-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 --[6]-- CHAPTER VI Confusing the People THESE articles have been attacked, but their facts�the facts of the treason of the Senate, taken from the records�have not been attacked. Abuse is not refutation; it is confession. New to this democratic republic, and more than suspicious, is the doctrine that the people must not be shown the public records of their public servants; that the people may not learn how the "merged" senators, with Joe Cannon's "merged" House concurring, license and protect the "high financiers" in piling up vast fortunes for the few and in multiplying for the many the difficulties of getting a livelihood and a competence; that the people must not be told how the Senate has never moved to use its ample Constitutional powers to protect the people until public anger compelled; how it has then merely passed some deliberately ineffective measure, like the Cullom interstate commerce act of 1887; and how, by killing reciprocity treaties and by injecting robber schedules into tariff laws, it has penned the people in from even such slight relief as might have come from abroad. A great deal is said by apologists for treason about there being nothing "constructive" in exposing public corruption. If trying to bring it about that only men of character can get public honors, if trying to make it impossible for tricksters and traitors to live in our public life�if these objects are not "constructive," then what does the word mean? Are only lying speech and perfidious act "constructive"? The exposed cry out that these exposures endanger the Republic. What a ludicrous inversion�the burglar shouting that the house is falling because he is being ejected from it! The Republic is not in danger; it is its enemies that are in danger. The treason of the Senate is a disease to be cured; but it is a disease of the skin, not of the bones. We have noted the "merger" of the two national political machines, and have watched it in operation, its Republicans and its Democrats playing into one another's hands. We have examined the records of its leaders. We have seen that they, the avowed chief men of the two political parties, the chosen arrangers of campaigns and legislative programmes, are of, by, and for "the interests." We have seen, beneath the dust of senatorial debates, measures in the popular interest maimed or assassinated, so-called Democrats cooperating with so-called Republicans, each crowd of the sham battlers wearing an angry front toward the other-to fool and confuse the people. The fact that these leaders are obeyed are followed, is in itself proof of the character of the followers. But there are those who would say: "True such men as Aldrich, Spooner, and Bailey ought not to be in command. But their followers are honest, are honestly deceived." But to say that men of enough ability to get anywhere at all are so foolish that they do not understand the politico-financial game, though playing it daily for years, is to draw too heavily upon credulity; and to excuse them is to stretch the mantle of charity diaphanously thin. However, let us go on until the deplorable but necessary truth about the overwhelming majority of the senators is established beyond even groundless and shadowy objection. Spooner and Bailey are, as we have seen, the first lieutenants of the "merger." There is a group of senatorial leaders who may be fittingly called second lieutenants�big figures in the public eye, influential in the Senate, that is, in the "merger," dangerous to the people because they are adroit, specious, reputed "eminently respectable." From this group let us select two for the present article-Elkins and Knox. Elkins and What He Stands For First�Stephen B. Elkins of West Virginia. We have seen that the "merger" does the main part of the work for "the interests" and against the people in the secure secrecy of Senate committees. Aldrich has Elkins on several important committees-rules, commerce, appropriations, etc. He has intrusted to him the chairmanship of the interstate commerce committee. Thus Elkins, under the Senate rules and "senatorial courtesy," is practically master of the committee which, with the exception of Aldrich's own finance committee, is the most important to the gang that finances both party machines and promotes the fortunes of senators and other high politicians in exchange for license and protection. For to this committee-to Elkins-are referred all proposals to enable the people to regulate their twenty thousand millions of annual interstate commerce, to secure a just distribution of prosperity. And only such measures as Chairman Elkins approves, or as Aldrich and he decide can or must be "taken care of" in the open Senate, ever see again the light of day. Who and what is the man Aldrich has intrusted with this vital command? Every man, woman, and child who makes or spends a dollar anywhere in this country is more interested in this question than in the immediate source of his or her own income. You can change your employer; but not so easily can you change this man who by his power over interstate commerce legislation has more to say about your material welfare than has your employer, more to say than have you yourself, no matter how well you may be using your energy and intelligence. Also, the answer to "Who and what is Elkins?" will broaden our light upon the Senate, where he has honor and authority by the votes of the majority of the senators. In reading his public record, let us not forget that its facts are well known to his colleagues, and that they can no more plead ignorance of him than they could of Aldrich or Spooner or Bailey�or of themselves. Elkins, having graduated from the University of Missouri in 1860 and been admitted to the bar in 1863, went to the territory of New Mexico, and, by interesting himself in politics, got the federal office of district attorney. The Mexican system of peonage, slavery for debt, was in full operation then, and Elkins laid the foundations of his fortune by wholesale prosecutions, each of which netted him a tidy sum whether there was conviction or compromise. With the capital thus gained lawfully, the young lawyer and politician went into the business of grabbing public land�keeping firm grip, of course, on his political power, and getting successively the, to a land-grabber, invaluable offices of attorney-general of the territory and territorial representative in Congress. As a citizen of New Mexico, a "captain of industry," and a "developer of resources," he was compactly described by the distinguished George W. Julian, one-time surveyor-general of New Mexico and a careful, honest man, in a speech at Indianapolis on September 14, 1892. Said Julian: "Elkins's dealings were mainly in Spanish grants, which he bought for a very small price. Elkins became a member of the landring of the territory; and largely through his influence the survey of these grants was made to contain hundreds of thousands of acres that did not belong to them. He thus became a great land-holder, for through the manipulation of committees in Congress grants thus illegally surveyed were confirmed with their fictitious boundaries. "He made himself particularly conspicuous as the hero of the famous Maxwell grant which, as Secretary Cox decided in 1869, contained only about ninety-six thousand acres, but which, under the manipulation of Elkins, was surveyed and patented for 1,714,764 acres, or nearly 2,680 square miles. Congress, through the action of its committees, was beguiled into the confirmation of the grant, and thus the Supreme Court was compelled to recognize this astounding robbery as valid. By such methods as these more than 10,000,000 acres of the public domain in New Mexico became the spoil of the land-grabbers; and the ringleader in this game of spoliation was Stephen B. Elkins, the confederate of Stephen W. Dorsey, and the master spirit of the movement. I do not speak at random, but from official documents and ascertained facts with which I became familiar during my public service of four years in that territory." Let us not linger upon the scores of instances of successful and unsuccessful jobbery in those days-how, for instance, he tried, but failed, to grab a group of rich copper mines by having a grant, which lay in one direction, surveyed as if it lay in exactly the opposite direction; how he took up and tried to force a claim against the Brazilian government for fifty million dollars, which claim Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard characterized as Ilan outrage upon any nation with which the United States has a desire to have friendly relations." Let us pass with him to West Virginia, where his father-in-law, Henry Gassaway Davis, was one of the overlordsa Democrat as Elkins was a Republican, and finally, in the last national campaign, the Democratic "merger" candidate for vice president. Davis and Elkins were soon in a sort of general partnership for exploiting West Virginia by means of political finance and financial politics. How He "Develops" His State Elkins has been "assisting in the development of the resources" of West Virginia since 1875. He came there rich; he has grown enormously rich in coal lands, railways, and public facilities of all kinds�the Morgantown & Ringwood Railroad, the Security Trust Company of Wheeling, the Wheeling Traction Company, the West Virginia Bridge & Construction Company, etc., etc., etc. His interests have destroyed independent towns that were thriving, and have built up in their place other towns that are dependent upon him. One illustration of his methods, being typical, will serve us as well as a hundred. The Fulmers owned coal mines which Elkins wanted. He owned the railway upon one of whose spurs the Fulmers depended to get their coal to market. The Fulmers found they could get no cars; then the spur somehow fell into such disrepair that it was unsafe to run cars over it, if the Fulmers should get a court order compelling Elkins to furnish cars; finally, he began to tear up the tracks of the spur. A succession of utterly lawless acts; a miniature of the man's career! Bold where boldness was necessary, sly where slyness would best serve, always energetic, implacably greedy, unscrupulous-such is Elkins, the citizen. And he has got together more than thirty million dollars; he "represents" the debauched state of West Virginia in the Senate; and there he is the man who passes upon all measures relating to our interstate commerce-the bulk of the labor of the American people, the bulk of their prosperity, for just or unjust distribution, as Elkins, under Aldrich and "the interests," may decide! What has Elkins done in the Senate? Except only the recently compelled rate bill, which as we shall see in due time is a fraud, no measure even pretending to be for the people or against the looters has been reported from his committee. That fact alone is enough to stamp the man, just as the fact of vast robbery rampant and big thieves unmolested and unafraid throughout the nation would be enough of itself, and without the crowding confirmatory evidence, to convict the Senate of treason. But let us recall, as a specific instance of Elkins's treason, his most conspicuous act of perfidious commission. In the winter of 1902-1903 he reported, and the "merged" Senate passed, an amendment repealing that provision of the law which made punishable by imprisonment the infamous crime of rebatinginfamous is a fit word to characterize the crime that is almost on a par with murder as an assault upon vital rights. To jail with the man who steals an overcoat or a loaf of bread; but only a fine for stealing by "high finance" sneak-thievery the property, the business, the prosperity of tens of thousands! This is Elkins's climax of senatorial achievement, thus far. It is significant of the power of the "merger" over the House that the Elkins act passed it by two hundred and forty-one to six, so eager are the Washington politicians to serve the "merger" and "the interests" if they can get plausible reasons for doing so. The fact that President Roosevelt signed it shows how unconscious he then was of the perfidy he had to deal with at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The reason advanced by Elkins for his bill, and accepted by many who should have known better in the excitement of the tremendous applause from the agents and newspapers of "the interests," was that railway officials would let themselves be convicted if the penalty were a fine only, whereas they would not permit it if they had to go to jail. The common sense of the matter was expressed with more than judicial moderation by Federal judge Bethea at Chicago last April, when, in imposing a fine upon some rebaters, he said he doubted if any fine would prevent the criminals from "repeating this offense or cause others to hesitate to follow their example," and that "if there were a provision for imprisonment, much more might be accomplished." Exposed by La Follette The real reason for the Elkins act was exposed by Senator La Follette in a speech in the Senate on April 27th, last. He told how the Wisconsin legislature in 1903 ordered an expert investigation of the books of the railways. Said he: "That was Just about the time of the passage of the Elkins act. It was disclosed that the railroads had made more than seven million dollars of deductions for rebates." Obviously, if Elkins and the Senate had not hastened to the rescue, the high officials of the railways radiating to the North and Northwest from Chicago would have had to go to jail; for the proof was complete. To befog the railway situation in the public mind, the railways, about two years ,ago, appointed as a committee for a "campaign of popular education" President Spencer of the Southern, President Underwood of the Erie, and President Wilcox of the Delaware & Hudson. Spencer, with his offices at Washington and with his direct opportunities socially and otherwise to influence public men, was the chief director of this education. Part of the scheme, and a very important part, was a series of public hearings on the railway question by Elkins's Senate committee a year ago last spring. For six weeks railway men poured in testimony to the fairness and impartiality and honesty of the management of the big railways. About the only discord was introduced by Governor Cummins of Iowa, a Republican who is fighting to destroy the grip of the "merger" upon his party in that state. In a speech at Storm Lake, Iowa, on February 16th, last, he described his treatment by Elkins. Said he: "For four hours and a half not one single question was put to me except with the intent to overwhelm me. I was the only man in that large room crowded to the doors who had- not gone there on the invitation of the railroads and on a free pass. While the chairman was probing me there sat by his side the general attorney for all the railroads of the United States. And when I saw that attorney passing to the chairman question after question to embarrass me, and when I observed the tender relationship existing between them, the hot blood of indignation ran through me. That chairman was Stephen B. Elkins. The people of West Virginia did not put him in the Senate. The railroads placed him there. He is there to do what the railroads command hint to do." The attorney to whom this stanchly Republican governor referred was ex-Senator Faulkner of West Virginia, a so-called Democrat, one-time chairman of the Democratic Congressional campaign committee. Elkins issued a long denial in May last; but Governor Cummins has ample corroboration for his main points. The Republican Governor Dawson of West Virginia was last spring forced by the desperate anger of the people of West Virginia publicly to describe and protest against the conditions resulting from Elkins-Davis "merged" politics. Wrote he: "West Virginia to-day is in the grasp of a railroad trust which practically says what part of the state shall be developed and what part shall not be developed, how much coal shall be shipped out of this state, to what points or parts it shall be shipped, and when it shall be shipped. Of course it makes its own rates and our people are helpless. I have been trying since 1881 to get a railroad commission in West Virginia, but the railroad lobby would never let us have it." This Republican governor sent this protest and appeal, not to Republican Senators Elkins and Scott of West Virginia, but to Senator Tillman, a Democrat from South Carolina. And when the Bituminous Coal Trades League of West Virginia made its similar protest and appeal, it addressed itself, not to the "merged" senators or to the cowed representatives from its own state, but to Representative Gillespie from far-away Texas. When Elkins and Aldrich found that the railway-rate bill could not be suppressed they had it reported from their committee in charge of Senator Tillman. The newspapers called this a bit of spite work against the President. As if old, experienced, coolblooded experts in the politics of chicane like Aldrich and Elkins acted from spite in crucial matters! The real reason was that the enmity between Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Tillman would necessitate go-betweens in the negotiations to get as strong a bill as possible through the Senate. The whole country now knows how shrewd that Elkins-Aldrich move was, and how easily they and their agents entangled the bill in a snarl of personal hatreds and distrusts, and took out of it what little strength it originally had. Is there doubt in anyone's mind whether Elkins is with "the interests" or with the people? Is it possible to conceive Elkins doing anything for the people? Yet he is a power in the Senate, one of the men who can do things, while honest senators like Republican La Follette and Democrat Tillman can only talk. Another Creature of Almighty Aldrich But some one is saying: "There is Knox. He is a power. Yet he is of the highest respectability, a man of character and of impartiality, a representative of the people." Let us see. Let us neither trust nor distrust "appearances"; let us look beneath them at actualities. Philander C. Knox, a graduate of Mount Union College, Ohio, in the class of 1872, became a lawyer and, in 1875, United States district attorney at Pittsburg. "The interests" are always alert to annex the bright young men who enter public service and who show capacity for mischief-and for usefulness. Knox graduated from the office of people's prosecutor into the service of those whom the people most wish and most need to have prosecuted; he has been in that service without a break ever since. His most profitable client for many years was the scandalously corrupt Carnegie Steel Company, as to whose vast rebating crimes President Cassatt of the Pennsylvania has lately "peached." He had the Pittsburg, Bessemer & Lake Erie, the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago, the Pittsburg and Birmingham Traction, and other powerful corporate clients, several of them always in need of the skill of an adroit lawyer, because, like the Carnegie Company, they were engaged in wholesale lawbreaking and law-dodging. Knox performed many signal and well-rewarded services for his law-cheating clients, who were just as much thieves as is the tramp who steals a nickel to get at a free-lunch counter;. but to recite them all would be to repeat the familiar story of the successful lawyer for big, rascal-controlled corporations. One most notable instance will suffice: The Carnegie Company was manufacturing armor-plate at a cost of less than two hundred dollars a ton, was selling it to the Russian government for two hundred and forty-nine dollars a ton, and to the United States government at from five hundred and twenty dollars to seven hundred dollars a ton. These are all official figures. The difference in price was not in value but in 46 patriotism "-our Carnegies with their "blow-hole" plate for the navy and our Armours with their "embalmed beef" for the army are nothing if not "patriots"; to criticise them or their agents in public life is "anarchy," is "pessimistic," is "muckraking." A Congressional committee, after examining thoroughly into the Carnegie Company's methods of manufacturing for American warships, reported (House Report No. 1468, 53d Congress, 2d session): "The company was hired to make the best possible armor-plate and was paid an enormous price. Resting under these obligations the company or its servants have perpetrated manifold frauds, the natural tendency of which was to palm off upon the government an inferior armor whose inferiority might perchance appear only in the shock of battle and with incalculable damage to the country. The efforts of the company, and of its superintendents Cline, Corey, and Schwab, have been to satisfy your committee that the armor is up to the requirements of the contract, notwithstanding the false reports to inspectors, doctoring of specimens, plugging of plates, fraudulent re-treating of test-plates and 'jockeying' of the testing-machine. The unblushing character of the frauds to which these men have been parties and the disregard for truth and honesty which they have shown in testifying before your committee render them unworthy of credence. The committee made charts showing the exact location of many bad plates upon thirteen American warships and specifying the defects so far as they could be ascertained. Did Knox throw up his retainer of fifty thousand dollars a year from this company, thus convicted? No! Did he refuse to defend it? No! Did he demand the dismissal of the men who had been detected and branded as untruthful and dishonest, parties to crimes against their and his country? Not he; not Patriot Knox. On the contrary, he continued as chief lawyer for them, continued intimately to associate with them, continued to grow rich out of fees and dividends earned from and by them. And when the Carnegie Company entered the United States Steel Corporation, with first Schwab and then Corey as president, Knox was made one of the legal sponsors of that gigantic tax upon industries and fraud upon investors. And to that same crowd he owes a large part of the money which makes him a millionaire. As we shall see, he also owes it his seat in the Senate. March 22, 1901, J. Pierpont Morgan, the big man of the steel corporation, called, in the evening, upon President McKinley, at the White House. The next morning Mr. McKinley announced that the attorneygeneral, the head of the national Department of justice, the legal guardian of the people against the common enemy, "the interests," would be�Philander Knox! And Mr. Roosevelt, charmed by his engaging personality and manifest abilities, impulsively retained him. The Anti-Trust League, petitioning the Senate judiciary committee�in vain�not to confirm the appointment, put the matter thus pertinently: "Is it proper for a lawyer to appear against his former clients? Can a lawyer willing to appear against his former clients be trusted to prosecute them if guilty? The charges we have filed refer not only to his dereliction of duty in the cases we have filed with him, but also bear upon his admitted intimate relations and his collusion with the criminal practices of the armor-plate trust which, we are informed, robbed the government of millions of dollars during the time Mr. Knox was their associate and adviser." Knox Betrays Roosevelt During Knox's custody of the national Department of Justice the expected happened. Nothing was done to reestablish justice, to drive off or even seriously to hamper the insolent thieves of "high finance." Mr. Roosevelt ordered Knox to proceed against the notorious Northern Securities Company which Morgan, Jim Hill, Harriman, the Rothschilds, and the Rockefellers had had cooked up by their lawyer lackeys. And what did Knox do? Let the answer come from the United States Supreme Court, from the opinion delivered by Mr. justice Holmes, on March 14, 1904: "It is vain to insist that this is not a criminal proceeding. The words cannot be read one way in a suit which is to end in fine and imprisonment, and another in one which seeks an injunction. I am no friend of artificial interpretations. . . . So I say we' must read the words before us as if the question were whether two small exporting grocers should go to jail." That is, Mr. Justice Holmes, in judicial language, exposed and rebuked Knox's sly betrayal of the President and the people in bringing a civil action against men who, as the justice said, were guilty of crime, if guilty at all. The court held that they were guilty; but the faithful Knox had seen to it that there could be no "running amuck," no jailing of rich lawbreakers as if they were poor devils with no education and with their poverty in extenuation of their crimes. Such was Knox as the efficient attorneygeneral for "the interests" and against the people. When Matt Quay died there arose the question, who could best represent what he had so long and so efficiently represented. The two great powers in Pennsylvania are the steel trust and the Pennsylvania Railroad�the steel trust that earns annually one hundred and forty millions net, on an actual investment of hardly twice that sum, by extortionate prices for a prime necessity of civilized life; and the Pennsylvania Railroad, the criminal betrayal of whose stockholders and of the people by its controllers was exposed before the Interstate Commerce Commission last May. It was published by newspapers of all parties, as a matter of routine news, that Frick, one of Knox's old employers in the Carnegie Company and a controller of the steel trust, and A. J. Cassatt, the presiding genius at the Pennsylvania's carnival of swindling, favoritism, and rebating, got together, agreed that Knox was the man for the job and "recommended" his appointment. The "recommendation" was, of course, heeded by Governor Pennypacker and ratified by the legislature. What has Knox done in the Senate? Nothing that suggests that the people have rights or even existence except as material for his friends and patrons to exploit. The most conspicuous of his typical and natural activities has been his effort to amend the railway-rate bill. Like all the "merged" senators, he was greatly agitated lest it should be "unconstitutional"; and, in the "merged" Senate and in the "merged" House, "unconstitutional" always means dangerous to the big leeches that are sucking away with greedy lips at the prosperity of the American people. His amendment provided for the point which Aldrich afterwards secured�every effort to curb the railways subjected to a court review which would enable the railways' lawyers to nullify the law by endless technicalities and delays. It contained a further provision that the orders of the Interstate Commerce Commission could be reviewed "in the Circuit Court of the United States for the district in which any portion of the line of the carrier or carriers may be located." That is, the railways could drag the wronged shipper to a part of the country remote from his business, could make it all but impossible for him to press his case. Attorney-General Moody pointed this out to Mr. Roosevelt, who cooled toward Knox. Throughout the railway debate, Knox was second only to Spooner in eagerness to serve corrupt controllers of railways, was second only to Bailey in confusing the issues and, so, aiding Aldrich to secure the complete triumph of the "merger" over President Roosevelt and Senators Tillman and La Follette, representing the people. Muck-Raking and Treason Knox is fifty-three years old; he has been in public life thirty years-and that in a state in which there is clamorous opportunity for a man with conscience and patriotism, and with talents such as his. Yet we search his record as vainly as we searched Aldrich's, Spooner's, Bailey's, Platt's, and Depew's. To him, as to the other leaders of the Senate, America has. meant, not the American people, but the men who exploit the labor and the capital of the American people of all classes, even of their own small class of the colossally rich; to him, as to the rest of the band, patriotism has meant serving those exploiters. Looking at this suave, complacent man, made a millionaire by fees from armor-plate and rebate rascals, or in listening to his smooth eloquence in behalf of robbers by methods worthy of footpad or assassin, who would imagine that he was supposed to represent the people of a state where there are such conditions as are described in the following extract from the official report of the Child-Labor Commission? "If Pennsylvania's working-children were to stand shoulder to shoulder, the line would reach more than twenty-two miles. If one of them were to pass your door each minute, day and night, it would take three months for the entire number to go by." There is a real problem for real "constructive statesmanship"! And a Senate of and for the people would consider it to the exclusion of all other problems until it was solved. But in a Senate of Knoxes and Elkinses, of Aldriches, Depews, Baileys, Burtons, Spooners, and Platts, the only problems that concern the "statesmen" are how to keep the people docile under saddle and curb, and how to maintain the plutocracy in the saddle, hand on the curb-rein. Admit that it is "muck-raking" to write and publish the records of the Senate, the biographies of the senators as made by themselves. Still, how does the epithet "muck-raker" change the fact of senatorial treason to the people, incessant, flagrant, deliberate? How does it change the fact that the Senate is licensing and protecting the sneak-thieves that pilfer daily, hourly, from your wages, your savings your till, your larder, your coal bin? pps. 62-71 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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