The salary grab
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper displays the congressional finger-pointing that followed passage of what became known as the “salary grab.” Representative Ben Butler (from left) was the chief advocate of the increase. Library of Congress image.
By the end of February 1873, the last gusts of the Credit Mobilier scandal had ceased. Another storm quickly followed.
As an incredulous press and public looked on, the House slapped Oakes Ames and James Brooks on the wrists for their roles in the scandal that dominated the Capitol and the headlines for months since it was first reported in the New York Sun. The Senate, faced with a similar quandary involving one of its own, Sen. James Patterson of New Hampshire, did nothing at all.
After concluding that no one should be expelled over the Credit Mobilier scandal, Congress decided it needed a pay raise.
In one of the last acts of the Forty-Second Congress, lawmakers approved legislation that raised salaries for themselves, the president, Supreme Court justices, Cabinet officers and other top federal officials.
For members of Congress, the pay increase was significant – a 50 percent rise from $5,000 to $7,500 annually. Expressed in terms of 2016 purchasing power, that would be a pay raise taking one’s salary from $103,000 to $155,000. Moreover, the pay raise was retroactive to the beginning of the Forty Second Congress.
The measure was the brainchild of Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts, the wily and controversial Radical Republican who defended Ames during the Credit Mobilier expulsion debate. After failing to win support for the measure, Butler managed to attach it to a legislative appropriations bill coming up for a vote at the end of the session.
Proponents of the pay increase justified it on the grounds of egalitarianism. Without the pay increase, argued Sen. Thomas Weston Tipton, R-Neb., it would be impossible for “a poor mechanic, a poor businessman, a poor lawyer” to serve in Congress, leaving the job of legislation to the “moneyed aristocracy.”
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Rep. Ben Butler. Library of Congress.
There may well have been merit to Tipton’s argument, but the pay increase – coming on the heels of Credit Mobilier — was a stunning political miscalculation. Sen. Aaron Harrison Craigin made that abundantly clear.
On the Senate floor, the New Hampshire Republican waved a telegram he had received from his allies in Manchester that warned “We are beaten forever if the bill passes.” But the reaction would not be confined to his state, he added. Passage of the salary bill endangered Republican prospects in upcoming elections in Connecticut and Rhode Island, he noted. “I begin to believe that [members of] this Congress will never learn wisdom until the people shall teach them.”
Indeed, the reaction was swift and stern. The New York Times called it “plunder” and connected the pay increase – which was widely becoming known as the “salary grab” – with congressional failure to take meaningful action on Credit Mobilier.
Like Craigin, the Times predicted voter wrath would soon make itself apparent.
“The public will not readily forget a piece of rascality so shameless, so despicable, and so conspicuous. Following close on the scandal of the Credit Mobilier – a scandal arising largely from the moral cowardice of Congress in treating it – it has wrought a deep impression on the people, which will make itself felt sooner or later – and we are inclined to think it will be sooner rather than later.”
Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio was particularly vulnerable as one of the lawmakers implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal and the manager of the appropriations bill to which the salary increase was attached. With voters up in arms, Garfield refunded his salary increase to the Treasury – and his allies made sure the local press knew about it.
In the spring and early summer of 1873, as 16 states prepared for local elections, voter fury over the pay hike was reflected in state Republican platforms. In Ohio, Iowa, and other states, the party denounced the pay increase, abuses by railroads and Credit Mobilier.
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James A. Garfield. Library of Congress.
“The Salary Grab – It Is Indefensible and Will Be Punished,” the New York Herald warned in August. “Public indignation has been so thoroughly aroused,” James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s paper warned, “that few politicians will be able to remain in public life unless they have returned the amount into the Treasury and are at the same time recorded as against the measure.”
By the time the Forty-Third Congress convened in December, the salary increase was doomed. Dozens of bills called for its repeal. Republican Representative Moses W. Field of Michigan, tongue planted firmly in cheek, proposed that lawmakers serve without salary or mileage compensation.
Field and his colleagues understood they had to act decisively to repeal the salary increase. The new Congress not only faced voter fury over Credit Mobilier and the salary grab, it also had to cope with the consequences of a severe stock-market panic that threatened widespread unemployment and bankruptcy.
Well might the National Republican newspaper in Washington counsel vigorous action by Congress to address escalating anger with the political status quo. The state elections were difficult for Republicans in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and elsewhere – and a possible foretaste of things to come. “The ‘off-year’ and its results has made many a Congressman feel the possibility, if not the probability, of his early retirement to public life,” the newspaper warned.
I will be at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, N.C., on March 27 to talk about the Credit Mobilier scandal. If you can’t make it, buy a copy of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com
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