After holding many sessions, and collating volumes of testimony, the committee found, as it stated in its report, that the total cost of building the Union Pacific Railroad was about $50,000,000. And what had the Credit Mobilier Company charged? Nearly $94,000,000 or, to be exact, $93,546,287.28. [Footnote: Doc. No. 78, Credit Mobilier Investigation: xiv.] The committee admitted that "the road had been built chiefly with the resources of the Government." [Footnote: Ibid., xx.] A decided mistake; it had been entirely built so. The committee itself showed how the entire cost of building the road had been "wholly reimbursed from the proceeds of the Government bonds and first mortgage bonds," and that "from the stock, income bonds, and land grant bonds, the builders received in cash value $23,366,000 as profit—about forty-eight per cent. on the entire cost." [Footnote: Ibid., xvii.]
The total "profits" represented the difference between the cost of building the railroad and the amount charged—about $44,000,000 in all, of which $23,000,000 or more was in immediate cash. It was more than proved that the amount was even greater; the accounts had been falsified to show that the cost of construction was $50,000,000. Large sums of money, borrowed ostensibly to build the road, had at once been seized as plunder, and divided in the form of dividends upon stock for which the clique had not paid a cent in money, contrary to law.
THRIFTY, SAGACIOUS PATRIOTISM.
Who could deny that the phalanx of capitalists scrambling forward to share in this carnival of plunder were not gifted with unerring judgment? From afar they sighted their quarry. Nearly all of them were the fifty per cent. "patriot" capitalists of the Civil War; and, just as in all extant biographies, they are represented as heroic, self-sacrificing figures during that crisis, when in historical fact, they were defrauding and plundering indomitably, so are they also glorified as courageous, enterprising men of prescience, who hazarded their money in building the Pacific railroads at a time when most of the far West was an untenanted desert. And this string of arrant falsities has passed as "history!"
If they had that foresight for which they were so inveterately lauded, it was a foresight based upon the certainty that it would yield them forty-eight per cent. profit and more from a project on which not one of them did the turn of a hand's work, for even the bribing of Congress was done by paid agents. Nor did they have to risk the millions that they had obtained largely by fraud in trade and other channels; all that they had to do was to advance that money for a short time until they got it back from the Government resources, with forty-eight per cent profit besides.
The Senate Committee's report came out at a time of panic when many millions of men, women and children were out of work, and other millions in destitution. It was in that very year when the workers in New York City were clubbed by the police for venturing to hold a meeting to plead for the right to work. But the bribing of Congress in 1864, and the thefts in the construction of the railroad, were only parts of the gigantic frauds brought out—frauds which a people who believed themselves under a democracy had to bear and put up with, or else be silenced by force.
THE BRIBERY PERSISTENTLY CONTINUES.
When the act of 1864 was passed, Congress plausibly pointed out the wise, precautionary measures it was taking to insure the honest disbursements of the Government's appropriations. "Behold," said in effect this Congress, "the safeguards with which we are surrounding the bill. We are providing for the appointment of Government directors to supervise the work, and see to it that the Government's interests do not suffer." Very appropriate legislation, indeed, from a Congress in which $436,000 of bribe money had been apportioned to insure its betrayal of the popular interests.
Buts Ames and his brother capitalists bribed at least one of the Government directors with $25,000 to connive at the frauds: [Footnote: Document No. 78, Credit Mobilier Investigation: xvii] he was a cheaply bought tool, that director. And immediately after the railroad was built and in operation, its owners scented more millions of plunder if they could get a law enacted by Congress allowing them exorbitant rates for the transportation of troops and Government supplies and mails. They corruptly paid out, it seems, $126,000 to get this measure of March 3, 1871, passed. [Footnote: Doc. No. 78, etc., xvii.]
What was the result of all this investigation? Mere noise. The oratorial tom-toms in Congress resounded vociferously for the gulling of home constituencies, and of palaver and denunciations there was a plenitude. The committee confined itself to recommending the expulsion of Oakes Ames and James Brooks from Congress. The Government bravely brought a civil action, upon many specified charges, against the Union Pacific Railroad Company for misappropriation of funds. This action the company successfully fought; the United States Supreme Court, in 1878, dismissed the suit on the ground that the Government could not sue until the company's debt had matured in 1895. [Footnote: 98 U.S. 569.]