III
An examination of the voluminous evidence in the case will disclose that the majority of the committee took little or no part in the examination of witnesses, and the major part, and practically all the cross-examination of Lorimer witnesses was done by the three members who came to the conclusion of Lorimer’s guilt, Kern, Kenyon and Lea. Senator Kern was the most active.
The theory on which Kern worked after a careful reading of the evidence before the Burrows committee and the Helm committee of the state senate of Illinois and the statement of Funk was about this: Edward Hines, interested in the lumber schedule of the Payne-Aldrich bill and lobbying in Washington, was urged by Aldrich and Penrose to help hurry a new Republican vote into the senate from Illinois to help out in the tariff fight. After conferences it was agreed that Lorimer should be the choice, and Hines undertook to put the agreement into effect. He financed the fight for Lorimer. The money was used through the management of Lee O’Neil Browne, the clever leader of the majority wing of the Democrats in the lower house of the legislature, and with the knowledge of Lorimer. He was absolutely positive that the wholesale defection of the Democrats to Lorimer could only have been the result of corrupt influence because the election of a reactionary Republican senator might, in view of the conditions surrounding the tariff fight in the senate, determine a national policy to which Democrats were elementally opposed and upon which they had made their campaign one year before. Had these Democrats gone to a Republican who would vote with Dolliver and Beveridge he might not have been so sure. Going to Lorimer, he was predisposed to the belief that money had been used. This frame of mind manifested itself repeatedly in all his examination of political witnesses. He appealed to Governor Deneen for one reason for Democrats deserting their party to vote for a reactionary Republican under conditions existing in Washington; to Yates, to Hopkins, to Stringer, to the members of the legislature who deserted and without once securing a plausible reply.
The hatred Senator Kern engendered at this time among the friends of Lorimer or the men accused did not appear upon the surface. The blond boss proved himself a consummate artist in the concealment of his hostility until after Kern had summed up the case against him.
But the existence of this hostility was not concealed. For a period of two months there was scarcely a day that did not bring its batch of scurrilous unsigned letters with a Chicago date mark.
Meanwhile the hearings seemed destined to drag on interminably. Long before the last witness was heard enough evidence had been submitted upon which any member of the committee might have formed an opinion. Newspapers began to hint that the purpose was to tire and disgust and confuse by the accumulation of the pages of the testimony.
The official stenographer of the committee throughout the hearings had been Milton W. Blumenberg, who stood high in his profession. One Saturday afternoon when the Burns stenographer was testifying, Blumenberg stood behind his chair looking at the witness’s notes. The hearing was adjourned for dinner to be renewed in the evening. The evidence disclosed that upon leaving the room on adjournment Blumenberg met a woman employed by the committee who immediately, and, strangely enough, challenged his opinion on the genuineness of the notes. He declared them “manufactured,” “faked,” and immediately after that Edward Hines and others of the Lorimer party appeared upon the scene and Blumenberg’s opinion was repeated for their edification. At the hearing that night Blumenberg broke in unexpectedly with a declaration that the notes were manufactured, and when the startled members of the committee undertook to question him as to his motive they were told they were “not the most important people in the world.” He was immediately placed under arrest for contempt and placed in the custody of the sergeant-at-arms, with instructions that no one should be permitted to communicate with him. The whole atmosphere had become so colored with the idea of corruption that the incident created a painful impression. He was discharged from the service of the committee, and the matter was dropped on the representation of Blumenberg’s friends that he was the victim of a nervous breakdown.
But hard on the heels of this incident another sensational incident fed the public curiosity when a twenty-year-old telegraph operator of the Postal Company, stationed at the New Willard Hotel, who had sent a telegram for the Burns detective, testified that Edward Hines had attempted to bribe her with a roll of bills in his hand to let him read the message given in by the detective. The girl had not sought the notoriety and was so transparently truthful in her charming girlish way that no one not directly interested in the case could have doubted her veracity. Thus the trail of the serpent seemed to lead directly back to Washington.