When House Speaker James G. Blaine wanted someone to lead the House investigation into the Credit Mobilier scandal, he turned to a Vermont Republican who personified rectitude.
Luke Potter Poland was a former senator and one-time judge who had led congressional investigations into Ku Klux Klan terrorism in the South. Favoring brass buttons, blue coats and ruffled shirts, he looked more like a relic of the American Revolution than a politician from the era of the telegraph and the steam engine.
“He is a fine looking man,” Grace Greenwood (the pen name for Sara Jane Lippincott) wrote in the New York Times, “erect and stately, with hair as white as the snows of his own Vermont hills, or as his own judicial ermine. I suspect, from his tone and manner, that he was once a Methodist minister of the best type, but that, in some hour of weakness, this ornament of the American pulpit let go of the saving doctrine of the ‘perseverance of the saints’ and backslid into the American Congress.”
Luke Potter Poland of Vermont. Library of Congress photo.
Poland had the experience, demeanor and reputation to tackle the thorny scandal arising from the New York Sun’s exposé of sweetheart stock sales to members of Congress by Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, a railroad financier heavily invested in Credit Mobilier and the Union Pacific. The Sun published letters from Ames to fellow Credit Mobilier investor Henry S. McComb in which Ames explained he was distributing Credit Mobilier stock on Capitol Hill because “we want more friends in this Congress.”
In early December, 1872, the House put the Vermont Republican in charge of a five-member committee assigned to investigate “whether any member of this House was bribed by Oakes Ames, or any other person or corporation, in any manner touching his legislative duty.”
Things went wrong from the start.
Poland and his colleagues decided at the outset to conduct their investigation behind closed doors. The practice might have been acceptable at one time, but a scandal that resulted from a newspaper exposé could not be conducted in secret. Weeks of negative headlines and commentary pushed the House into opening up the deliberations to the public when lawmakers returned from their Christmas break to Washington in early January, but the damage was done. The private deliberations raised questions about the legitimacy of the investigation that never went away.
That was bad enough, but there were other failings. In the course of its investigation, Poland’s committee focused entirely on the question of who bought Credit Mobilier shares while ignoring the more serious question of whether the sales influenced the legislative actions of anyone who bought the stock.
There is evidence to suggest they did. In December, 1867, at the time he was arranging to buy Credit Mobilier shares from Ames, Representative Henry Dawes of Massachusetts introduced legislation that would allow the Union Pacific to move its headquarters from New York. The measure favored Ames and his allies on the Union Pacific board who had just concluded a bitter struggle for control of the railroad with Thomas C. Durant.
Poland’s committee never looked into this issue, nor did it explore other instances in which lawmakers voted on issues related to the Union Pacific as they arranged to buy or actually owned Credit Mobilier shares.
These failings came back to haunt Poland in February when the committee released its findings. The panel recommended that the House expel Ames and a Democratic member, Representative James Brooks. While it chastised those who bought Credit Mobilier shares – “No member of Congress ought to place himself in circumstances of suspicion, so that any discredit of the body shall rise on his account” – Poland’s committee recommended no sanction against anyone who obtained Credit Mobilier stock from Ames.
Representative Oakes Ames. Library of Congress photo.
The press was incredulous. “It is a gross perversion of the facts to assume that the congressional participants in the spoil of the swindle did not know from where these spoils were derived,” the Sacramento Union seethed. “This part of the report is whitewash of the purest wash, and it will deceive no one.”
Poland’s failure to follow through on the committee’s instructions undermined support for the committee recommendations. There was little appetite in the House for expelling Ames or Brooks – and less because of the failure of the committee to follow through on its instructions. In the end, the House censured Ames and Brooks but took no other action.
To be fair, Poland and his colleagues faced a daunting task. They were assigned to investigate a sprawling and complicated scandal at the end of the 42nd Congress without benefit of staff. They faced an explosive scandal implicating some of the biggest names in the House. Representative Job Stevenson of Ohio aptly likened the committee to “a little tub” whose crew was unable to haul in “all these leviathans of the great deep in their net.”
But while Poland may have mismanaged the investigation, he understood all too well the issues at stake as the House deliberated on the Credit Mobilier scandal. As the House prepared to reject his committee’s report, Poland warned that the public was fed up with politicians who seemed in thrall to the enticements used by big corporations – in this case, the Union Pacific and its profitable subsidiary – to influence the legislative process.
As the evolution from an agricultural to an industrial economy proceeded, “the country is filling with gigantic associations which command great influence and great money power,” and public was convinced that these interests threatened their rights and liberties, Poland observed. Unless his colleagues acted convincingly to demonstrate its independence of these interests, he warned, “they will soon encounter a tempest of public judgment that will utterly overthrow many of their schemes, and there may be danger that the innocent will suffer with the guilty.”
Poland was a better prophet than an inquisitor. In 1874, Democrats rode a wave powered by public disgust with Credit Mobilier, an ill-considered retroactive pay raise and rising public anxiety about the economy following the Panic of 1873 to regain control of the House.
Coming soon from Edinborough Press: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age” by Robert B. Mitchell.
