The story that started it all
By the standards of modern journalism, it was a most peculiar scoop.
Consistent with the editorial practices of the day, there was no byline. The most sensational evidence lay buried at the end. Factual errors abounded. It expressed the hope that the public figures named in the story were innocent of wrongdoing but concluded with mock regret that “there is no escaping the fact that they are guilty.”
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The headlines atop The New York Sun’s Credit Mobilier expose. Library of Congress/Chronicling America.
The Credit Mobilier scandal burst on the scene on Sept. 4, 1872, in a sprawling story that filled much of the four-page broadsheet in which it was published, the New York Sun. Charles A. Dana’s newspaper published its exclusive, reported by Washington correspondent Albert M. Gibson, under the headline “The King of Frauds.”
The headline was an apparent play on the nickname of the congressman at the center of the scandal, Republican Rep. Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, who was known as the “King of Spades” because of his family’s shovel-making business. But there was nothing funny about what it alleged.
The Sun charged that Ames sold shares in a railroad construction company known as Credit Mobilier to Republican members of Congress with the expectation that they would look out for the interests of the company’s sole customer, the Union Pacific Railroad. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames explained to a fellow Credit Mobilier investor, Henry S. McComb.
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Rep. Oakes Ames. Drawing in Behind the Scenes in Washington.
Ames was heavily invested in Credit Mobilier and the Union Pacific. He may well have been a shrewd railroad financier but discretion was not his strong suit. He made the assertion in one of several letters to McComb as he attempted to forestall McComb’s campaign to get additional shares of Credit Mobilier — shares he claimed he was entitled to as part of the settlement of a dispute between Ames and Thomas C. Durant in 1867.
McComb eventually sued Ames and Credit Mobilier and retained high-powered Washington attorney Jeremiah S. Black as his counsel. Unfortunately for Ames, the letter became part of the trial evidence.
And that is how the scandal that opened the Gilded Age came to light.
Black was a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had served before the Civil War as attorney general and secretary of state in the Buchanan administration. After the war he practiced law in Washington and counted friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress, including Republican Rep. James A. Garfield, a fellow member of the Campbellite Christian denomination.
In the spring and summer of 1872, McComb was deposed about the claims and submitted the letters written by Ames into his testimony. There the matter might have stayed had it not been for a serendipitous sighting that aroused Gibson’s reportorial instinct.
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Jeremiah Sullivan Black. Library of Congress.
In 1885, writing (again, without a byline) in the New York Times, Gibson — a Pennsylvania native with strong connections to the state’s Democratic establishment — recalled that he was visiting Black’s son, Chauncey, In York, Pa., when he noticed the arrival of McComb. Gibson, who had heard rumors of scandal involving Credit Mobilier and knew that McComb had filed a lawsuit on the matter, put two and two together.
With some digging in Philadelphia, where the lawsuit was filed, and — despite the correspondent’s claims to the contrary, a little help from Jeremiah Black — Gibson located the deposition. “To say I was startled at my ‘find’ would inadequately express my mental state,” Gibson wrote.
No wonder. It was all there — McComb’s detailed description of the internal operations of Credit Mobilier; his allegations that he had been defrauded by company management; and, most explosively, evidence that the company was buying friends and influence in Congress through Ames.
Unfortunately for the reader, neither Gibson nor the Sun made any attempt to synthesize or boil down the lengthy transcript. It was simply printed as it was taken down. The Sun added a sub-head here and there and fueled reader indignation with inflammatory deck heads (“Colossal Bribery” and “Congressmen Who Have Robbed the People and Now Support the National Robber,” for example) but otherwise left it to the reader to puzzle things out.
There was a halfhearted attempt at even-handedness — McComb was identified as a speculator who was “an active manipulator of both” the Union Pacific and Credit Mobilier “who made piles of money.” The real villain of the story was Ames — the target of McComb’s lawsuit. But the transcript didn’t mention Ames’s letter until the end.
Chronological order, rather than the inverted pyramid, was the Sun’s favored approach to news, according to historian Janet Steele’s account of the newspaper, It Shines for All. In the case of Credit Mobilier, that didn’t help the reader one bit.
Numerous sloppy errors were also unhelpful. The Sun, in boldface at the top of the story, said lawmakers 2,000 to 3,000 shares apiece. In fact, no one bought more than 150 shares – and that lawmaker, James Brooks of New York, obtained his shares from Thomas C. Durant.
The mistakes hurt, allowing one newspaper in Maine to dismiss the story as the “Credit Mobilier slanders.” The Sun‘s well-earned reputation as an ardent foe of President Ulysses S. Grant made matters worse. The story’s appearance in the Sun is “prima facie evidence that it is a lie,” the New York Times sneered.
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Difficult to read, riddled with errors and published by a rabidly anti-Grant newspaper, the Credit Mobilier expose could easily have been dismissed. Why did it resonate?
The story confirmed what many in the press already knew – that Credit Mobilier stock was being used to buy influence on Capitol Hill. As early as 1868, John R. Young, the managing editor of the New York Tribune, warned Rep. Elihu Washburne, R-Ill., of testimony in New York courts pointing to “an almost incredible amount of corruption” involving the Union Pacific and “especially the Credit Mobilier.” Young, a good Republican, feared that the evidence would hurt his party’s chances in the presidential election of that year and assured Washburne he would do what he could to keep it out of the press. “This is the only thing that makes me hesitate, and I do not know as that will long.
Four years later, the Tribune published a condensed version of the Sun’s story. Even though it seemed to help Tribune editor and Democratic presidential candidate Horace Greeley, the newspaper said it was hesitant to do so except for one thing: “our knowledge of the fact that the letters of Mr. Ames are genuine documents.”
Then the Tribune went on to make a prediction that three congressional investigations, front-page headlines and searing editorial in newspapers from Sacramento to New York would validate in the months to come. “The public will look with deep interest at further developments in the case.”
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Read more about the Credit Mobilier scandal in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, available Amazon.com
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