* Testimony before the Wilson Committee.
The majority of the members involved in the nasty affair were absolved by the Poland Committee from "any corrupt motive or purpose." But Oakes Ames of Massachusetts and James Brooks of New York were recommended for expulsion from the House and Patterson of New Hampshire from the Senate. The House, however, was content with censuring Ames and Brooks, and the Senate permitted Patterson's term to expire, since only five days of it remained. Whatever may have been the opinion of Congress, and whatever a careful reading of the testimony discloses to an impartial mind at this remote day, upon the voters of that time the revelations came as a shock. Some of the most trusted Congressmen were drawn into the miasma of suspicion, among them Garfield; Dawes; Scofield; Wilson, the newly elected Vice-President; Colfax, the outgoing Vice-President. Colfax had been a popular idol, with the Presidency in his vision; now bowed and disgraced, he left the national capital never to return with a public commission.
In 1874 came the disclosures of the Whiskey Ring. They involved United States Internal Revenue officers and distillers in the revenue district of St. Louis and a number of officials at Washington. Benjamin H. Bristow, on becoming Secretary of the Treasury in June of that year, immediately scented corruption. He discovered that during 1871-74 only about one-third of the whiskey shipped from St. Louis had paid the tax and that the Government had been defrauded of nearly $3,000,000. "If a distiller was honest," says James Ford Rhodes, the eminent historian, "he was entrapped into some technical violation of the law by the officials, who by virtue of their authority seized his distillery, giving him the choice of bankruptcy or a partnership in their operations; and generally he succumbed."
McDonald, the supervisor of the St. Louis revenue district, was the leader of the Whiskey Ring. He lavished gifts upon President Grant, who, with an amazing indifference and innocence, accepted such favors from all kinds of sources. Orville E. Babcock, the President's private secretary, who possessed the complete confidence of the guileless general, was soon enmeshed in the net of investigation. Grant at first declared, "If Babcock is guilty, there is no man who wants him so much proven guilty as I do, for it is the greatest piece of traitorism to me that a man could possibly practice." When Babcock was indicted, however, for complicity to defraud the Government, the President did not hesitate to say on oath that he had never seen anything in Babcock's behavior which indicated that he was in any way interested in the Whiskey Ring and that he had always had "great confidence in his integrity and efficiency." In other ways the President displayed his eagerness to defend his private secretary. The jury acquitted Babcock, but the public did not. He was compelled to resign under pressure of public condemnation, and was afterwards indicted for conspiracy to rob a safe of documents of an incriminating character. But Grant seems never to have lost faith in him. Three of the men sent to prison for their complicity in the whiskey fraud were pardoned after six months. McDonald, the chieftain of the gang, served but one year of his term.
The exposure of the Whiskey Ring was followed by an even more startling humiliation. The House Committee on Expenditures in the War Department recommended that General William W. Belknap, Secretary of War, be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors while in office," and the House unanimously adopted the recommendation. The evidence upon which the committee based its drastic recommendation disclosed the most sordid division of spoils between the Secretary and his wife and two rascals who held in succession the valuable post of trader at Fort Sill in the Indian Territory.
The committee's report was read about three o'clock in the afternoon of March 2, 1876. In the forenoon of the same day Belknap had sent his resignation to the President, who had accepted it immediately. The President and Belknap were personal friends. But the certainty of Belknap's perfidy was not removed by the attitude of the President, nor by the vote of the Senate on the article of impeachment—37 guilty, 25 not guilty-for the evidence was too convincing. The public knew by this time Grant's childlike failing in sticking to his friends; and 93 of the 25 Senators who voted not guilty had publicly declared they did so, not because they believed him innocent, but because they believed they had no jurisdiction over an official who had resigned.
There were many minor indications of the harvest which gross materialism was reaping in the political field. State and city governments were surrendered to political brigands. In 1871 the Governor of Nebraska was removed for embezzlement. Kansas was startled by revelations of brazen bribery in her senatorial elections (1872-1873). General Schenck, representing the United States at the Court of St. James, humiliated his country by dabbling in a fraudulent mining scheme.
In a speech before the Senate, then trying General Belknap, Senator George F. Hoar, on May 6, 1876, summed up the greater abominations:
"My own public life has been a very brief and insignificant one, extending little beyond the duration of a single term of senatorial office. But in that brief period I have seen five judges of a high court of the United States driven from office by threats of impeachment for corruption or maladministration. I have heard the taunt from friendliest lips, that when the United States presented herself in the East to take part with the civilized world in generous competition in the arts of life, the only products of her institutions in which she surpassed all others beyond question was her corruption. I have seen in the State in the Union foremost in power and wealth four judges of her courts impeached for corruption, and the political administration of her chief city become a disgrace and a byword throughout the world. I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official privilege of selecting the youths to be educated at our great military schools. When the greatest railroad of the world, binding together the continent and uniting the two great seas which wash our shores, was finished, I have seen our national triumph and exaltation turned to bitterness and shame by the unanimous reports of three committees of Congress—two in the House and one here—that every step of that mighty enterprise had been taken in fraud. I have heard in highest places the shameless doctrine avowed by men grown old in public office that the true way by which power should be gained in the Republic is to bribe the people with the offices created for their service, and the true end for which it should be used when gained is the promotion of selfish ambition and the gratification of personal revenge. I have heard that suspicions haunt the footsteps of the trusted companions of the President."
These startling facts did not shatter the prestige of the Republicans, the "Saviors of the Union," nor humble their leaders. One of them, Senator Foraker, says: * "The campaign (1876) on the part of the Democrats gave emphasis to the reform idea and exploited Tilden as the great reform governor of New York and the best fitted man in the country to bring about reforms in the Government of the United States. No reforms were needed: but a fact like that never interfered with a reform campaign." The orthodoxy of the politician remained unshaken. Foraker's reasons were the creed of thousands: "The Republican party had prosecuted the war successfully; had reconstructed the States; had rehabilitated our finances, and brought on specie redemption." The memoirs of politicians and statesmen of this period, such as Cullom, Foraker, Platt, even Hoar, are imbued with an inflexible faith in the party and colored by the conviction that it is a function of Government to aid business. Platt, for instance, alluding to Blaine's attitude as Speaker, in the seventies, said: "What I liked about him was his frank and persistent contention that the citizen who best loved his party and was loyal to it, was loyal to and best loved his country." And many years afterwards, when a new type of leader appeared representing a new era of conviction, Platt was deeply concerned. His famous letter to Roosevelt, when the Rough Rider was being mentioned for Governor of New York (1899), shows the reluctance of the old man to see the signs of the times: "The thing that really did bother me was this: I had heard from a great many sources that you were a little loose on the relations of capital and labor, on trusts and combinations, and indeed on the numerous questions which have recently arisen in politics affecting the security of earnings and the right of a man to run his own business in his own way, with due respect of course to the Ten Commandments and the Penal Code."