“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_.