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.