“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.