-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Treason of the Senate
David Graham Phillips
academic reprints
p.o. box 3003
Stanford, California
Cosmopolitian Magazine
Vol. XL - March, 1906 - No.5
--[4]--
CHAPTER 4
Chief Spokesman of "The Merger"
WE have now seen the Aldrich-Gorman "merger" of the two party machines, and
what sort of men Aldrich and Gorman are, and how they got their power. We
have seen how, now by legislation and now by preventing or emasculating
legislation, this "merger" diverts to its master, "the interests," more and
more of the earnings and savings of the American people. We have seen that
the "merger," with the Senate as its citadel, does the most, and most
important, of this traitorous work in secrecy through a cunningly contrived
system of committees, operated by chairmen who are stanch and skillful
servants of "the interests." We have seen that, whenever it becomes necessary
to complete the work in the open, the "merger" arrays a secure majority,
usually made up of senators from both parties, to vote down the "hasty and
ill-considered" measure of the people or to pass the "safe and sane" measure
of "the interests."
The open part of the treason is, of course, preceded by a debate to fool the
people. The "merger" senators who are to vote for it must explain, with
specious and learned eloquence, how public-spirited they are and how
patriotic is their action; the "merger" senators who are assigned or let off
to join the opposing minority must help their fellow-conspirators of the
majority by extolling their honor and purity of motive, while deploring that
prejudice should so blind them. And the galleries are thrilled; and the
honest senators sit glumly silent, trying to keep down the gorge and longing
for the courage to transgress "senatorial courtesy" and defy "the interests"
by plain, honest speech.
For its dexterous and delicate senatorial floor-work the "merger" has many
eloquent and adroit orators and debaters, all of them men whom the powerful
press of "the interests" has built into distinguished and admired public
figures. The head spokesman of the "merger" is John C. Spooner of Wisconsin.
Many of our foremost newspapers, Republican, Democratic, and independent,
have been assuring us for the past few years that Spooner is a great
statesman, an honor to his state, his country, and his era. But they have
cited no acts of signal or even of modest public service in the one direction
in which a statesman could serve the people—in correcting conditions that
have built up a plutocracy in a single generation, that have reduced the
average American family's income to a scant six hundred dollars a year, and
have driven our little children by the hundreds of thousands to hard labor in
mines and factories. Now if you take all the acts of the life of the very
worst man that ever lived, you find that most of them were either innocuous
or positively good. To get the character and the influence of the man, you
must take his crucial acts. If you take all the acts of the Senate at any one
session, you find that most of them, almost all of them, were harmless
enough; to get at the reality of the Senate, you must take its crucial
acts-what it does in the great crises between the people and their enemy,
plunderer and oppressor, "the interests." Spooner is all right when busy
about purely foreign affairs. But the Spooner that concerns the American
people, the Spooner that interests us here, is the Spooner of the crisis.
He is now sixty-three years old. After a brief nominal war service, he
entered public life at the age of twenty-two, as secretary to Governor
Fairchild of Wisconsin. He has therefore been a public man forty-one years.
We cannot, need not, rehearse the whole record here. Typical acts at crucial
times will be enough.
Early Connection with "The Interests
To begin with his first appearance in public life: Wisconsin was then
dominated by two bands of thieves engaged in robbing the people of vast areas
of valuable agricultural, timber, and mineral public lands. One of these
bands was in control of what afterwards became the "Omaha" railway system,
the other of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul. The United States had
conditionally given to Wisconsin certain large tracts, larger than several
states, to be granted to companies that would agree to build and would build
railways. The St. Croix and Lake Superior Company, a possession of the Omaha
gang, had conditionally got one of these conditional grants; but it had never
built afoot of railway. The Omaha problem was how to keep this land without
doing anything to earn it. "Cush" Davis, afterwards a senator from Minnesota,
and our Spooner, then a poor young lawyer working for the West Wisconsin
Railroad, later a branch of the Omaha, got from the United States Circuit
Court a ruling that—
"Such lands do not, ipso facto, revert to the United States by mere failure
to build the road within the time specified by Congress; to effect the
forfeiture, some act on the part of the general government evincing an
intention to take advantage of such failure is necessary."
The Supreme Court sustained this apparently fair but really dishonest Spooner
proposition, so useful to land thieves throughout the West. The courts did
not take judicial cognizance of the fact that the land thieves controlled the
Senate and the federal land office, and so could prevent federal interference
while their legislatures were giving them the people's land.
The ruling was got in 1872—and in 1872 Spooner entered the legislature under
the auspices of the Omaha gang. And in 1872 the legislature made the thieves,
organized as the Wisconsin Railway Farm Mortgage Company, a present of the
first large slice of the people's property. So, intending settlers, instead
of getting the land for a nomi-nal sum from the government, as was their
right under the homestead act, had to pay the thieves a good, stiff price,
the thieves of course having first exploited the timber and the minerals.
Note the "patriotism" and "constructive statesmanship" of that ruling got
from the compliant lower court and the unconscious higher court, and of the
present of millions on millions of the people's property to a gang of thieves
and bribers and debauchers of public life.
These two gangs, typical of the gangs working throughout the West at
"developing the resources of the country," as it is called in "high-finance"
circles, finally so stirred the wrath of the people that, partisan though
they were in those days just after the war, they elected a "granger"
legislature. Our budding statesman "side stepped" into the job of solicitor
for the Omaha. The popular fury against, not the railways nor honest railway
investors, but against railway thieves, was not easily allayed. It wasn't
until 1881 that the gangs could again elect a "safe and sane" legislature,
and resume and complete the steal. When the steal was being completed, in the
corrupt and corrupted legislature, our Spooner was not only general solicitor
of the Omaha, and therefore in charge of all its legal business; he was also
a stockholder and a director in the system!
Philetus Sawyer, Spooner's friend and employer in the railway system, was a
powerful man in Wisconsin politics. Sawyer had had himself elected senator in
1881 by his "safe and sane" legislature. But he was coarse, rough, a buyer of
men, not a diplomat or speaker. He was now in a big interstate railway
combine, and he needed for his more delicate work at the national capital
some glib fellow, a first-class lawyer and a plausible "wind-jammer" as well.
One of his local partners in those days was Isaac Stephenson. Spooner, in
1884, was put forward for the Senate, with Sawyer and the Omaha back of him;
the gang of railway rogues in control of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul,
the Omaha's rival, put up Gen. Lucius Fairchild, Spooner's first introducer
to "practical" politics. The Omaha crowd was the stronger, and Spooner joined
Sawyer in the Senate.
Two years ago, Stephenson, at outs with his former pals, publicly charged
that the legislature was bought for Spooner, that he (Stephenson) had put up
twenty-two thousand dollars and Sawyer thirty thousand dollars to "do the
trick." Spooner hysterically denied this. Cried he,
"Does anyone suppose that if I had been elected to office by corrupt means it
would have taken twenty-one long years to find it out?"
This is not Spooner at his best; usually he is plausible. Obviously
corruption of that kind cannot be uncovered until a principal "peaches"; and
it was twenty-one years before Stephenson got in the mood to give the game
away. Spooner's plea that there is a statute of limitations against truth
tends to confirm Stephenson's confession. On the face of the facts, is it
likely that the people of Wisconsin would select as senator the chief lawyer
of their chief despoilers?
Treachery to the People
We need give here only a characteristic instance or two of Spooner's
treachery to his new client, the people—quite enough to reveal the "patriot"
and "constructive statesman." In those days, as now, the Senate was busy with
the "vast problems of constructive statesmanship in connection with railways
"—said problems consisting in devising ways and means of preventing
interference with "the interests" industriously exploiting the railways and
their stockholders and, through the railways, the people. Spooner began his
senatorial career in December, 1885. Three months later there came before the
Senate a bill to restore to the public domain all public lands which a
railway had forfeited by not complying with the conditions of the grant.
Spooner moved an ingeniously worded amendment, one worthy of the it great
constitutional authority" and "constructive statesman." Its effect was to
exclude from the operations of the bill a large part of two huge Iowa
counties claimed by the Omaha system. Senator Plumb, chairman of the
committee on public lands, exposed the scheme. Said he:
"There never has been a more flagrant violation of public right, a more
complete contempt for the public, than is exhibited by the claim of this
railroad company. For more than ten years after they completed their railway
they never set up a single claim to these lands. It was not until the fact
that the lands were lying idle became the subject of inquiry among people who
would like to be settlers that the railroad came on and set up any claim to
them, and they then sought to do it by indirection."
But on March 12, 1886, the Spooner amendment was adopted by a Senate
dominated then, as now, by "interests" of various kinds. On March 16th, four
days later, Spooner, the senator, the retained and paid lawyer of the people,
the sworn guardian of the people's rights, stepped over to the Supreme Court
of the United States and appeared in precisely the same matter as the lawyer
of the Omaha.
This classic specimen of senatorial treason brought to a climax the scandal
of congressmen, especially senators, openly acting in the courts as lawyers
for the enemies of the people. On June 1st, Senator Beck of Kentucky
introduced a bill making it unlawful for any senator or representative to act
as the attorney or agent for any railroad which had received a land grant
from Congress. The penalty for transgression was five hundred dollars fine or
a year in prison or both. Said Beck in the debate on his measure on June 22d,
"Will any gentleman insist that any man who is the attorney of any railroad,
any man who is retained in any way by any of these roads, when these great
questions involving perhaps fifty or a hundred millions to the tax-burdened
peoples of this country come up for consideration, shall advocate the
interests of the road whose money in the shape of retainers or fees he has in
his pocket, keeping the fact concealed, professing all the time that he is
acting and arguing in the interests of the United States?"
Spooner, Allison, Cullom and Frye, all doughty defenders of "the interests"
then, as now, opposed the bill. An attempt was made to refer it to the
judiciary committee where it could be quietly done to death. But Beck was in
earnest and forced a vote, and the Senate dared not refuse to pass it.
But—one day, when the public scandal had died down, a motion to reconsider
was suddenly sprung; and though Beck fought gallantly the motion passed, to
be followed by a motion to refer the bill to the judiciary committee, which
also passed. The bill was never heard of again. But "the interests" profited
by the warning of the scandal. Their senators do only senatorial duty
nowadays—in public.
Spooner loses his Seat
In 1890 the people of Wisconsin revolted against the shameless corruption and
robbery by and under the auspices of the Republican branch of the merged
political machine; they flung it out and put in the Democratic branch. It was
one of those frequent amusing farces which the American people have been
enacting in national, state, and local politics for a quarter of a century.
Spooner was ejected from the Senate, and William F. Vilas, wearing a
Democratic label, took his place and assumed his "duties." And "the
interests" in whose service Vilas was an old and efficient employee, had no
cause to complain.
Spooner, however, was as busy as ever. He still had his "private" duties as a
lawyer in the pay of "the interests." There was also the work of going about
among the people, extolling "the party," seeking to show, with the adroit
eloquence of which he is a master, that the Republican branch of the merged
machine should be restored to its former place as chief exploiter of the
people, and that the Democratic branch should be relegated again to the minor
and supplementary place in the service of the master of machines, "the
interests." It is hardly necessary to quote any of those speeches. Like all
the speeches of these secret traitors to country and people, of these men who
are so directly responsible for the uppiling of huge, ill-gotten fortunes and
for the increase of poverty and child labor and of the vast armies of
unschooled children, Spooner's speeches abounded in virtue, piety, and
patriotism. Let us pass to typical instances of Spooner's "constructive and
constitutional statesmanship" for right, people and country as a
distinguished private citizen and party leader.
Henry Villard's wrecking of the Northern Pacific was exposed by the
stockholders' committee in its scathing report of Febru-ary 18, 1893, On
August 15th of that year three receivers were appointed, the chief of them
Henry B. Payne, Spooner's "next friend" in politics after the death of
Saw-yer, and a corrupt boss and boodler whom
death recently rescued from final and crowning exposure and disgrace.
As Payne was boss of the Wisconsin merged machine, "next friend" Spooner of
course became chief lawyer for the receivers. They began to cut wages on the
plea that the road was in bad financial condition. After a second huge cut
which reduced wages all along the line from fifteen to thirty per cent. below
the market rate, the employees of the road asked for a conference with the
re-ceivers. The receivers assented.
On the eve of it, Spooner and his associate, Miller, got judge Jenkins—one of
our "interests "- selected, Senate—recommended, and Sen-ate—confirmed,
federal judges—to issue an injunction which prohibited the men "from
combining or conspiring to quit, with or without notice"—that is, an
injunction for- bidding twelve thousand American fellow- citizens of
statesman and. patriot Spooner under any circumstances to quit work! Jenkins
followed this up with a supplemen-tary injunction forbidding these American
citizens from "ordering, recommending, approving or advising others to quit
the service of the receivers!"
This outrage upon freedom, with few parallels, if any, in all modern
civilization, caused the House of Representatives to investigate through its
judiciary committee. At a session of the committee at Milwaukee on April 10,
1894, Spooner denied part in the supplementary injunction, but was forced to
admit his joint authorship with Miller of the "constructive statesmanship"
and "constitutional interpretation" involved in the principle that an
American citizen can be forbidden and restrained, under jail penalty, from
quitting work, even though he give due notice! The House judiciary committee,
in its report (H.R. No. 1049-53 Congress, 2 Session, June 8, 1894) denounced
Spooner's statecraft and constitutional law as "in violation of a
constitutional provision, an abuse of judicial power and without authority of
law." It denounced Jenkins's proceedings as " an oppressive exercise of the
powers of his court" and "an invasion of the rights of American citizens."
But what did Spooner and his pals care for this? The injunction had been
obeyed by the men.
And what were Payne and his pals doing with the money they took by such
highhanded tyrannies from the pockets of workingmen? The year after the
injunction, on August 7, 1895, Brayton Ives petitioned the federal-court at
Seattle to remove the receivers on the ground of gross misconduct in office.
Two days later, Spooner and a long train of lawyers began to fight for Payne
and his pals. When all their ingenuitv was exhausted—which was not long, as
this was a family quarrel between two branches of "the interests" and the
anti-Payne branch had the stronger "pull"—the receivers resigned to escape
appearing in court and showing their books. Ives challenged them to show
their books; the challenge was not taken up. But the resignation of Spooner's
friend and his pals was confession, and the refusal to show the accounts was
confirmation.
It is said that Spooner's fee in this one case was eighty thousand dollars.
Certain it is that he has been well paid, as the pay of "the interests" for
mere brains goes. Spooner has been at times a very rich man; again, not so
rich—this according to his luck in the "street." It must have been in one of
his lean periods when, on his reentry into the Senate in 1897, he said in an
interview, " The newspapers are accustomed to say I am a millionaire; but it
is not true." The highest sum with which Spooner has been credited in
Wisconsin gossip is two millions. The figure usually given is " about a
million."
Returns to the Senate
The occasion of Spooner's 1897 outpouring about his wealth, was a charge as
to the manner of his getting back to the Senate. It was known that the people
of Wisconsin did not want him; they had shown their opinion of him by beating
him for governor in 1892. It was known that the legislature which elected him
to the Senate did not represent the people, that it was for the most part a
rotten aggregation of Republican and Democratic hacks swept in by the
Payne-Spooner gang on the tide against free silver. It was not unnaturally
suspected that Spooner's friends had had to "give down" for his election. But
Spooner denied this with angry virtue.
"I have nothing to say about the way in which I got to the Senate, except
that it was the clean way. No improper influence of any kind was employed in
my behalf."
He did not explain how he could possibly know this, and know it so
positively. Nor did he explain how anything clean could be got from a Payne
legislature which soon showed itself to be so shamelessly in the control of
"the interests" that the Republicans turned to La Follette and wrecked the
Payne machine.
In the Senate again, Spooner was immediately busy. We need here note only a
few typical activities. An anti-trust bill came up from the House in 1900.
There was in it a provision that, when a trust was declared criminal by the
Supreme Court, it should be barred from the mails and from domestic or
foreign commerce, just like a common, ordinary criminal who gave nothing to
campaign funds and owned no senators or congressmen. The House passed the
bill; the Senate referred the "hasty and ill-considered" measure to Spooner's
judiciary committee, and there it slept until February 5, 1901. Then a free
senator, Pettigrew of South Dakota, moved that the bill be brought before the
Senate. Spooner's debating on this, on February 2 1, 1901, was in his best
vein. He fairly yearned to smash the wicked trusts, but—always that Spooner
"but "—as to this bill, he had grave doubts about its constitutionality.
Always the Constitution! It never interferes with "the interests"; it always
solemnly stops the people-at least, that is the effect of having it
interpreted in Congress always by agents of "the interests."
Next, a motion was made in the judiciary committee to report the bill without
recommendation. The motion was voted down, Spooner of course supplying the
Aldrich members of the committee with the pretext for doing it. Finally, a
motion to take the bill from the committee was forced in open Senate. The
Aldrich gang "fined up," led by Aldrich himself, by Spooner, Foraker. and
Fairbanks. The motion was defeated; the bill died in Spooner's committee—a
peaceful death, for Spooner is not a harsh man.
Another instance: In many speeches, notably on October 13, 1902, at
Milwaukee, he came out strongly against the corrupt and law-defying trusts.
It would have made a patriot's blood leap to hear him cry out, "The American
people will have no masters, either in business or in politics!" He was
especially fierce about the coal trust. But that was Spooner on the stump;
let us look at Spooner in the Senate, that is, on duty. On January 5, 1903,
less than three months after Spooner's stump speech, Senator Jones of
Arkansas moved that the attorney-general be called on for what evidence he
might have that the coal roads and the coal operators were conspiring to
monopolize coal. Up sprang Spooner. To second the motion? To call for
immediate inquiry into that cruel conspiracy to rob the people through an
absolute necessity, and to cause the poor to suffer and their children to
die? No; Spooner asked that the resolution be referred to his committee, his
particular slaughter-pen for "the interests," almost the equal, in
treasonable work, of Aldrich's finance committee and of Elkins's interstate
commerce committee. As the "merger" was working smoothly, there was no rude
attempt to transgress "senatorial courtesy." Spooner got the resolution, bore
it away to its doom; it is one of the many, many corpses of measures for the
public good buried under the floor of that committee room.
Again, on March 3rd of last year, it was Spooner who dealt the final blow to
the pure-food bill for that session and so issued the seventeenth annual
senatorial renewal of license to the poison trust. But we will not here take
up the matter of pure-food legislation. In like manner Spooner's part in the
pending railway-rate legislation, interesting, typical, and repellent though
it is, will not be described until we have before us the completed law, with
all the mischief and emasculation of the Aldrich-Gorman " merger"
ineffaceably a part of the record .
In-these debates, in all the debates wherewith the "merged" senators led by
Spooner, amuse and excuse themselves, the method is tediously the same. It
consists in discussing, judicial decisions and precedents as to
constitutionality. The innocent lay spectator or reader is impressed; but an
intelligent lawyer or judge would be disgusted that grown men should so waste
time, and the man who loves his country is exasperated that there should be
such heartless trifling with the vital interests of the people, with matters
that mean food, clothing, and shelter or lack of it to millions of Americans.
As any competent lawyer will say, when an honest judge is interpreting a law
he looks first at what is just and sensible in the particular circumstances
which the law purports to meet; then, having found what is the best way to
interpret the law in the interests of the people, he goes to the law books
and selects from among the masses of conflicting and contradictory decisions
and precedents those that will sustain the position honesty and common sense
command him to take. In the light of this, how contemptible, how vicious, how
cynical become those vaunted debates of the Spooners and Baileys, the Knoxes
and Forakers! Those sham battles in the Senate tourney—and the people being
plundered the while, and begging in vain for the relief that is their right!
La Follette forced to accept him
How did Spooner get reelected to the Senate in 1903? La Follette, the
splendid fighter of the corruption in control of his party in Wisconsin, had
triumphed. His associates—in that battle to destroy all that
Spooner stood for in Wisconsin politics, were a majority of the legislature.
Spooner, for obvious reasons, announced an " unalterable purpose not to be a
candidate for reelection." He having thus secured himself against any public
humiliation from possible defeat, the press of "the interests" and all the
newspapers that do not look beneath surfaces or remember history, cried out
that it was a shame " to deprive the country of a great constructive and
constitutional statesman like Spooner." But this clamor—which was truly
"hasty and ill considered" — was not what decided La Follette and his
friends; they knew Spooner too wellwhat he was in Wisconsin, what he was at
the capital, the real Spooner under that fluent and learned plausibility and
sweet geniality. What decided them was that the broken Spooner-Payne machine
effected a combination with the Democratic machine -under the " merger"
system-and announced that, if Spooner was not sent back to Washington for
"the interests," all the reform measures for which La Follette and the people
had been striving, would be defeated. To avert this, they let Spooner return.
It was a hard dilemma that was there forced upon La Follette; whether he
chose wisely it is not easy to judge. To realize what it might have meant to
the people to have another La Follette in the Senate from Wisconsin, it is
only necessary to recall that La Follette, in his third month in the Senate,
exposed a Rock Island railroad grab of lands worth, not millions but billions
of dollars, that was smoothly on its way through the Senate. And so complete
was his work that the "merger" hastily secured a postponement of the measure
until next year-when doubtless another and slyer attempt to consummate the
grab will be made.
A Vain Search
Ever since Spooner attained manhood's age and influence, the great, vital,
all-dominating, all-dwarfing issue, has been justice in the distribution of
wealth-the product of a man's labor to the man himself. The politicians,
serving the plunderers and diverters of the people's property and prosperity,
have been trying, often successfully, to obscure or to pervert this issue.
But it has always reappeared, stronger, clearer, more insistent. In preparing
this article about the foremost senator in talent and in reputation for
respectability, his record has been searched diligently with the desire in
fairness to present, if possible, some act of his that would show at least an
occasional impulse toward the side of right and justice on the one great
issue. The search has been in vain. Spooner has been in deeds steadfastly and
constantly where he was when his Omaha patrons and pals were stealing the
vast tracts of the people's lands, where he was when he devised an
in-junction making the workingman the slave of his employer. So much for
domestic affairs. In foreign affairs the only matter wherein senatorial
action was greatly important to the American people in a quarter of a century
was the reciprocity treaties.
These the traitor Senate killed at the bidding of "the interests"; and
Spooner's record there is the record of all the merged" senators.
Wisconsin—Spooner's "home folks"—has long known him, through and through. His
oratory has been admired, listened to and applauded—and that is all. His
presence in the Senate, despite the home opinion of him and feeling about
him, is characteristic of our senatorships, so unrepresentative of the people
except in a few more or less accidental instances. Further, everybody at
Washington has long known Spooner as thoroughly as Wisconsin and his friends
in the Wall Street district know him. Yet the country at large has looked on
him as an almost ideal senator. He has been put forward by the leaders of his
party, by the leaders of the other party, by his fellow-senators, by the
entire "merger," as an ideal senator and as typical of the Senate. " Yes,
there are a few queer fish in the Senate. But most of the senators are like
John Spooner."
Well, so they are. Are they not willingly led by Aldrich and Gorman, whose
characters and conduct have been heretofore exposed? Are they not willingly
spoken for by Spooner, whose character we have just outlined? And Aldrich,
Gorman, and Spooner are in their essence of a piece and pattern with the
representatives of the foremost state in the Union, with Platt and Depew.
Spooner says "No Treason"
It was said at the outset of this series that treason was a strong word, but
not too strong in the circumstances. We have only begun to penetrate into the
real Senate. Yet, is not that statement already justified? Spooner, defending
the Senate at a banquet in Washington on March 27th, said:
"There is no treason in the Senate! The one man I despise most is he who
takes upon his lips in blasphemy the good character of a woman; next to that
is the man who will tear down the character of the man in public life. Above
all things, my brothers, believe in your republic and in the general fidelity
of your public servants."
In view of Spooner's record, is it difficult to understand why he is so eager
for us to shut our eyes and silence our consciences as lovers of our country
and give ourselves up to blind belief in the " general fidelity" of our
Spooners? Spooner is; right about the infamy of " the man who will tear down
the character of the man in public life." But, the only man who can do that
is the man who makes the record of the man in public life, the faithless,
treacherous public servant himself. And Spooner's only successful assailant
is Spooner himself, the maker of Spooner's record. It is not victim nor
prosecutor nor judge that brings the criminal to iustice, but the criminal
himself.
pps. 42-50
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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