-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Treason of the Senate David Graham Phillips Intruoduction by George E. Mowry & Judson A Grenier©1964 All Rights Reserved Quadrangle Books 180 North Wacker Drive Chicago LCCN 64-21838 --[10a]-- INTRODUCTION PUBLICATION of David Graham Phillips's "The Treason of the Senate" by the Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1906 was, in many respects, the climax of the muckraking movement in American journalism. The bold, outspoken, often intemperate language of an author dedicated to "the search for truth" captures the essence of both the best and worst aspects of muckraking. In addition, the political dialogue stirred by publication of these articles constitutes a chapter in the history of the progressive movement and provides insight into the careers of two major public figures, Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst. The "era of the muckrakers" is generally assumed by historians to have begun with the publication by McClure's Magazine of Lincoln Steffens' "Tweed Days in St. Louis" in October, 1902, and to have ended in the Progressive party's Gotterddmmerung with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912. The muckraking movement thus coincides in time with progressive domination of the Republican party, rising to fame with Roosevelt and, though castigated by him, supporting the Colonel as history swept by at Armageddon. Progressivism as a social force received its impetus from the journalistic technique of exposing to public view the malpractices of nineteenth-century society. Like journalism, progressivism relied upon the moral and ethical efficacy of democracy to correct social evils once they were exposed. In most social upheavals, a vanguard usually brings old institutions into disrepute, paving the way for new ones. The muckrakers played this role. From 1902 to 1912, they led the nation in the systematic uncovering of the strands of a giant web of control, linking politics, education, the press, religion, health, and high finance. Their names-Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Charles Edward Russell, Thomas W. Lawson, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips-were household words. The magazines that published their articles—McClure's, Collier's, Everybody's, the American, and the Cosmopolitan—acbieved circulations in the hundreds of thousands and won an unprecedented mass readership across America for the "literature of exposure." Trained in the Christian ethic and devoted to the people's right to know, the muckrakers revealed the corruption of public men and corporations in the name of morality, a heightened public awareness, and the common good. Their crusade was consecrated to the precept of St. John viii:32: "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." Many muckrakers conformed almost to a pattern. They were born in the 1860's to middle-class parents and grew up in Midwestern towns which their families bad, a generation or two earlier, helped to establish. Their fathers, landowners or editors, ministers or bankers, but seldom factoryowners, were influential in the business-professional society of the town. Usually thoroughly Protestant oriented, these young men were trained in the public schools to have deep reverence for American historical tradition, particularly the individualistic and equalitarian romance of the frontier, and an intimate knowledge of the forms and moral messages of English literature and classic parable. Small Midwest colleges sharpened their talents for expression and stimulated their desire to give their lives meaning by becoming creative writers. The necessity of earning a living, however, diverted their talents into journalistic channels, and they became newspaper reporters in some nearby city. Within a few years, they migrated to New York or Chicago and were caught up in the glamor and excitement of the golden age of American journalism, with reporter Richard Harding Davis its symbol and Park Row his throne. Steadily, these newsmen became conscious of the changes in American society produced by the industrial revolution, particularly "our serious public corruption ... of a kind unknown to the people of two generations ago." Images were seared into their minds-extremes of wealth and poverty shattering their comfortable illusion that America was composed of communities of neighborly homesteaders who uplifted the community by uplifting themselves. Sometimes their eyes were opened by reading Henry George's Progress and Poverty, but more often by what they observed: in Chicago a dynamic World's Fair providing a glittering backdrop for a dirty slum; in New York a fashionable Fifth Avenue within walking distance of long rows of tenements stuffed with penniless immigrants and owned by a wealthy Wall Street church. They pondered ethical questions: What has happened to American morality? How have we gone astray? Who has betrayed us? And, as reporters exploring the labyrinth of debased city politics, they came to pin responsibility on the businessman ("predatory wealth"), because the money used by the corrupters originated with him. Yet it was their writing ability, not their social philosophy, that won them the respect of the metropolitan press, and when the new mass-circulation magazines in the late 1890's infused interviews and investigative articles into the potpourri of verse, essay, and short fiction which was the nineteenth-century formula, it was natural that they should tap Park Row for original and responsible talent. The reporters, still harboring a desire to be creative artists, but far wiser in their knowledge of how both halves of society lived, became magazine writers and, eventually, "muckrakers." Their articles and stories were peopled with wise Ohio mothers, old-timers with salty speech, farmboys and cow hands, kindly preachers and public school teachers, ethical corner grocers and blacksmiths, villainous Eastern lawyers, crooked politicians, crude and self-centered factory owners with hopelessly spoiled children. They would speak wistfully of the country and the old home town and sometimes pay hurried trips to the Midwest, to return (they said) rejuvenated. But the city was their "beat" now, and it gave them comfort and doubt, stimulation and shame. So long as readership was high and fame opened most doors, New York remained their home. The life of David Graham Phillips essentially corresponds to this pattern. He was born on October 31, 1867, in Madison, Indiana, a town of ten thousand population lying fifty miles above Louisville on the Ohio river. Madison was founded in 1806, and its days of commercial glory were the two decades prior to the Civil War, when for a time it was the largest and wealthiest city in Indiana, a port for steamboat traffic. By the 1870's, however, the railroad had replaced the river as a carrier of commerce; Madison's prosperity had begun to wane, its shipyards to decline, its meatpacking industry to lose business to Chicago and St. Louis. Stately homes, a fixed society, and patterns of living established in the time of Jackson were the heritage of the town's pre-war business vitality. Phillips's father, an Indiana farm boy, lived in Madison from the time he was sixteen years of age, attended Indiana Asbury University, served as sheriff and clerk of court, and for thirty-one years was cashier of the National Branch Bank of Madison. Phillips grew up in an atmosphere compounded of banking, Republican politics, Bible-reading, Methodist morality, and love of learning. His father owned one of the best private libraries in southern Indiana, and Phillips was encouraged to read widely, particularly in American history. In later years be attributed his omnivorous reading and tenacious writing habits to that encouragement. Graham, as he was called at home, gained his early education in the Madison public schools, which, according to Arena editor B. 0. Flower, were staffed in the seventies by enthusiastic New England teachers who created a thoroughly democratic environment and were famous for efficiency and a high standard of ethical conduct. Phillips told Flower, "I went to the public-scbools ... and I do not know of anything I am more thankful for. If I bad my way, there should not be any other kind of schools, high or low." Although his principal interests were history, politics, and government, Phillips was an avid reader of novels and verse; his biographer, Issac F. Marcosson, reported that Graham had read all of Dickens, Hugo, and Scott before he was twelve and knew thousands of lines of poetry, including the whole of Gray's "Elegy." In 1882, at the age of fifteen, he enrolled at Asbury, his father's college, a Methodist institution in the rural atmosphere of Greencastle, Indiana (Which changed its name to DePauw University about the time Phillips departed). Among his college interests were languages, French realistic literature, debate, football, and the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he met the man who would become his closest and life-long friend, Albert Beveridge. Beveridge, a self-made man, impressed Phillips with his integrity, magnetism, and commanding voice. He was Phillips's roommate, and the writer in later years used him as model for his politician-hero, Hampden Scarborough, in a series of novels. Phillips admired Beveridge's determination to be a success, and the experience may have altered his own ambitions. By 1885, when Phillips left Indiana for Princeton University, he bad decided not to follow his father's banking profession. At Princeton for two years, be won reputation as a brilliant conversationalist and a fastidious dresser, and there he resolved to become a writer. Phillips graduated from Princeton in 1887 and began his journalistic career in Cincinnati, Ohio, ninety miles upriver from Madison. A college friend, Marshal Halstead, helped him get a position as reporter for the Times-Star, and, after Phillips had demonstrated his ability, offered him a similar job with the Halstead family's Commercial-Gazette. His three years in Cincinnati were an apprenticeship spent reporting disaster, crime, politics, government, and recreation-the standard city assignments-and were spiced with frequent feature articles and a gossip column. In 1890, he left Cincinnati for New York City, where he joined the staff of Charles A. Dana's Sun, the best written and edited newspaper of its day. Dana insisted that reporters be able to recognize truth when they saw it, and then to express that truth in pungent, concise English. Phillips could have attended no better school of journalism. Many of his social ideas were shaped by the three years he covered the streets, homes, and offices of New York for the Sun. His mode of living was established during these years: he dressed well, in high fashion and high collar; he dined well, at Mouquin's, Delmonico's, and, after 1899, at Rector's; he roomed in tasteful bachelor quarters at, for example, The Players, a private club for actors and writers on Gramercy Park. Phillips never married, perhaps because his intense dedication to work allowed little time for feminine companionship. He usually left the Sun office at midnight and returned to his rooms to write until dawn. He wrote standing at a high, portable drafting desk, smoking cigarettes continuously, covering reams of lined copypaper with pencil in a fine, cramped script. For the rest of his life, the major part of Phillips's writing would be done while the city slept, a habit originating in his years with a morning newspaper. While be was in college, Phillips determined that his newspaper career would be but a stepping stone to becoming a novelist. As a reporter be would be at school in society; he would learn the truth about the American people and their institutions, and then he would tell them that truth. Not newspapers, but magazines and books would be his outlet. In 1891, Harper's Weekly published the first of a stream of his articles, all written in off-duty time. But the nature of the goals Phillips had set for himself demanded that his experience be broad and varied, and after three years on the Sun, he joined the staff of the World, largest and most energetic newspaper in New York. From 1893 to 1902, he served the World as reporter, foreign correspondent, editorial writer, and sometime traveling companion for Joseph Pulitzer, its publisher. For the United States, these years were crucial in preparing the way for the Progressive Era. They were years of violence and change: bloody strikes at Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Chicago; financial panic and depression; the march on Washington of Coxey's army; President Cleveland's desperate attempts to borrow gold from Wall Street; increasing concentration of corporate wealth and the growth of trusts; drought, bankruptcy, and tenancy on the farms of the West and South, culminating in the Populist revolt; the revelations of poverty and squalor in tenement and tenderloin, by Jacob Riis and Rev. Charles Parkhurst; Bryan's emotion-charged campaign for free silver and the Presidency; the rise of the American navy, jingoism, and delusions of imperialist grandeur; yellow journalism and its war with Spain in the Caribbean; sanguinary fighting with Philippino insurrectionists; anarchism and the collective national shock at the assassination of William McKinley; the accession to the Presidency of a younger, vigorous generation in the person of Theodore Roosevelt. Such were the raw materials of Phillips's World years. Some he gathered first hand, on assignment from city editor Charles Edward Russell; much he analyzed editorially under the guidance of Pulitzer himself, high in the World tower. Late in 1896, Phillips became an editorial writer, and his promotion to this position coincided with the start of the intense rivalry between Pulitzer and Hearst's New York Journal, the so-called "war of the yellows." To express Pulitzer attitudes toward politics, imperialism, civic corruption, and monopoly became second nature to Phillips during these years. As Russell recalled: "At Mr. Pulitzer's direction David Graham Phillips wrote a series of articles reciting the misdeeds of trust after trust, sternly demanding thereto the immediate attention of ... [Cleveland's Attorney General] Richard Olney, and notifying the citizenry that it had been betrayed." The Presidency and both houses of Congress came in for their share of Phillips's attention, and the World frequently scolded the Senate and Senator Chauncey M. Depew in particular. It may be that "The Treason of the Senate" was born in the editorial offices of the World; surely Phillips's antipathy for Congressional spokesmen for corporate wealth was an attitude shared by Pulitzer and his editors in the crusading nineties. The aging, nearly blind publisher frequently requested the companionship of the tall, handsome Hoosier, and in long conversations attempted to shape his outlook much as a father would advise a son. But Phillips's days as a newspaperman were numbered. His output of magazine articles increased; his first novel, The Great God Success, was published in 1901 under the pseudonym John Graham (because its rather bitter depiction of newspaper life was thinly disguised). The book was read by the young editor of the Saturday Evening Post, George Horace Lorimer, who convinced Phillips to resign from the World in 1902 to become a free-lance writer. His old friend, Beveridge, now Senator from Indiana, was a frequent Post contributor. In the ensuing three years, Phillips wrote some fifty signed articles and numerous editorials for Lorimer, and perhaps conditioned himself for the "Treason" articles by penning political portraits of Roosevelt, Cleveland, Root, Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. He also contributed articles and short stories to Everybody's, the Cosmopolitan, Harper's, McClure's, the Arena, and Collier's, and published one or two successful novels each year. David Graham Phillips's reputation as a muckraker rests largely upon his "Treason" series, but be probably contributed more to the seedbed of progressivism as a novelist than as a writer of nonfiction. Hundreds of thousands of middle-class Americans shared Phillips's attitudes and prejudices and found them reflected in his novels: The Master-Rogue (1903) and The Cost (1904), scathing critiques of Wall Street; The Deluge (1905), a fictional version of the financial revelations of Thomas W. Lawson; The Social Secretary (1905), a depiction of the deterioration of Washington, D.C., and the Federal government because of the self-promoting standards of the rich; The Plum Tree (1905), a description of the rise to power of a United States Senator whose standards and convictions were a blend of those held by Marcus Hanna and Boies Penrose; and The Second Generation (1907), a portrayal of the idle, degenerate children of the wealthy. These novels and others, many published by the Indiana firm of Bobbs-Merrill, constituted an effective counterpoint to the exposes of Baker, Steffens, Tarbell, and Russell, and, together with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, remain the standard examples of muckraking fiction. In his Post articles and novels, Phillips examined the problems of industrialization and urbanization from a nostalgic, Jeffersonian perspective. His heroes display small-town virtues: they are honest, neighborly, independent, moral, observe the Golden Rule, respect their wives, take their mothers' advice, have "a Covenanter fiber tough as ironwood," and resist temptation. His villains are Easterners, city-bred or exhibiting acquired city manners: they are money-crazed and power-seeking; they practice bribery and fraud to pervert the democratic process and destroy honest government; their worship of luxury and wanton display increases the cleavages between classes; their marriages fail, and often their own conniving brings about their doom. They are essentially weak men, and their intelligence is "of the kind that goes with weakness—shrewd and sly, preferring to slink along the byways of craft even when the highway of courage lies straight and easy." The villains constitute "Privilege," the heroes are "the People," and Phillips's novels are essentially a dialogue between these forces of good and evil, with "the People" triumphant only after constant vigilance and a long struggle. Phillips's plea was for a return to the old moral standards, for the hard-beaded integrity of the frontier farmer, for the revival of democratic methods of selecting public officials in place of the boss-ridden, moneydominated political practices of his day. Phillips's greatest weakness, shared by most of his fellow muckrakers, was the inadequacy of his specific proposals for ending the corruption. For example, the fictional Senator Scarborough, upon winning the Presidential nomination, promised only to obey the Constitution and enforce the laws, leaving his intent to the reader's imagination. Phillips was vague and uncertain as to the methods by which corporate skullduggery might be restrained. Some of his contemporaries turned to socialism, but for Phillips socialism, like charity, was an aristocratic scheme to destroy self-reliance and individuality; it meant "withering and denuding paternalism" which would coddle incompetents. Phillips's solutions, being ethical, nostalgic, and deficient, enhanced his dilemma, but, insofar as they reflected the insecurity of an industrialized society nurtured upon Jeffersonian ideals, probably contributed to his popularity. It may be that his success as a writer was due, as critic Kenneth S. Lynn charges, to his ability to pander to the private hopes and dreams of the middle class. Though hopelessly anachronistic, Lynn writes, what makes Phillips important is that be ". . . actually did for a time become the secretary of American society." When the Cosmopolitan Magazine selected Phillips to write the series of articles collectively entitled "The Treason of the Senate," its editors must have anticipated both the nature of his material and the manner of his presentation. Phillips had made his predispositions abundantly clear in his novels. In The Cost, monopolies managed the state legislatures which chose Senators. In The Social Secretary, rich men bought their way into the Senate. The Plum Tree muckraked the Senate itself. Its chief figure, Senator Harvey Sayler, custodian of "the plum tree" (an allusion to a telegram attributed to Senator Matthew Quay, political boss of Pennsylvania), manipulated both parties and controlled legislation in league with a syndicate of wealthy businessmen. Sayler's career as a political boss began when he realized . . . that graft was the backbone, the whole skeleton of legislative business, and that its fleshly cover of pretended public service could be seen only by the blind. I saw, also, that no one in the machine of either party had any real power. The state boss of our party, United States Senator Dunkirk, was a creature and servant of corporations. Silliman, the state boss of the opposition party, was the same, but got less for his services because his party was hopelessly in the minority and its machine could be useful only as a sort of supplement and scapegoat. This characterization is suggestive of the Aldrich-Gorman relationship depicted by Phillips in "Treason." Six months prior to the commencement of the "Treason" articles, Phillips published a book of essays, The Reign of Gilt, in which he bitterly castigated the political spokesmen for the rich. He predicted their ultimate doom. Representatives of a financial aristocracy, they would not exist beyond the time that "the People" became educated. Nothing could prevent the ultimate triumph of democracy—"the inevitable sequence of widespread intelligence"and that, in turn, would rid America of the rascals. Democracy, for Phillips, was "not a theory that may someday be discovered false"; its progress was human history itself, with "a force as irresistible as that which keeps stars swinging" to sustain it. The role of the writer in the cause of democracy, be be essayist or novelist, was that of educator. The literature of exposure (even "yellow journalism") played a part in the process, for, as Phillips wrote in The Cost, "There is an abysmal difference between everybody knowing a thing privately and everybody knowing precisely the same thing publicly ... the tremendous blare of publicity act[s] like Joshua's horns at Jericho." The image of himself as a latter-day Joshua, supported by historical inevitability and challenging a citadel of entrenched privilege, would have appealed to Phillips. Though David Graham Phillips was the author of "The Treason of the Senate," he was not accountable for its genesis nor for its ultimate publication. That was the responsibility of Publisher William Randolph Hearst and his editors, Charles Edward Russell and Bailey Millard. Perhaps the publication of the "Treason" series was just a calculated step in Hearst's political ambitions. >From February 5, 1899, a major editorial policy of the Hearst newspapers was the direct election of United States Senators. Attacks upon the Senate were a standard feature of Hearst's political campaigns. For example, when accepting the Democratic party nomination for Congress from New York on October 6, 1902, he noted that "the people will never be protected against the trusts by a Senate in which the trusts occupy many seats and control a majority," and vowed to support direct election as "a first step." Elected to Congress, Hearst introduced such a resolution into the House and continued to agitate for the reform in his press. During his unsuccessful 1904 campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, he repeatedly supported direct election. Then, in the spring of 1905, Hearst purchased his first magazine, the Cosmopolitan, founded in 1886 and owned since 1888 by John Brisben Walker. Under Walker, Cosmopolitan was a general family magazine, nonpartisan and not inclined toward muckraking, though it published six articles by Phillips. Under Hearst, the magazine was sensationalized, long-time Examiner editor-reporter Bailey Millard was made editor, and such standard Hearst writers as Arthur Brisbane, Russell, Alfred Henry Lewis, Edwin Markham, and Ambrose Bierce became regular contributors. Russell claimed at a later date to have originated the "Treason" series. As he recalled, the idea came to him in 1905 while be was in the press gallery of the Senate listening to a debate in which the great majority of "well-fed and portly gentlemen" below represented not the people but an array of predatory interests. Upon returning to New York, Russell suggested to Hearst a series of articles for Cosmopolitan "on the fact that strictly speaking we had no Senate; we bad only a chamber of butlers for industrialists and financiers." According to Russell, Hearst approved the idea; "I had begun to accumulate the facts when I received an assignment from Everybody's ... My task for Mr. Hearst was passed along to David Graham Phillips." When Editor Millard first suggested to Phillips that he undertake the Senate series, the writer pleaded that he was occupied with his novels and proposed that William Allen White be given the job. But White was busy, and Millard again turned to Phillips, offering to pay any price named by the author. He also promised Phillips research assistance in amassing the facts and statistics upon which the articles would be based. A final appeal to the author's social conscience brought consent, and Graham's brother, Harrison, a Colorado newsman, and Gustavus Myers, a brilliant and dogged researcher, were hired as assistants. Myers had written The History of Tammany Hall in 1901; his socialist inclinations gave him an almost instinctive sense of the pitfalls and temptations in the path of businessmen, and with the determination of a detective, he pored over old books, newspapers, and magazines, on the trail of corruption. Myers used some of this data in his classic History of the Great American Fortunes (1909). His research gave him a sense of the continuity of the American past which eluded Phillips; he did not share the Indianan's reverence for pre-Civil War days and believed that the roots of political corruption lay in the landed wealth of colonial times. Aware of the methods by which companies gained real estate in the eighteenth century and bank charters and railroad land grants in the nineteenth century, Myers concluded that graft always had been prevalent, that the level of politics in the 1900's was better, not worse, than it had been in the past, and that progressive "reformers" were simply members of a self-satisfied class that wished to maintain its traditional social dominance. Myers believed himself to be more objective, more historical-minded than the muckrakers; yet, to the extent that his class consciousness determined the nature of the information he furnished Phillips, the "Treason" may have been given, as President Roosevelt charged, socialistic overtones. Phillips prepared himself for his assignment by traveling to Washington, where newspapermen and Congressmen gave him confidential tips and leads which he used in the series. He then returned to New York and, white-hot with enthusiasm, indignation, and prejudice, began to turn out copy at his usual pace. Staff members and lawyers pored over his articles for libelous material. It was a painstaking task. Though the series at one time was scheduled to begin in the February, 1906, issue of Cosmopolitan, it was delayed until the March number. A Hearst biographer reports that the publisher took a personal interest in the series, stopping the press run of the first article in order to insert more facts and rewrite the conclusion. The process of selection to the Senate in 1906 was what it had been in the early days of the republic, when state legislatures were designated by the Constitutional Convention to select United States Senators. Thus was election made indirect, less democratic, and supposedly less subject to political wrangling. And as Madison's Journal clearly indicates, many members of the Constitutional Convention hoped that a Senate so fashioned would represent wealth as well as the individual states, At the convention, only James Wilson of Pennsylvania suggested direct election of Senators by vote of the people; selection of legislatures to do the job eventually was adopted unanimously. Congress was given the right to regulate the time and manner of holding elections, but it did not exercise this right until July 25, 1866, and many states were not represented in the Senate at times for lack of agreement upon a candidate. In 1866, a law was enacted providing that each house of a state legislature would choose its Senatorial candidate on the second Tuesday following organization. The next day a joint session would be held. If both houses selected the same man he would be declared elected; if not, a joint ballot would be taken on that and every day the legislature remained in session until a Senator was chosen. Yet this 1866 law did little to prevent Senate vacancies. For example, Delaware failed, after daily balloting, to elect a Senator in 1895, 1899, 1901, and 1905. Even when one man gained a clear majority, delaying tactics—such as preventing a quorum—could be employed by the opposition. From 1890 to 1906, eight states had Senate vacancies for portions of a term. Moreover, in the post-Civil War period, state legislatures seemed increasingly subject to bribery and intimidation in their selection of Senators. Though only one case of alleged bribery came before the Senate prior to 1866, nine such cases were tried from 1866 to 1906. As early as the 1870's, charges were made in the press that the Senatorial selection process was colored by corruption and subservience to corporate interests seeking such privileges as franchises, land grants, and protective tariffs. That some politicians sold their favors was evident, as was the late nineteenth-century tendency of lawyers representing corporations and, later, wealthy businessmen themselves, to seek election to the Senate. Gustavus Myers suggested that the movement of millionaires toward the Senate was "led by the mine magnates of the far West"—William Sharon and James G. Fair of Nevada (1875, 1881), and Leland Stanford and George Hearst of California (1885, 1886). The World Almanac of 1902 listed eighteen Senators as millionaires, including Aldrich, Depew, Elkins, Fairbanks, Kean, Lodge, and Hanna. In 1906, Phillips listed twenty-five, though Senator George Perkins considered this number to be an exaggeration. A moot question sometimes debated in the press, prior to the appearance of "Treason," was whether it was less harmful to have millionaires elected to the Senate than to have Senators use their office to make millions. In either case, the Senate was known in the popular vernacular as the "Millionaires' club." In 1906, the political scientist George H. Haynes summarized the public standing of the body: Judged by the fruits which it has produced in recent years, in the estimation of the public, the Senate has fallen from its high estate ... Never before in its history has the Senate been the target of such scathing criticism as during the past fifteen years. On all sides is heard the charge that the Senate . . . is now the stronghold of the trusts and of corporate interests. In examining the 58th Congress (1903-1905), Haynes was appalled. to discover that one-tenth of the Senators had had serious charges of dereliction from duty brought against them. Other statistics compiled by Haynes showed that Republicans comprised 64.4 percent of Senate membership, that the average age of members was 59.8 years, that about two-thirds of the Senators were lawyers by profession, and that only two members of the present Senate had "written a book in stiff covers." (That is, men of letters were not well represented.) He then submitted a list of the Senators in the 58th Congress to "five impartial observers of the Washington scene" (including two Washington correspondents and one magazine writer), and asked that the Senators be classified according to what or whom each represented in Congress. One out of three Senators owed his election to "wealth" or "manipulation"—qualities which 11 make their usefulness as members of the dominant branch of Congress decidedly open to question." Yet, many of the Senators attacked by Phillips were given a clean bill of health by Haynes's panel. Its classifications included: I. "Statesmanship": Allison, Bailey, Fairbanks, Foraker, Frye, Hale, Hoar, Spooner II. "Rank and File": Nelson Either I or II: Cullom III. "Wealth": Kean, Depew, Elkins IV. "Political Manipulation": Gorman, Penrose, Platt, Stone Either III or IV: Aldrich V. Unclassified: Burton Following this introduction are capsule biographies of twenty-one Senators muckraked by Phillips in his "Treason" articles. These men had certain characteristics in common: eighteen were Republicans, half of whom were committee chairmen; sixteen were lawyers by profession, a higher percentage than the Senate average; seniority was characteristic even of Northern senators—eight of the twenty-one established longevity records for serving their states in the Senate. Eleven won election to the House of Representatives prior to their selection as Senators (for a higher average than the Senate's overall 35.9 percent), and all had won some popular election, suggesting that their success and influence were partially due to preliminary political experience. Sixteen represented states lying east of the Mississippi and north of the Potomac and, with the exception of Bailey of Texas, none was from the deep South or far West, indicating that political control of the Senate in 1906 differed from that of today. Although criticism of the Senate antedated the muckraking movement, investigation of that body increased noticeably after the turn of the century. Articles analyzing the Senate, some critically, appeared in the North American Review in 1902; the Atlantic Monthly and Century in 1903; the Nation, the Independent, and World's Work in 1905, to name a few. The press abounded in statements linking Senators and trusts. For example, the New York Post in March, 1904, caustically commenting upon the investigation of Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, wondered if it wouldn't be as proper to expel a Senator who took orders from the beef or sugar trust as one who took orders from the Mormon church. Or the Chicago Record Herald of one year later: "Caesar had a listening senate at his chariot wheels. He must have been the forerunner of the railroad magnate." In McClure's, Ray Stannard Baker branded the Elkins committee railroad investigations a farce, charging Elkins, Kean, Aldrich, and Foraker with collusion to whitewash the railroads. In 1905, a public uproar resulted over the arrests and trials of Senator John H. Mitchell (Oregon) and Joseph Burton (Kansas) on charges of land and postal frauds; both men were fined and sentenced to prison. Under the heading, "The Senate's Roll of Dishonor," the Nation, on December 7, 1905, claimed that the Senate's prestige "has suffered a terrible blow" because of the convictions. Included in the Nation's roll of "disgraced Senators" were Thomas C. Platt and Chauncey Depew of New York and Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, largely because of their implication in New York insurance scandals. The Armstrong investigating committee, led by its chief counsel, Charles Evans Hughes, clearly indicated the privileges accorded insurance companies because of political pressures brought by these men, and produced a clamor for their resignations. Even so business-minded a paper as The Journal of Commerce suggested that neither Platt nor Depew "has been, is or can be a good and faithful servant of this great State, and their presence in the Senate covers it with confusion and humiliation." Probably the most significant muckraking series to reflect upon the dignity of the Senate prior to "Treason" was Thomas W. Lawson's "Frenzied Finance" published in Everybody's. Financier Lawson's exposes of the operating methods of insurance companies helped trigger the Armstrong investigation. Then, in the November, 1905, issue of Everybody's, Lawson charged that Senator Clark of Montana purchased his election. After the election, according to Lawson, Henry Rogers of the Standard Oil Company requested a Senatorial investigation because Clark was an industrial competitor. When Clark resigned his seat and was then re-elected to the Senate, again under questionable circumstances, Rogers warned him be would be expelled unless he co-operated with Standard Oil. To back up his threat, Rogers supposedly produced a list containing the names of two more Senators than the majority needed for expulsion. Popular reaction to the Lawson charges was widespread; the Arena, in its January, 1906, issue, specifically asked the following men if their names were on the Rogers list: Lodge, Aldrich, Depew, Platt, Gorman, Bailey, Penrose, Spooner, and Elkins. It also demanded a Senate investigation of the Lawson exposures and suggested that the Senate ". . . is becoming more and more a machine for registering the will of Wall-street campaign contributors and the puppet of privileged wealth." Lincoln Steffens' series of articles on statewide corruption for McClure's in 1904-1905, titled "Enemies of the Republic," may be considered a forerunner of "Treason." Steffens' investigations led him repeatedly to the Senate, and though his language was more restrained than that of Phillips, his conclusions were similar. For example, in "New Jersey: A Traitor State" (April, 1905), Steffens wrote: ". . . it has seemed that the United States Senate must be made up of the representatives from each state, not of the people, not even of the state, but of the corrupt system of each state. This would account for much that happens in the Senate." He added, "We have been in at the birth of several United States Senators, so we can begin, if we are honest, to realize that that august chamber is the earthly heaven of traitors." Steffens' article on Rhode Island centered upon Nelson Aldrich, "the arch-representative of protected, privileged business," who had become the "boss of the United States." Steffens believed Senator Spooner to be representing the railroad interests of Wisconsin, and Senator Stone the baking powder interests of Missouri. Finally, Steffens visited Washington itself and, in a series of articles for a newspaper syndicate in 1906, charged that "the chamber of bosses" bad sabotaged the President's legislative program. The immediate political background for the "Treason" series lay in the 59th Congress, which opened in December, 1905, in an atmosphere of criticism, scandal, and doubt. Public and newspaper attention was focused on the President's request for railroad rate reform; cartoonists depicted Aldrich, Elkins, and Foraker as a trio of determined opponents of Roosevelt's proposals. Current Literature told its readers that the fate of the railroad measure, as well as other legislation, treaties, and appointments, rested in the hands of an unofficial "'steering committee' chosen at a caucus of the dominant party." This steering committee consisted of Senators Allison (chairman), Hale, Aldrich, Cullom, Lodge, Perkins, Clark (Wyoming), Elkins, Spooner, Kean, and Beveridge; eight of the eleven would be attacked by Phillips. A prolonged debate at the outset of the session indicated Senatorial sensitivity to rising public criticism. On December 18, Senator Bailey remarked that ". . we have fallen to the point that even when in the common playhouses of the country where cheap playwriters stage cheap plays, the audience applauds when Senators are described as grafters." His remark was immediately challenged, and a debate raged as to whether the Senate ought to expel a Senator accused of graft while the courts were in the process of trying him. Theodore Roosevelt characterized the mood of Washington on January 10, 1906: "Just at the moment the people at large, and therefore Congress too, seem to be Lawson-ized, so to speak. They are so jumpy, even about reform, that it is difficult to get coherent-that is, effective-action from them." Within days after Roosevelt's edgy letter on the emotional state of Congress, street-corner placards appeared throughout Washington, proclaiming in giant type the coming publication of "The Treason of the Senate!" The promotional campaign for the major muckraking series of 1906 was intense, thorough, and highly sensational—a page out of Hearst canon. The Hearst metropolitan press and small-town newspapers throughout the nation printed anticipatory news releases supplied by the magazine's circulation department. Reaching the news stands on January 15, the February issue of Cosmopolitan, with its editorial introduction to the series, promised stirring revelations and hinted that Chauncey M. Depew, target of the March issue, would resign. He did not, but the March number of the magazine sold out. So did the April Cosmopolitan containing the article on Senator Nelson W. Aldrich. Subscriptions poured in and, if publisher's figures are to be trusted, circulation in May stood at 450,000, or about 50 percent higher than the magazine's 1905 average. Measured in terms of profit, circulation, letters to the editor, and by the extent to which the articles were reprinted in the country's smaller dailies and weeklies, "Treason" was a smashing success. The nine articles comprising "Treason" appeared monthly from March through November and dealt at length with the private and public careers of twenty-one Senators, selected apparently because of their private wealth and their power in the Senate and party organizations. Stone of Missouri, Gorman of Maryland, and Bailey of Texas were Democrats, the remainder Republicans. All were either immensely wealthy, like Depew of New York, or like Spooner of Wisconsin and Lodge of Massachusetts were influential because of their Senatorial committee assignments. Some, such as Aldrich of Rhode Island and Elkins of West Virginia, were both multi-millionaires and wielders of power in the Senate. They by no means represented a typical cross-section of that body; on the other hand, their political sins were apparently no greater than those of most of their colleagues. Phillips probably could have written double the number of articles had be and Hearst cared to continue muckraking the lesser lights of the Senate in a similar vein. Phillips's technique was to present a short biography of his subject that stressed a triangulation between his public success, his willingness to serve private business interests, and his accumulation of a sizable fortune. The remainder of the article was devoted to his subject's political career, with emphasis upon a number of legislative incidents in which the Senator had invariably cast his influence and vote in a way befriending his corporate allies at the expense of the general public. The articles usually concluded with a short homily on the man and his public ethics. The "Treason" articles presented very little factual information about the Senators and the Senate that had not appeared previously on the public record in one form or another. How then is one to explain the series' impact upon the public, the indignation it caused in conservative circles, and the wrath it stirred in the President? Part of the answer lies in its aggregate weight—the accumulated effect of piling charge upon charge, article after article—which, in totality, implied that most Senators were guilty of great public wrongdoing. Part lies in the fact that the articles appeared in a supposedly reputable national magazine owned indeed by a member of Congress. Additionally, the effect of Phillips's articles was heightened by his use of sentences which implied more than they actually said, a technique which his contemporary, Norman Hapgood, termed "adroit insinuation." For example, in his article on Lodge, Phillips claimed that the Massachusetts legislature was characterized by public plunder and betrayal, and then concluded that "this is notoriously typical of the body which has three times elected Lodge. A stream can rise no higher than its source—that is not an axiom of physics only." As an axiom applied to Lodge, it was nonsense. The articles were replete with such outlandish suggestions—that John Spooner's seat in the Senate chamber was designed to give him a "coigne of vantage as the mouthpiece of special privilege," or that because Hemenway of Indiana and Brandegee of Connecticut favored Fairbanks's Presidential ambitions, that "is, of itself, enough to locate them." The reader was to use his imagination. But perhaps the major reason for "Treason's" impact is to be found in the unrestrained language Phillips used to describe his subjects, in the intensity of his adjectives and adverbs rather than in the gravity of his rather well-known facts. Bailey, for example, was compared unfavorably to Judas Iscariot, Gorman described as "a grafter," Elkins accused of "sneak thievery," and Aldrich of "three acts of treason" that had brought him wealth and rank. Collectively, the Senate was depicted as "stealthy," "treacherous," and "traitorous," made up of "bribers" and "perjurers" and "change-pocket thieves." During heated political campaigns, especially in Populist days, personal charges of such intensity had not been unknown. But rarely outside of campaigns had such blunt words been used so coolly about august public servants by a respected journalist writing for a reputable national magazine. Little wonder that Theodore Roosevelt feared a general public discrediting of his party, the national legislature, and indeed the administration if the effects of such charges were not somehow dissipated. Roosevelt had reasons for being indignant about the "Treason" series. In them his personal friend Lodge was characterized as a "product of petty grafters" and his former cabinet member Knox described as a man who had made his millions through fees "from armor-plate and rebate rascals." Roosevelt also feared that his legislative program for the regulation of railroads, stockyards, and food manufactures would be endangered by the controversy, and possibly as a result his party might lose the Congressional elections of 1906 and thus mar his incredibly popular record with a sign of public displeasure. Even before the articles appeared in print, the President was apprehensive about them; he had good reason to be. The writer had linked him with plutocracy and ridiculed his ostentatious "ceremonial of a king" in The Reign of Gilt. The publisher was perhaps his major political enemy. It seems probable, therefore, that the President had made up his mind about the series before he read it. At any rate, he had been growing disenchanted with the "literature of exposure" for nearly a year. Lawson's articles, followed by Boss Platt's subsequent testimony that he recognized a moral obligation to care for the interests of corporations that contributed to campaigns, upset Roosevelt because he was, by implication, involved. The investigations by Ray Stannard Baker of railroad corruption and by Lincoln Steffens of state politics for McClure's in 1905 had troubled him in their cumulative effect. As McClure's biographer suggests, ". . . these articles constituted a devastating report on the State of the Union, so graphic and so telling that they had wrested from the President his political leadership. He was no longer summoning, he was being dragged." Roosevelt wrote McClure on October 4, 1905: I think Steffens ought to put more sky in his landscape. I do not have to say to you that a man may say what is absolutely true and yet give an impression so one-sided as not to represent the whole truth. It is an unfortunate thing to encourage people to believe that all crimes are connected with business, and that the crime of graft is the only crime. He warned writer Ray Stannard Baker on November 28, 1905: "In social and economic, as in political, reforms, the violent revolutionary extremist is the worst friend of liberty, just as the arrogant and intense reactionary is the worst friend of order." To his friend, editor Lyman Abbott of the Outlook, he wrote on October 14, 1905, that an author who lies by overexaggerating graft ". . . occupies a position in my judgment not one whit better than the real grafter, and infinitely below the very worst of the men whom he accuses; for most of the latter are not guilty of any shortcomings whatever." But of all the sensational writers and publishers, Hearst had annoyed him most. A potential political rival since Spanish-American War days (when TR refused to give "a certificate of character to the New York Journal"), Hearst had long borne the brunt of his invective. In his first speech to Congress, for example, the President spoke of his predecessor's assassin as probably having been inflamed ". . . by the reckless utterances of those who, on the stump and in the public press, appeal to the dark and evil spirits of malice and greed, envy and sullen hate. The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their share of responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped." He was by implication blaming Hearst for the death of McKinley, and when Hearst ran for governor of New York in 1906, Roosevelt authorized his Secretary of State, Elihu Root, to state publicly that when uttering those words he "had Mr. Hearst specifically in mind. And . . . what he thought of Mr. Hearst then he thinks of Mr. Hearst now." Roosevelt's apprehensions about expose increased when Poultney Bigelow muckraked the Panama canal situation in the Independent and the charges were repeated in other magazines. The President and his Secretary of War were incensed and called in the press in January, 1906, to answer each charge with facts and figures. (Later in the year Bigelow was after Panama again, for the Cosmopolitan.) Shortly thereafter, the provocative billboards advertising "Treason" appeared, followed by the February number of Cosmopolitan with its announcement that Chauncey M. Depew would be the first target. The attack on Depew was a final straw for the President. Depew, though a frontman for the railroads, was considered by Roosevelt to be a harmless good-fellow, and at the state Republican convention of 1898 he bad made the speech nominating TR for governor of New York, reciting his accomplishments in glowing terms. Roosevelt's reaction to the "Treason" announcement was, at first, indirect. His close associate, Postmaster General George B. Cortelyou, dispenser of all-important mailing privileges, warned in a Lincoln's Birthday speech at Grand Rapids, Michigan: Of late years there has developed a style of journalism, happily as yet limited in its scope, whose teachings are a curse and whose influence is a blight upon the land. Pandering to unholy passions, making the commonplace to appear sensational, fanning the fires of sectionalism and class hatred, invading the privacy of our firesides, it presents one of the most important of our present-day problems. When the March Cosmopolitan containing the Depew article reached him on February 17, the President wrote an associate, "I need hardly tell you what I feel about Hearst and about the papers and magazines he controls and their influence for evil upon the public and social life of this country . . ." That same day he suggested that Alfred Henry Lewis, head of the Washington bureau of the New York Journal, and himself a Cosmopolitan contributor, drop in for conversation: I have just been reading the Cosmopolitan. There is no need for me to say that so far as in one article or another corruption and fraud are attacked, the attack has my heartiest sympathy and commendation; but hysteria and sensationalism never do any permanent good, and in addition I firmly believe that to the public, as well as to private individuals, the liar is in the long run as noxious as the thief. In a letter written to William Howard Taft on March 15, two days before he addressed the Gridiron Club, Roosevelt named Phillips, Lawson, and Upton Sinclair as a trio of lurid sensationalists who were building up a revolutionary feeling in the country. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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