“I may be a very bad man, but they are not investigating me”
Thomas Nast’s rendering of the Credit Mobilier scandal in Harper’s Weekly. Rep. Oakes Ames, R-Mass., is seen with his right hand in his vest pocket standing next to the bespectacled Rep. James Brooks, D-N.Y. Library of Congress.
The end was in sight.
By the middle of February, 1873, the investigations into the Credit Mobilier scandal were nearing completion. More than two months of hearings held by three congressional committees had generated countless front page stories, indignant editorials and sputtering speeches.
Washington was obsessed — and the rest of the country was appalled.
The scandal involved surreptitious sweetheart sales of stock in a Union Pacific construction subsidiary with the distinctive name of Credit Mobilier to members of Congress. A dozen or so members of Congress and former lawmakers were implicated, with four emerging as the primary figures of interest, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax, the former Speaker of the House; Rep. James Brooks, D-N.Y., and Republican Sen. James Patterson of New Hampshire.
[image error]
Rep. Oakes Ames, from “Behind the Scenes in Washington.”
But Rep. Oakes Ames — a major Credit Mobilier and Union Pacific investor who sold shares to Colfax, Patterson and at least nine others (Brooks obtained his from Ames’s corporate rival Thomas C. Durant) — remained the central character in the drama.
In the final weeks of the investigations, the Massachusetts Republican known as the “King of Spades” for his family’s successful shovel-making business spent a good deal of time providing details of the transactions with his colleagues. He made no secret of his motive.
At the outset of the investigation Ames had been content to obfuscate to protect the reputations of his colleagues. But when it began to look as though he would be made out as the villain of the scandal he lost interest in covering for them. As he put it: “[W]hen I heard it was said they intended to break me down I could not do otherwise than state everything.”
[image error]
The New York Sun, Sept. 4, 1872.
Ames would have stayed out of the headlines altogether had it not been for an explosive scoop by the New York Sun. On Sept. 4, 1872 the feisty four-page Sun filled its front page and most of its inside pages with details of Credit Mobilier’s operations gleaned from the deposition of a Credit Mobilier stockholder who was suing Ames. Among the startling revelations was the disclosure that Ames had sold the valuable stock to his congressional colleagues to promote the interests of its parent company, the Union Pacific, on Capitol Hill.
“We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames wrote to the investor, Henry S. 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.”
In characteristically flamboyant language, the Sun heralded its report on corporate malfeasance and public sleaze related to Credit Mobilier as “the most damaging exhibition of private villainy and public corruption ever laid bare to the gaze of the world.”
That was Gilded Age hyperbole, but the point was made. The story prompted the House to form a committee to investigate the allegations in the story. Before long, two more committees — a second in the House and one in the Senate — joined the inquiry.
In mid-January, after watching one Credit Mobilier purchaser after another deny buying the stock or claiming that it had been quickly returned, Ames went on the attack and provided the Poland committee with ample evidence of his dealings with members of the House and Senate.
On Feb. 11, he doubled down, producing a hand-sized notebook filled with detailed information about stock sales and dividend payments to Colfax, Reps. James A. Garfield, John Bingham, William “Pig Iron” Kelley and Henry Dawes as well as Sens. Patterson and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts (who would soon succeed Colfax as vice president).
[image error]
Schuyler Colfax. Library of Congress.
The additional evidence further confirmed what was widely suspected — that members who had denied buying shares from Ames were lying. Many stuck to their stories anyway. Colfax, confronted by evidence that he deposited $1,200 at his bank — an amount corresponding to dividend payments recorded by Ames — offered an implausible tale in his defense. The vice president claimed he had received $200 from a member of his family and then discovered a worn $1,000 bill as he opened his mail at breakfast one morning.
The New York Tribune found this story improbable in the extreme. “If Mr. Colfax’s statement is true, he is the victim of a train of circumstantial evidence almost unparalleled in judicial history,” the Tribune observed pointedly.
By documenting his transactions with his congressional colleagues, Ames had succeeded to some extent in redirecting the spotlight toward others implicated in the scandal. But how much good it did him was open to question.
That became clear when Ames, testifying before the committee investigating Credit Mobilier’s reach into the Senate, made a jest as he was answering questions from Sen. John Potter Stockton of New Jersey.
Stockton wanted Ames to amplify on the reason he gave for selling the stock in the first place — that he wanted to encourage “men of influence” in Congress to support the interests of the Union Pacific.
“Those were the kind of men you wanted?” Stockton pressed.
“Yes sir,” Ames responded. “Don’t you?”
Stockton was not amused by Ames’s apparent flippancy. “What I do is not under investigation of Congress,” the senator responded. “Mr. Ames, I may be a very bad man, but they are not investigating me.”
Ames and the others implicated in the scandal would learn soon enough what that investigation concluded — and if the House was prepared to act.
I am going on the road in the next several months to talk about the Credit Mobilier scandal — at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C., on March 27 and then Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minn., on April 27. If you’re not able to attend, then you can find Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com
