Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

The debate upon the recommendation of the committee not to investigate was impassioned. Senator Hoar said: "The adoption of this majority report ... will be the most unfortunate fact in the history of the Senate." When the vote of the Senate not to investigate was announced, Senator Edmunds turned to his neighbor in the Senate and summed up the verdict of posterity in these words: "This is a day of infamy for the Senate of the United States."

The same Legislature which sent Senator Payne to the Senate defeated the bill to allow the Cleveland independent refiners to build a pipe line to furnish themselves with oil. The defeat of the bill was accomplished by a lobby whose work was so openly shameless that it was characterized by the Ohio press "as an indelible disgrace to the State." The bill was one of many attempts which have been made by the people of Ohio and Pennsylvania, without success, to get from their Legislature the right to build pipe lines. It has been tried to get laws to regulate the charges of the existing lines, but without success. The history of the pipe-line bills in these legislatures for the past ten years has been a monotonous record of an unavailing struggle of a majority of millions to apply legal and constitutional restraints to a minority of a few dozens. The means employed in the Ohio Legislature of 1885 to defeat a bill giving equality in pipe-line transportation to refiners in competition with the oil trust, which owned the existing pipe-lines, were of such a sort that that body has gone into the history of the State as the "Coal-oil Legislature." It is stated by Hudson, in his Railways and the Republic, that the Democratic agent of the bribery openly threatened to publish the list he had of the members of the Legislature he had purchased, and that in consequence of this threat proceedings which had been begun against him for outraging the House by appearing on the floor in a state of gross intoxication were abandoned.[573]

In a debate about combinations in trade and industry—trusts—in the United States Senate in 1888, the sore scandal of this senatorial election of 1884 was disinterred.

"If there be such a trust," said Senator Hoar, referring to the oil trust, "is it represented in the cabinet at this moment? Is it represented in the Senate? I want to know the facts about these five or six great trusts which are sufficient in their power to overthrow any government in Europe, if they existed in those nations, that should set itself against them—the coal, the sugar, the whiskey, the cotton, the fruit, the railroad transportation of this country, controlled by these giant chieftains."

Senator Payne defended the oil trust and himself. "Even at this date," he said, "it seems that that company is represented as being guilty of all sorts of unlawful and improper things. Such allegations without proof to sustain them I regard as unworthy of an honorable man or an honorable senator.... The Standard Oil Company," he continued, "is a very remarkable and wonderful institution. It has accomplished within the last twenty years, as a commercial enterprise, what no other company or association of modern times has accomplished." He went on to declare that he "never had a dollar's interest in the company." But the charge which he and it would never allow to be investigated was that the company had a great many dollars' interest in him. "The majority of the stockholders are very liberal in their philanthropic contributions to charity and benevolent works," he pleaded; "but it contributed," he said, "not one dollar or one cent directly or indirectly to my election to this body." During the demand for investigation he uttered no such denial to be taken as a challenge.

The senator made what Senator Hoar properly called a "very remarkable admission" concerning the part taken in elections by the oil combination. "When a candidate for the other House in 1871," Senator Payne said, "no association, no combination in my district did more to bring about my defeat, and went to so large an expense in money to accomplish it, as the Standard Oil Company."

The oil trust, then, does take part in elections, and as a company spends larger sums of money than any other "institution, association, combination ... to accomplish the defeat" of candidates for Congress!

Then Mr. Payne said: "There never has been a national election at which those two gentlemen—one of them was my own son—have not contributed very liberally." He named the two men who were, as Senator Hoar showed, among the most influential and important managers of his election to the Senate.

Senator Hoar closed the debate with these unanswered and unanswerable words: "A senator who, when the governor of his State, when both branches of the Legislature of his State, complained to us that a seat in the United States Senate had been bought; when the other senator from the State rose and told us that that was the belief of a very large majority of the people of Ohio, without distinction of party, failed to rise in his place and ask for the investigation which would have put an end to those charges, if they had been unfounded, sheltering himself behind the technicalities which were found by some gentlemen on both sides of this chamber, that the investigation ought not to be made, but who could have had it by the slightest request on his part, and then remained dumb, I think should forever after hold his peace."[574]

The election of this senator was meant to be only the prelude to his nomination and election as President of the United States. This was publicly and authoritatively declared by the men who were charged with having spent money to buy the Legislature for him. One of these was the proprietor of the most influential Democratic daily in Ohio, and that journal in a leading editorial, double leaded to make it more prominent, declared this to be the purpose of Payne's friends. The New York Sun of May 27, 1884, followed, also in double-leaded editorials, under the caption in staring black type of the name of the Senator, and said: "Henry B. Payne is looming up grandly in the character of a possible and not altogether improbable successor to Mr. Tilden as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency. The fact that the Ohio delegation at Chicago in July is sure to be solid for Payne is of peculiar importance and significancy. Everybody can see what it may amount to."