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“THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS
Dana’s Relentless Fight Against the Whisky Ring, Crédit Mobilier, “Addition, Division, and Silence,” the Safe Burglary Conspiracy and the Boss Shepherd Scandal.
THE first ten years of Dana’s service on the Sun were marked by the uprooting of many public evils. To use the mild phrasing of the historian John Fiske, “Villains sometimes succeeded in imposing upon President Grant, who was an honest, simple-hearted soldier without much knowledge of the ways of the world.” To say it more concretely, hardly a department of the national government but was alive with fraud. The Sun, which had supported Grant in the election of 1868, turned against his administration in its first months, and for years it continued to keep before the public the revelations of corruption—which were easily made, so bold were the scoundrels, so coarse their manner of theft.
Among the scandals which the Sun either brought to light or was most vigorous in assailing, these were the principal:
The Crédit Mobilier Scandal—This involved the names of many Senators and Representatives who were accused of accepting stock in the Crédit Mobilier of America, the fiscal company organised to build the Union Pacific Railroad, as a reward for using their influence and votes in favour of the great enterprise.
The Navy Department Scandal—In this the Sun accused George M. Robeson, Secretary of the Navy, of having permitted double payment to contractors and of violating the law in making large purchases without competitive bidding. Mr. Dana appeared as a witness in the Congressional investigation of Robeson, who, in the end, while not convicted of personal corruption, was censured for the laxity of his official methods.
The Whisky Ring—This evil combination cheated the government out of millions of dollars. It was made up of distillers, wholesale liquor-dealers, and employees of the internal revenue office, these conspiring together to avoid the payment of the liquor tax. The first attack on the corrupt alliance was made in the Sun of February 3, 1872, in an article by “Sappho,” one of the Sun’s Washington correspondents. Other great newspapers took up the fight, but the Sun was the chief aggressor. As a result of the exposure, two hundred and thirty-eight men were indicted and many of them, including the chief clerk of the Treasury Department, were sent to prison.
“Addition, Division, and Silence”—On March 20, 1867, W. H. Kemble, State Treasurer of Pennsylvania and one of the Republican bosses, wrote the following letter to Titian J. Coffey, a lawyer and claim-agent in Washington:
MY DEAR TITIAN:
Allow me to introduce to you my particular friend, Mr. George O. Evans. He has a claim of some magnitude that he wishes you to help him in. Put him through as you would me. He understands addition, division, and silence.
W. H. KEMBLE.
When this letter fell into the hands of the Sun, which had already made war on the ring formed for the collection of war claims, it saw in Kemble’s last four words the sententious platform of wide-spread fraud. It printed the letter, and kept on printing it, with that iteration which Dana knew was of value in a crusade. In a few months the whole country was familiar with the phrase so suggestive of plunder.
Kemble was a politician with a thick skin, but he at last became so enraged at the repetition of “addition, division, and silence,” whether uttered by street urchins or printed all over America as the watchword of corruption—“honest graft,” he would have called it, if that phrase had then been common—that he sued out a writ of criminal libel against Mr. Dana and had him arrested as he was passing through Philadelphia. The only result of this was to make the phrase more common than before.
Kemble was afterward convicted of trying to bribe Pennsylvania legislators, and was sent to prison for a year.
The Post-Trader Scandal—William W. Belknap, Grant’s Secretary of War, was charged with receiving from Caleb P. Marsh fifteen hundred dollars in consideration for the appointment of John S. Evans to maintain a trading-establishment at Fort Sill, in the Indian Territory. The scandal came to the surface through the remark of Mrs. Belknap that Mrs. Evans would have no place in society, “as she is only a post-trader’s wife,” and the retort of Mrs. Evans, upon hearing of this, that “a post-trader’s wife is as good as the wife of an official who takes money for the appointment of a post-trader.”
The Sun laid the story of bribery wide open, and the Senate proceeded to impeach the Secretary of War. He escaped punishment by resigning his office, twenty-five Senators voting “not guilty” on the ground that Belknap’s resignation technically removed him from the Senate’s jurisdiction. Thirty-five Senators voted “guilty,” but a two-thirds vote was necessary to punish.
The Salary Grab—This was the act of Congress of March 3, 1873, which raised the President’s salary from twenty-five thousand dollars to fifty thousand, and the salaries of Senators and Representatives from five thousand to seventy-five hundred. Its evil lay not in the increases, but in the retroactive clause which provided that each Congressman should receive five thousand dollars as extra pay for the two-year term then ending. The assaults of the Sun and other newspapers so aroused public indignation that Congress was obliged to repeal the act in January, 1874, and many Members returned their share of the spoil to the Treasury.
The Boss Shepherd Scandal—The Sun printed an article from Washington accusing Alexander Shepherd, vice-president of the Board of Public Works of the District of Columbia, and Henry D. Cooke, governor of the District, with having a financial interest in the Metropolitan Paving Company, which had many street contracts in the national capital. Shepherd and Cooke laid a complaint of criminal libel against Mr. Dana, and an assistant district attorney of the District of Columbia came to New York and procured from United States Commissioner Davenport a warrant for the editor’s arrest.
It was the intent of the prosecution to hale Dana to a Washington police-court, where he would be tried without a jury. Dana had gone willingly, even eagerly, to Washington when summoned in the Robeson case, but the Shepherd strategy was so manifestly an attempt to railroad him that an appeal was taken to the Federal court for the southern district of New York. The historic decision of the district judge—Samuel Blatchford, subsequently promoted to the United States Supreme Court—may be summed up in one of its paragraphs:
The Constitution says that all trials shall be by jury, and the accused is entitled, not to be first convicted by a court and then to be convicted by a jury, but to be convicted or acquitted in the first instance by a jury.
As the Sun said of this decision, important to the freedom of the individual as well as to that of the press:
Those who sought to murder liberty, where they looked for a second Jeffreys, found a second Mansfield.
The Safe Burglary Conspiracy—Columbus Alexander, a reputable citizen of Washington, was active in the movement to smash the Washington contractors’ ring. He sought to bring certain contractors’ books into court and exposed the false set that was produced. The ringsters hired a man to go to Mr. Alexander with a story that he could bring him the genuine books. Then the gang, which included men in the secret-service departments of the government, placed some of the genuine books in the safe of the district attorney’s office and employed three professional burglars to blow open the safe.
The books, taken from the safe, were carried to Alexander’s home by the man who had approached him. Close behind came police, who were prepared to arrest Alexander as soon as he received the “stolen property.” He was to be accused of hiring the burglars to crack the district attorney’s safe. But the hour was early in the morning, Alexander was sleeping the deep sleep of the just, and the criminal rang his doorbell in vain.
The ringsters then “arrested” the “thief,” and caused him to sign a false confession, accusing Alexander; but the failure of their theatricals had broken the hireling’s nerve as well as their own, and the conspiracy collapsed. Two of the hired criminals turned state’s evidence at the trial, but the powerful politicians of the ring were able to bring about a disagreement of the jury.
These were the greatest of the scandals which the Sun exposed in its news columns and denounced on its editorial page. It was the cry of the ringsters, and even of some honest men, that the Sun’s assaults on the evils that marred Grant’s administration were the result of Dana’s personal dislike of the President. More specifically it was declared that Dana was a disappointed office-seeker, and that the place of collector of customs at the port of New York was the office he sought.
We have it on the unimpeachable testimony of General James Harrison Wilson, the biographer of Dana, and, with Dana, a biographer of Grant, that General Rawlins, Grant’s most intimate friend, told Dana’s associates, and particularly General Wilson, that Dana was to be appointed collector. There is no evidence that Dana ever asked Grant, or any other man, for public office. One place, that of appraiser of merchandise at the port of New York, was offered him, and he refused it. The Sun said editorially, replying to an insinuation made by the Commercial Advertiser that if Dana had been made collector his paper would not denounce the administration:
The idea that the editor of the Sun, which shines for all, could consent to become collector of the port of New York is extravagant and inadmissible. It would be stepping down and out with a vengeance.
And yet we do not mean that the collector of New York need be other than an upright man. Moses H. Grinnell was such, and Tom Murphy, though a politician, a crony of Boss Grant, and one of the donors of Boss Grant’s cottage, certainly never took a dollar of money from the Federal Treasury to which he was not entitled. General Arthur, the present collector, is a gentleman in every sense of the word.
The office of collector is respectable enough, but it is not one that the editor of the Sun could desire to take without deserving to have his conduct investigated by a proceeding de lunatico.
Dana and the Sun lost friends because of the assaults on Grantism. The warfare was bitter and personal. In the case of Belknap, for instance, the Sun was attacking a man whom Dana, having known him as a good soldier, had recommended for appointment as Secretary of War. But it must be recalled that at the very height of his antagonism to Grant, the President, Dana never receded from his opinion that Grant, the general, was the Union’s greatest soldier. And the Sun was quick to applaud him as President when, as in currency matters, he took a course which Dana considered right.
The friends of Grant, nevertheless, turned against Dana and his paper. Some of them, stockholders in the Sun Printing and Publishing Association, quit the concern when they found themselves unable to turn Dana from his purpose. All their pleadings were vain.
“A few years from now,” Dana would reply, “I shall be willing to accept whatever judgment the nation passes on my course of action; but now I must do as I think right.”
So far as the material prosperity of the Sun was concerned, the desertion of Grant’s friends hurt it not a whit. For every reader lost, four or five were won. Men may stop reading a paper because it disgusts them; they rarely quit it because it is wounding them.
“I don’t read the Sun,” said Henry Ward Beecher during his trial, “and don’t allow anybody to read it to me. What’s the good of a man sticking pins into himself?”
The Sun made this reply to Beecher’s assertion:
Everybody reads the Sun—the good, that they may be stimulated to do better; the bad, in fear and trembling lest their wickedness shall meet its deserts.
In Beecher’s case, as in Grant’s, the Sun believed that it was doing a public service in laying open wrongful conditions. In answer to one who criticised its brutal candour about the Plymouth Church scandal the Sun said:
The exposure of the moral nastiness in Brooklyn is a salutary thing. If, when the exposure of the scandal took place, the people had been indifferent—as indifferent as Beecher assumed to be—and had received no shock to their sense of purity and propriety, then the Jeremiahs might well have bewailed the turpitude of society and prophesied evil things for the country. Then, indeed, the poison would have been in the whole social atmosphere....
The Plymouth pastor, if a guiltless man, has brought all this trouble on himself by his cowardly course in dealing with the accusations against him....
If he is not a bold man, strong in the truth and in purity, what business has he to preach the religion of the Apostles to his fellow men—he who distributed Sharp’s rifles to the Kansas combatants with slavery, who denounced sin and bore his head high as a man of freedom of thought and action? To have kept himself consistent, he should not have dallied with Tilton and Moulton in secret, but if entrenched in innocence he should have dragged out their slanders and torn to pieces their plans from the pulpit where he had preached courage under difficulties, divine faith under sorrow, and bold encounter with sin. This would soon have expelled the poison lurking in the social atmosphere, but Beecher did not do it.
Perhaps Beecher’s thanks were not due to Dana, but Grant’s surely were. It is impossible that scandals like those of the Whisky Ring could have lain hidden forever. If they had not been exposed when they were, they would have come to the top later, perhaps after Grant went out of office, and when his cry, “Let no guilty man escape!” would have been in vain.
The Sun’s fights against the scandals of the Grant period were no more bitter than its attacks on the frauds attending the Presidential election of 1876, although Dana had no cause for personal animosity toward Hayes. The Sun’s chief Washington correspondent, A. M. Gibson, who handled many of the Grant scandals, wrote most of the news stories about the theft of the Presidency by Mr. Hayes’s managers. He also published in book form an official history of the fraud.
Joseph Pulitzer, then newly come from the West, was assigned by Dana to cover the proceedings of the Electoral Commission in semieditorial style. Pulitzer was later, in 1878, a European correspondent of the Sun.