“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.”
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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.
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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.
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