Washington luxuriated in a period of relative calm during the Christmas season of 1872.

Congress adjourned for the holiday on December 20. Because some lawmakers had begun celebrating a wee bit early, the House had trouble summoning a quorum to approve a motion to adjourn for the Christmas recess. Eventually, according to the New York Times, more than half of Congress left town for the holiday, and “save for the generous glow of Christmas, the city is almost completely devoid of interest.”

The nation’s capital needed a break. When Congress returned to town earlier in the month to begin the third and final session of the 42^nd Congress, it was consumed immediately by the Credit Mobilier scandal. In practically its first order of business in early December, the House voted to create a five-member committee to investigate whether Massachusetts Republican Representative Oakes Ames had attempted to bribe colleagues to whom he sold shares in Credit Mobilier, the Union Pacific’s lucrative construction subsidiary.

House Speaker James G. Blaine and other Republican leaders – including James A. Garfield – hoped to get ahead of the headlines with a demonstration of resolute integrity. Things didn’t work out as they hoped.

Right out of the box, the committee led by Luke Potter Poland blundered by voting to conduct its business in secret. Poland believed meeting behind closed doors would allow the committee to pursue its investigation in a business-like fashion. Garfield, implicated in the scandal, also favored a closed-door investigation for obvious reasons.

Meeting in private, however, did absolutely nothing to inhibit the press from reporting on the Poland committee’s deliberations. Leading newspapers in New York filled their news columns with reports based on sources from inside the committee room. For much of December, newspapers reported – with varying degrees of accuracy – on the testimony of Henry S. McComb, Ames and others.

Some of the sources were not hard to identify. A fawning interview in the New York Sun with Jeremiah Sullivan Black, the Democratic lawyer representing McComb , made plain from whom the newspaper was getting its information. Others papers were more circumspect but clearly getting their impressions from sources whose perspectives were just as biased as Black’s.

News that one witness had testified that Democratic Representative James A. Brooks of New York had been implicated in the scandal led to a maudlin drama on the House floor on December 17. Ailing, not entirely lucid and oozing self-pity, Brooks delivered an hour-long defense of his conduct that included a vow before the House and God that he had never tried to profit from his position in Congress. Onlookers and journalists, well accustomed to displays of sanctimonious hypocrisy, grimaced and rolled their eyes.

Accurate reporting of the secret investigation wasn’t the biggest problem faced by Poland, Blaine and other Republican leaders. Of greater political significance was the universal editorial condemnation of the closed-door proceedings. Headlines in Cairo, Ill., and Memphis referred sneeringly to “secret deliberations” of the Poland panel. Henry Van Ness Boynton’s Cincinnati Gazette reported that no one in Washington – even those implicated in the scandal – supported opening up the deliberation. Out in California, the Sacramento Union offered a scathing assessment. “We expect nothing from this investigation as it is being conducted.”

Most tellingly, one of Washington’s leading newspapers in the capital concluded that the closed-door investigation was all wrong. This was a city whose daily press was so cozy with the powers-that-be that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed one of the newspapers in their novel The Gilded Age: a Tale of Today as “The Washington Daily Love-Feast.” Nevertheless, the Washington Evening Star concluded that the closed-door investigation was all wrong. Many critics of the closed-door proceedings “say more harm is likely to be done the accused parties through the sensational guessings at the evidence, and wholesale fabrications without any guessing, than would be by a full report of all that takes place in the committee room. And they are quite right.”

Shortly before Christmas, the influential Boynton – who had dismissed the Sun’s Credit Mobilier scoop as a partisan smear during the presidential campaign – admitted in print that he had been wrong to do so. “It is not pleasant to write about the Credit Mobilier,” Boynton began in a column that reviewed the disclosures that emerged since the investigation began. The evidence that had emerged “aroused suspicions that nothing but the most searching investigation will either meet or satisfy,” he wrote.

The question hanging over Washington at the end of 1872 was whether Congress could — or would — investigate with the rigor Boynton and others demanded.

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A day after the death of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, the reckoning began.

Perhaps no newspaper faced a more complicated task in assessing the Union war hero and former president than the New York Sun, whose 1872 expose of the Credit Mobilier scandal marked the beginning of the Gilded Age. Its idiosyncratic editor, Charles A. Dana, oscillated wildly over the years when it came to the quiet, unassuming Midwesterner whose unflinching prosecution of the war against secession saved the Union.

Americans have struggled for decades with the life and legacy of Grant, the subject of Ron Chernow’s remarkable new biography. That struggle played out in the editorial columns of the Sun as the nation mourned the loss of its former president and military hero.

Grant’s personal battles against economic ruin brought on by an ill-advised business partnership with Ferdinand Ward and the cancer that ultimately took his life transfixed the nation in his final years, Dana’s newspaper noted.

“A generation has passed away and another has come upon the stage since the reports of Grant’s successes in the field filled the columns of the daily press and made every one of that time familiar with his brilliant military exploits,” the Sun recalled.

But there was more to say.

“Unfortunately for the country, as well as for him, the lustre of his great fame as the conqueror of the rebellion has since been dimmed by his conspicuous failure as a statesman and businessman; and through this failure his countrymen have come to regard him with less partiality and perhaps less respect than are justly his due.”

That assessment may well be regarded as judicious and measured. But its appearance in the Sun seemed more than a little ironic — because there were few publications that pummeled Grant the politician more vigorously than the feisty four-page broadsheet led by Dana. The paper’s contempt was made plain by its withering nickname for the president: “Useless S. Grant.”

It wasn’t always like that. Dana first became acquainted with Grant during the war. At a dinner in Memphis, Dana would recall years later, he encountered “a man of simple manners, straightforward, cordial, and unpretending.” In March 1863, as rumors swirled of Grant’s alcoholism and doubts lingered about his responsibility for the carnage at Shiloh, Dana was assigned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to join Grant’s retinue. “The ostensible function I shall give you will be that of special commissioner of the War Department to investigate the pay services of the western armies,” Dana said he was told, “but your real duty will be to report to me every day what you see.”

Grant, Dana recalled, welcomed him to his official family. “He did not like letter writing, and my daily dispatches to Mr. Stanton relieved him from the necessity of describing every day what was going on in the army.”

That cordiality continued to define their relationship for the next several years. Dana supported Grant’s bid for the White House in 1868, but their relationship took a sharp turn for the worse shortly after Grant took office.

The new president, Dana believed, had failed to honor a promise to offer him the lucrative patronage job of collector at the Port of New York. But Dana also recognized that the sympathies of the working class readership of the Sun lay with the Democratic Party. “To stake a claim in the cut-throat New York newspaper industry, Dana needed to define and win a loyal audience,” writes Janet E. Steele in The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles A. Dana. “For a variety of reasons, personal as well as pragmatic, he would choose to keep that audience a Democratic one.”

Even by the wild and woolly editorial standards of the era, Dana over-achieved in this regard. No accusation, no opportunity to cast aspersions on the president or his party went unexploited. Grant’s family was characterized as a pack of shameless office-seekers and self-promoters (although, as Chernow points out, there was some truth to this when it came to Grant’s father). His appointments were blasted as incompetent and corrupt. Grant wanted to annex the Dominican Republic; the Sun wanted the U.S. to back Cuban rebels fighting for independence from Spain.

This is the context in which the Sun’s Credit Mobilier scoop appeared. The lengthy (albeit error-ridden) account by Albert M. Gibson detailed the operations of the Union Pacific Railroad’s shady construction subsidiary — and how a member of Congress sold shares in the company at advantageous prices to his colleagues with the goal of cultivating support for the railroad.

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The hyper-partisanship of Dana’s newspaper was the reason the rival New York Times could plausibly dismiss the story; its appearance in the Sun, the Times asserted, was “prima-facie evidence that it was a lie.” Even the New York Tribune, whose editor — Democratic presidential candidate Horace Greeley — stood to benefit politically was initially reluctant to endorse the story. The Tribune grudgingly reprinted a condensed version of the story on an inside page and noted in its editorial columns that it did so “with all possible reserve.”

But the Tribune took note of something else. The basic allegation of the story — that Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts peddled Credit Mobilier stock to his colleagues to help the Union Pacific’s interests in Congress — was true. Letters from Ames to fellow Credit Mobilier investor Henry S. McComb confirming that this was his motivation were “genuine documents,” the Tribune acknowledged.

The Tribune went on to make a prediction. “The public will look with deep interest at further developments in the case.”

In the months that followed, newspapers of all partisan persuasions began to understand the seriousness and validity of the Sun‘s blockbuster. Even the Times conceded that the members of Congress implicated in the scandal deserved some sort of sanction.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge Dana’s newspaper by the editorial conventions of the twenty-first century. The newspaper industry was on the cusp of explosive growth in influence and political power when the Sun published the Credit Mobilier story. The principles of objectivity, fairness and impartiality that govern modern newsgathering had yet to take root.

But there may well have been less resistance to believing the story had the Sun been less overtly hostile to Grant and his party. Its journalistic legacy, combining aggressive, adversarial reporting and shamelessly shrill partisanship, is at least as complex as the statesman it memorialized in August 1885.

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The Credit Mobilier scandal marked an important watershed in the political life of the United States — the moment in the years after the Civil War when Americans began to react against what Luke Potter Poland and others called “money power” in the halls of government.

But the scandal displayed another important change taking place in the country. The political melodrama was hatched, fed and kept alive by an aggressive and independent press. There would have been no scandal — no investigation, no revelations, no national debate about corruption and money power — without the persistent reporting of Washington correspondents and adversarial editorial commentary.

For me, as a lifelong journalist, this aspect of the story is particularly fascinating. The story of Credit Mobilier illustrates how the press was growing up, abandoning old conventions and moving toward the professional norms accepted and practiced by responsible news organizations today.

“Moving toward” is the key phrase. There was still plenty that the Poynter Institute would find objectionable. Sensationalism, partisanship and, in some instances, overt corruption characterized much of the press of the early 1870s. For example, Washington correspondent Uriah Hunt Painter learned early on that Oakes Ames was selling valuable shares in Credit Mobilier on Capitol Hill — but instead of breaking the story he bought some of the stock himself.

William Shaw, correspondent of the Boston Transcript, bragged to a congressional committee about how he used his access to the Treasury secretary George Boutwell to profit from insider knowledge. After weeks of even-handed coverage of the scandal, the National Republican suddenly decided it was all much ado about nothing — just as it was bidding for a contract to print the Congressional Globe and the mood of the House was clearly against taking drastic action against Ames or anyone else involved.

Indeed, the scandal resulted from an expose by the New York Sun printed at the height of the bitter 1872 presidential campaign pitting Republican President Ulysses S. Grant against Democrat-Liberal Republican Horace Greeley. The Sun hoped the scoop by Washington correspondent Albert M. Gibson would help defeat Grant. On that score, it failed miserably.

Recklessness and irresponsibility are easy to spot in the newspapers of the period — but there was also smart reporting and imaginative efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal. At the same time, there was a dawning realization that the press played a vital role in keeping the pressure on Congress so that, in the words of the Sacramento Union, “politicians will find it impossible to keep the issue down.”

Henry Van Ness Boynton, the Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette, provided authoritative and searingly honest coverage of the affairs of Washington. A recipient of the Medal of Honor for his service at the battle of Chickamauga, Boynton had been dismissive initially of the Credit Mobilier story. In an important column in December, 1872, he conceded that “It is not pleasant to write about the Credit Mobilier,” but he did — and conceded that he had been wrong to wave it off.

Newspapers used divergent styles to bring the news of Credit Mobilier to their readers. The Sun combined snarky partisanship with its front-page coverage. “Trial of the Innocents” was the paper’s hilariously cynical standing headline for stories about the congressional investigations. Other papers, particularly the New York Tribune, offered front page “scene” pieces that described the mood and atmosphere during dramatic moments in addition to routine coverage of debates and hearings.

One of the most interesting Credit Mobilier stories appeared under the byline GATH, the pen name for George Alfred Townsend, a famous Civil War and Washington correspondent. In 1872 the Chicago Tribune assigned him to get to the bottom of the story. Townsend filed a remarkably smart piece that represents an early example of sophisticated media reporting.

Townsend headed to Philadelphia, where the lawsuit that formed the basis of Gibson’s story had been filed. He retraced Gibson’s steps and concluded that the scoop had been orchestrated by Jeremiah Sullivan Black, the attorney whose client was suing Ames.

As the story unfolded in the winter of 1872-1873, it was clear that the press was performing precisely as the Sacramento Union had hoped. Pressure from newspapers forced the House to open its investigation to the public. A daily stream of pointed headlines and embarrassing front-page stories kept the heat on.

This was something new. Lawmakers didn’t like it, and Ben Butler knew that. Speaking on behalf of Ames as the House debated whether to expel him and Representative James Brooks of New York, Butler shook his fist at the press gallery and melodramatically declared: “I am a man God made, not the newspapers!”

The House cheered.

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