CHAPTER XXXII
THE SWAY OF BRIBERY AND “HONEST GRAFT”
1903-1905
Graft of all kinds was rampant, as later official investigation showed, in Tammany-controlled departments, but in the public mind the question of this form of graft was vastly overshadowed by the revelations of the New York legislative committee investigating the great life insurance companies.
The disclosures showed that Republican legislators as well as Democratic were bought; that enormous corruption funds had been contributed to both political parties, and that one political machine was no better than the other.
Bribery expenditures, the committee reported, were classified on the various insurance companies’ books as “legal expenses.” The committee described the amounts as extraordinarily large. In the year 1904 alone, the Mutual Life Insurance Company thus disbursed $364,254.95; the Equitable Life Assurance Society, $172,698.42, and the New York Life Insurance Company, $204,019.25.[1]
Andrew C. Fields, long engaged by the Mutual Life Insurance Company to manipulate legislation at Albany, lived there in a sumptuously furnished house jocosely styled the “House of Mirth.” The expenditures were charged to “legal expenses.” The Mutual thus expended more than $2,000,000 in “legal expenses” from 1898 to 1904.[2] And from 1895 to 1904, the total payments made by the New York Life Insurance Company to Andrew Hamilton, its chief lobbyist at Albany, amounted to $1,312,197.16, all of which sum was soberly entered as “legal expenses.”[3] A present of nearly $50,000 was contributed in 1894 by the New York Life Insurance Company to the campaign fund of the Republican National Committee, and similar amounts in 1896 and 1900 to the same recipient.[4] All of the large insurance companies regularly contributed funds not only for national political campaigns, but for those in the States; the Equitable, for example, gave $50,000 in 1904 to the Republican National Committee, and had also, for many years, been giving $30,000 annually to the New York State Republican Committee.[5] The legislative investigating committee found it impossible to trace all of the directions of this continuous great corruption. “Enormous sums,” the committee stated, “have been expended in a surreptitious manner.”
Under the pressure of public opinion, District Attorney Jerome finally caused the Grand Jury to proceed against a few of the figureheads involved; the great magnates who had profited so enormously from the huge frauds, were, so events proved, left untouched. Although it had been clearly proved by the testimony that the frauds and corruptions consummated were gigantic, not a single one of those of great wealth implicated was ever sent to jail or even incommoded by the formality of a trial.
In the face of such disclosures, the opponents of Tammany could not well point to Tammany corruption as an exclusive product. It was a time, too, when what was termed “muckraking” was almost at its height; magazines and newspapers, were filled with articles exposing in detail the corruptions and colossal manipulations and spoliation done by great corporations and other vested interests, and the close connection between these and the “bosses” and machines of both old political parties. Public attention was concentrated more upon these nationwide scandals than upon local graft—petty, indeed, in some respects, compared to the great extortions of trusts and other industrial, transportation and financial corporations.
These factors had their influence in developing in New York City a powerful movement called the Municipal Ownership League, later passing under the name of the Independence League. The head of this organization was William R. Hearst. He had inherited a large fortune from his father, United States Senator George Hearst. The estate comprised a San Francisco newspaper; and William R. Hearst had come to New York, where he now had a morning and an evening newspaper. Of a sensational order, yet written in popular style, these newspapers had an extensive circulation, and their agitational matter were in reality the mainstay of his movement. Two of the local objectives of this agitation were the scandalous overcrowding of the street car system and the methods by which the subway system in New York City, built by the city’s credit, had been turned over to the profit of private interests. At the same time, no means was neglected to awaken popular resentment against the “plunderbund” fattening on the people, and to arouse indignation against the bossism of Tammany Hall. Day after day effective articles, editorials and cartoons were published; written in a simple style, understandable by the crudest intelligence, they produced a great effect among the voters. Nothing quite like this original kind of political journalism had ever been known in New York City.