An otherwise obscure two-term lawmaker, in 1880 Jones played a colorful bit role in an incident involving Rep. James B. Weaver of Iowa, then the leading member of the Greenback-Labor Party in the House. Shortly before Christmas, Weaver was goaded by Democratic Rep. William Sparks almost came to blows with the Illinois provocateur.
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The Washington Post, Dec. 22, 1880.
“Not since the days before the has there been such an exhibition in the House,” the Washington Post reported. As members separated the two, Jones appeared in the chamber. “In the midst of the commotion,” according to the Post, “the venerable Jones, of Texas, who was born in 1828, ran down the aisle at his best paces and, stripping off his coat, exclaimed: “If there is going to be a fight I want to be in it.”
Rep. Philemon T. Herbert, D-Calif.
Herbert served only term in Congress — and for good reason. On May 8, 1856, the first-term lawmaker exploded in rage when he didn’t get the breakfast he ordered. He brawled with and shot the Irish waiter before fleeing the scene. The first attempt to prosecute him ended in a mistrial. The second trial, conducted before a jury packed with anti-Irish Know-Nothings, ended in acquittal.
Herbert continued to serve in the House while on trial but left Washington after he was acquitted and declined to run for re-election. He insisted on his innocence, however, claiming in a published letter that “I was justified in my conduct, and awarded a triumphant acquittal.” But his California neighbors didn’t want him around and drove him out of the state. He fled to Texas, fought for the Confederates and died in 1864 after suffering wounds at the battle of Mansfield, La.
Rep. Glenni Scofield, R-Pa.
Another obscure figure in the annals of Capitol Hill, Scofield served six terms in the House and chaired the House Committee on Naval Affairs. He came to my attention as a a bit player in the Credit Mobilier scandal.
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The New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.
Scofield was one of the lawmakers who bought shares in the profitable Union Pacific construction company from Rep. Oakes Ames. When called to testify about his transactions with Ames, Scofield claimed he knew nothing about the company when Ames approached him, nor did he have any idea of the value of the stock.
Despite knowing so little, Scofield paid Ames $1,041 to buy Credit Mobilier stock, congressional investigators concluded. When asked by Rep. William Merrick, D-Md., if he might have stayed away from Credit Mobilier had he known more about the company, Scofield revealed a deep cynicism informed by his years in Washington. ” ‘Avoid the appearance of evil’ is an injunction that, I think, sometimes rogues are more careful to observe than honest men.”
William B. Shaw
Roguery wasn’t confined to the halls of Congress. In the years before journalism was regarded as a profession, the congressional press gallery was filed with scribes eager to profit from their access and inside knowledge. Shaw, who testified in 1873 before one of the committees investigating the Credit Mobilier scandal, offers one of the best examples of the dodgy journalism ethics of the period.
Before the committee, Shaw recounted walking into the office of the treasury secretary to discover that he was examining Union Pacific bonds. Shaw asked why and was told the government was considering withholding payment on the notes — then asked to get a head’s up when the government decided to act because he owned some of the railroad’s stocks and bonds. “I would like to know it, so I can unload and get out,” he confided. Shaw succeeded in selling his holdings before the news broke, and he told lawmakers that he saw nothing wrong with it. “I always do these things before I let anyone else know,” he admitted.
Sen. William Stewart, R-Nev.
In the pay of the Central Pacific during construction of the trans-continental railroad, Stewart defended the interests of the western road whenever they were in conflict with the Union Pacific. Contemporaries recognized that Stewart took a flexible approach to ethical questions. “Give him a chance to construe the sacred law,” his friend Mark Twain once observed, “and there wouldn’t be a damned soul in perdition in a month.”
Uriah Hunt Painter
Painter made a name for himself as a reporter by getting early reports of the Union defeat at Bull Run in 1861 to his paper in Philadelphia — but made sure to tip off financier Jay Cooke to the debacle so he could sell before the news broke.
That set a pattern that the strange, disheveled correspondent followed for the rest of his career. He got early word of Oakes Ames’s sales of Credit Mobilier stock on Capitol Hill, but instead of breaking news he got in. Ames sold him 300 shares and later told congressional investigators that Painter was angry that he couldn’t buy more.
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A New York Herald headline on the Credit Mobilier investigation.
George Alfred Townsend called Painter and other insiders who attempted to profit from their knowledge of congressional business “strikers” and memorably committed his impressions of them to verse:
Slouched, and surly, and sallow-faced,
With a look as if something were misplaced,
The young man Striker was seen to stride
Up the Capitol stairs at high noontide,
And as though at the head of a viewless mob —
Who could look in his eye and mistrust it? —
He quoth: ‘They must let me into that job,
Or I’ll bust it!’
You can read more about Shaw, Painter, Jones, Stewart, Scofield and other characters in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age and Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver. Both are available at amazon.com.
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Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver
March 1, 2019
The drama of Credit Mobilier
Editor’s note: It’s been awhile since I last posted. But while I was preoccupied with other matters, the Annals of Iowa published a very favorable review of Congress and the King of Frauds. Mark Wahlgren Summers writes that in an era awash in corruption, “nothing could match Credit Mobilier and the sensational hearings that followed its exposure. Now Robert Mitchell tells the story as excitingly as the testimony and newspaper reports made it at the time and with a thoroughness unmatched by any previous account.”
Summers is the pre-eminent expert on Gilded Age corruption. Those of you who have read “King of Frauds” know that two of his books — The Era of Good Stealing and The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878 — are among the works I consulted. So it was deeply gratifying to read this conclusion: “Then and since, Credit Mobilier was the ‘King of Frauds,’ and for a revelatory moment in stripping the gilding from the Gilded Age, readers should give this book a royal welcome.”
*****
The riveting appearance of Michael Cohen before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform proved yet again how dramatic congressional testimony can transfix Washington and the rest of the country.
During another winter, almost 150 years ago, Americans looked on as the defining scandal of the Gilded Age provided weeks of testimony, speeches and indignant claims of innocence that were later revealed as lies. As Congress investigated the Credit Mobilier scandal, lawmakers found themselves playing roles they didn’t enjoy. But the audience couldn’t get enough.
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Rep. Oakes Ames. Library of Congress.
Politicians squirmed as they admitted they bought shares in the Union Pacific construction subsidiary — after initially denying the purchases. They scurried desperately in and out of offices on Newspaper Row, anxiously trying to explain the contradictions in which they were trapped. They cheered when Rep. Ben Butler, R-Mass., shook his fist at the press gallery, blamed congressional correspondents for their discomfort and declared, “I am a man God made, not the newspapers.”
While they wished the headlines and accusatory editorials directed at them from all across the country would go away, there was no chance of that happening. In part that’s because the drama surrounding scandal was a surefire hit that the public found endlessly fascinating.
Writing from Ohio to his friend James A. Garfield, one of the lawmakers caught in the scandal, B.A. Hinsdale said no story since the end of the Civil War had consumed the public so completely. “People have been asking, ‘whereunto shall this thing grow?’ ” Hinsdale wrote at the end of January, 1873.
It all started on on Sept. 4, 1872, when the New York Sun published a blockbuster story about Rep. Oakes Ames’s sale of Credit Mobilier stock to his colleagues. Ames put hundreds of thousands of dollars into Credit Mobilier and the Union Pacific — and he sold the shares in order to promote the interests of the railroad on Capitol Hill.
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The New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.
“We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames advised fellow Credit Mobilier investor (and eventual adversary) Henry S. McComb in one letter. The scoop by the Sun — based on a lawsuit filed by McComb against Ames and Credit Mobilier — forced the House to act.
For the next five months, newspapers well-attuned to the public filled their pages with headlines, stories and editorials (it was sometimes hard to tell the difference in those days) about Credit Mobilier. A Democratic editor in Springfield, Ill., anticipating the public fascination with the story and hoping to stay ahead of it, wrote to Jeremiah S. Black, McComb’s attorney, requesting “any and all fact” he might have regarding the scandal.
Almost three months after the Sun story appeared, the House opened the third session of the Forty-Second Congress with Credit Mobilier at the top of the agenda. The Sun called it “the most important and really the only exciting part of the proceedings” on the first day. A “respectable” crowd on onlookers — many curious to see what the House might do to get to the bottom of the scandal — packed the galleries.
In a bit of parliamentary theater that highlighted the gravity of the allegations, Rep. James G. Blaine, R-Maine, stepped down from the Speaker’s chair and called for a five-members committee to investigate. The House endorsed the plan — not realizing, perhaps, that it had set in motion a political drama that the public would follow avidly.
Many of the scandal’s most dramatic moments unfolded in the small book-lined committee room in the Capitol basement where Rep. Luke Potter Poland of Vermont and his colleagues interrogated witnesses.
“A good grate-fire burns under a symmetrical, old-fashioned mantel of white marble, above which is a mirror of the largest proportions,” journalist George Alfred Townsend wrote. It was an intimate setting that seemed to invite thoughtful deliberation and investigation. But the cozy confines seemed to encourage posturing and theatrical oratory rather than level-headed inquiry.
On several occasions public interest taxed the committee’s cozy confines. On Feb. 11, as the Poland committee approached the end of its investigation, public interest in Credit Mobilier overwhelmed the committee room’s cozy confines. Chaos reigned as Ames returned to the committee with additional details about his stock sales — information that undermined Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s claims that he never bought Credit Mobilier shares.
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The crowd of spectators was so big that the two Capitol policemen assigned to keep order threw up their hands in disgust and left. Spectators climbed atop a desk to get a better view. Correspondents perched uneasily on chair armrests to witness the proceedings.
The House chamber was better equipped, with its visitors gallery, to accommodate the intense public interest in the scandal. And it was here where some of the most extraordinary moments in the drama of the scandal unfolded.
On Feb. 18, when Poland presented the findings of his committee — recommending the expulsion of Ames and Rep. James Brooks, D-N.Y., but exonerating everyone else implicated in the scandal — onlookers jammed the House gallery. “The absorbing interest with which this report is looked for,” the National Republican reported, “is without precedent in the annals of Congress.”
One week later, the House began debate on the committee’s recommendations. This time, the House gallery could not accommodate the influx of spectators. The crowd was so large that the House voted to let women spectators onto the floor, and some members surrendered their seats to the throng.
“The galleries were filled half an hour before the time of meeting. Every seat was occupied and every standing place filled. The corridors were impassable, being crammed with latecomers pressing for a chance to get admission,” the New York Herald reported. “There never was before such a crowd of curious sight seers in the Capitol.”
The public may have been fascinated by the political theater provided by Credit Mobilier, but the conclusion was disappointing. Ames and Brooks were censured rather than expelled, and no one else suffered any sanction for their involvement in the scandal.
Although the Credit Mobilier drama ended in an unsatisfactory manner, it was quickly followed by an infuriating sequel when Congress voted itself a retroactive pay raise quickly dubbed the “salary grab.” The reviews were scathing.
“The public will not readily forget a piece of rascality so shameless, so despicable, and so conspicuous,” the New York Times warned. The political drama, as it turned out, was just getting started.
My books on the Credit Mobilier scandal and Iowa populist James B. Weaver are available at amazon.com
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Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver
February 24, 2019
TR in 1912
The Washington Post published my Retropolis post on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 third-party bid: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/02/22/we-stand-armageddon-teddy-roosevelts-improbable-third-party-presidential-campaign/
November 3, 2018
The Anti-Masons
As some of you know, I am fascinated by 19th-century third parties. Here’s a piece I did for The Washington Post’s Retropolis blog about the first third-party in U.S. history.
October 10, 2018
Custer and the Panic
George Custer. Library of Congress.
For financier and railroad speculator Jay Cooke, the front-page headline could not have come at a worse time.
It was Sept. 6, 1873. Close observers of Wall Street were growing increasingly anxious about conditions in the financial markets – and in particular the perilous condition of the Northern Pacific, the railroad being built by financier Jay Cooke.
Into this combustible environment charged self-aggrandizing Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
Rehabilitated after his military career had seemingly collapsed in disgrace, Custer had been dispatched to the Yellowstone River in the Montana Territory to subdue Sioux and other tribes resisting the westward push of the Northern Pacific.
He intended to make the most of it.
Under the headline “The Yellowstone War,” the New York Tribune reprinted Custer’s official report on his August battles with the Sioux along the Yellowstone and Tongue rivers. It made for vivid – if unsettling — reading.
“The Indians, outnumbering us almost five to one, were enabled to envelop us completely between their lines,” Custer recounted. “Until the Indians were made to taste quite freely of our lead, they displayed unusual boldness, frequently charging up to our line and firing with great deliberation and accuracy.”
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The New York Tribune, Sept. 6, 873
Custer’s report noted that the Sioux were led by Sitting Bull, whose defeat on the second day of fighting moved the general to chortle that “for once he has been taught a lesson he will not soon forget.”
That may well have been true – but probably not in the way he meant.
Less than three years later, over two days in late June, 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse wiped out Custer’s forces at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in one of the greatest victories for Native American warriors fighting against the westward encroachment of settlement.
Custer’s vivid, self-serving report on his campaigns in the summer of 1873 proved to be a blunder of a different sort.
“With unerring instinct Custer understated his role, credited subordinates, overstates Indian prowess, magnified dangers, and left the reader with the knowledge – without ever stating it – that victory had been achieved only through exceptional leadership: his,” M. John Lubetkin writes in his excellent history of the Northern Pacific.
Unfortunately, Custer’s gaudy prose not only called attention to himself – it underscored the difficulties faced by Cooke and his backers as they struggled to build a second transcontintental railroad line. Exactly what kind of market would the new railroad be able to serve, investors wondered, if the regions through which it ran were plagued by war?
“Throughout the spring and summer of 1873,” Lubetkin writes, “potential Northern Pacific investors became more skittish, as stories about increased Indian hostilities appears with greater frequency.”
It was yet another headache for Cooke, whose railroad had started with great promise but foundered as investors grew harder to find. On Sept. 18, less than two weeks after the Tribune published Custer’s sensational report, the fading fortunes of Cooke’s railroads caused the collapse of his banking house and precipitated the Panic of 1873.
To modern eyes, accustomed to clinical economic terms like “depression” and “recession,” “panic” seems like an odd way to describe a catastrophic economic event. But in the days that followed the closure of Cooke’s banking, it was all too apt.
The New York Stock Exchange closed for 10 days as investors struggled to regain their bearings. Banks closed in Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere across the country. Worried business leaders met in Richmond and professed confidence – an exercise that only demonstrated how uncertain they really were. Depositors rushed to get their money out of New York banks, prompting Mayor William F. Havemeyer to issue a patronizing call for calm that probably did little good.
“The reckless management of an institution cannot be made a just excuse for a run on the savings banks,” he said. “They have to loan the money they have, and of course they cannot pay it over to depositors at any moment.”
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The panic on Wall Street, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Library of Congress.
Custer’s report, of course, did not by itself cause the collapse of Cooke’s finances or the panic. But it is illustrative of the combination of forces that led to the financial catastrophe that colored the rest of the 1870s and reverberated for years beyond.
In his magisterial history of the late 19th century, The Republic for Which It Stands, Richard White recounts the macro-economic factors that pushed the American economy to the brink. They included:
The collapse of the Vienna stock exchange and a corresponding interest rate increase by the Bank of England that made itself felt on both sides of the Atlantic;
The rickety financial position of U.S. railroads, which made them vulnerable to rising borrowing costs; and
The contraction of the currency that followed the demonetization of silver in January, 1873 and added to the financial problems faced by railroads.
Decades of speculation and what Alan Greenspan would have called “irrational exuberance” finally caught up with the industry that had transformed the American economy and come to dominate – though means licit and illicit – American politics.
“As they had in good times, the railroads led the way in bad times,” White writes. “By 1876 roughly half of the railroad companies had gone into receivership. Railroad stocks lost 60 percent of their value between 1873 and 1876.”
The day Cooke’s banking house closed “Men and boys raced from office to office” on Wall Street, the Chicago Tribune told its readers the next day. “The telegraph was incessant in its operations, and the excitement grew intense.” The financial district in Philadelphia was “thrown into an uproar” by the news of Cooke’s failure, the newspaper reported.
The New York Herald called it “Cooke’s Crash.”
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The New York Herald, Sept. 19, 1873.
In the days and weeks that followed, President Ulysses S. Grant and his treasury secretary met with jittery New York businessmen in an attempt to calm their fears. The government made limited attempts to respond with bond repurchases and the issuance of $26 million in paper dollars, according to Grant biographer Ron Chernow, but there was only so much Washington was willing to do. When Congress passed an inflation bill in 1874 to stimulate the economy by injecting $64 million in additional currency into circulation, Grant stunned Capitol Hill and the country by vetoing the bill.
As Washington dithered, the economy continued to deteriorate. Unemployment skyrocketed. Coal miners, railroaders and iron workers by the thousands lost their job. An estimated 100,000 workers were jobless in New York.
“Americans,” White writes, “had entered a period of radical economic and political instability that they were ill-prepared to understand.” The crisis would take years to work itself out — and the cavalry was not coming to the rescue.
The Panic of 1873 followed hard on the Credit Mobilier affair, the defining scandal of the Gilded Age. Read about it in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, now available at amazon.com.
