Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 September 1889 — LEMON LOVES TANNER. [ARTICLE]

LEMON LOVES TANNER.

PAYING THE CORPORAL’S TRAVELING EXPENSES. ! The Commissioner Allowing the Boss Pension Shark to Eoot His Bills—How the Treasury Is Raided by a Shameless Triangle—Dudley and Harrison. [Washington special to Chicago Herald.] Nobody in this city was surprised at the statement that Capt. George E. Lemon was in Milwaukee paying Corporal Tanj ner’s expenses at the hotel and vigorously engaged in booming Tanner’s scheme for an indorsement by the Grand Army snoampment. Demon can well afford to pay Tanner’s bills, even to the extent of SIOO a day at the hotel. Lemon is the biggest man in the pension business in this country, Tanner alone excepted. The pension office which Lemon rnnß is second in extent and importance only to that managed, or mismanaged, by Tanner himself. And the beauty of it is, from Lemon’s standpoint, that whereas Tanner makes only his salary of $5,000 a year, Lemon’s profits are something like SIOO,OOO every twelvemonth. Lemon would indeed be a mean man if he refused to pay for parlors at the hotel and other expenses incidental to a proper and effective working of the Tanner vindication scheme. Lemon is not only as big a man as Tanner, but he is pretty nearly as big a man in Washington as Ben Harrison. Lemon is worth fully a million and a half dollars, he is President of a bank, he owns twenty-five or thirty houses, one of them rented to Secretary Windom for $5,000 a year, he has a newspaper, and there is no telling what Lemon is in and is not in. When the citizens want a pot of money raised to carry on an inaugural enterprise, an enterprise which is always so worked in Washington as to earn a profit, or when the National Republican Committee, or the National Republican Congressional Committee, or the Grand Army is in need of funds, Lemon is the man Invariably first called upon. Lemon has lots of money and he knows how to put it out where it will do the most good. Nobody knows better than this Mr. Lemon on which side his bread is buttered. Lemon can well aftord to be generous, for he has made his fortune about as easily as any man ever made a fortune. He has grown rich getting pensions for soldiers and pushing claims and bounty cases through the pension office and other Government departments. Lemon’s concern is one of the sights of the town. He occupies three whole floors of one of the large business buildings opposite the Tieasury. It is a convenient location for him, for nobody in this country, excepting only his good friend Tanner, gets more money from the big vaults across the street. It is with no little pride that Lemon’s factotum takes one through the establishment and points out where the 165 clerks are at their work hustling pension cases and other claims thiough the departments. Of these 165 clerks twentyfive are lawyers or doctors. The weekly pay roll is more than $3,000. At this very moment Mr. Lemon’s private pension bureau has 75,000 cases pending before the official pension bureau presided over by his friend Tanner. Very often the receipts of Lemon’s bureau exceed SI,OOO in a single day. One-third of all the pension business in the country is attended to in this bureau of Mr. Lemon’s. No wonder Lemon can afford to go out to Milwaukee and pay hotel bills at the rate of $ ICO a day.

Friendship and patriotism aside, and Lemon s interest in Tanner reduced to an equivalent in the almighty dollar, the case is easily understood. The business which Lemon has pending before Tanner amounts in prospective fees to a little more than a million of dollars. At the present time the profits of pension attorneys come largely from reratings. The crop of original applications is at last running low, and if Congress cannot be induced to come to the rescue of a flagging industry in the enactment of a service pension law, or some other device for dismembering the surplus, in a few years the enterprising pension attorneys will have to depend entirely upon reratings. The fee for a rerating is only $lO, but with a superserviceable board of medical examiners, organized by the genius of Lemon and Dudley, and a buster like Tanner to keep his eyes shut and his mouth open while the looting is going on, there is no danger of the pension attorneys starving to death. It isn’t generally known, but really Lemon is fairly entitled, to the honor of • being called the father of the Grand Army of the Republic. In 1881 he conceived the idea of establishing a soldiers’ paper as a sort of -auxiliary to his pension business. He set his mark at a hundred thousand circulation a week, counting that if he could get the soldiers to taking his paper he would be all the more likely to secure their pension business. Finally succeeding in having his paper declared the official organ of the Grand Army, he found the circulation rapidly rising, and the pension business increasing in like ratio. Then he concluded the Grand Army was not large enough, at least for his purposes, and immediately set about extending its membership. He sent out blank charters by the thousands, at his own expense, and showed the veterans how to organize, and at the same time how to become subscribers to Lemon’s paper, and how to get their pension applications put through in good shape, via the subsidiary pension office. As a resultof these efforts it is Lemon’s boast that the membership of the Grand Army was doubled, now reaching the enormous total of 417,000 men, with 67,000 posts, and a Woman’s Relief Corps comprising 70,000 members. At the same time the circulation of Cap-, tain Lemon’s soldier paper has grown to a week, and his pension business to 75,000 applications constantly pending. The paper alone “makes a fortune every year," and the pension business is a gold mine. If for any reason the membership of the Grand Army should show a tendency to fall away, the enterprising Captain* Lemon may be depended upon to inject some sort of elixir of life into it. He needs the Grand Army in his business. The second largest pension business in Washington is owned by a man named Stevens, but as things are going now Stevens may expect to be soon outstripped by one W. W. Dudley, who was also conspicuous at Milwaukee as a shouter and manipulator for Tanner. Dudley’s office is near Tanner’s, on F street* and, though hot as large as Lemon’s, it is already the

third largest in the city and growing rapidly. Dudley has peculiiA' advantages in that he was once pension commissioner himself, and in that he is a member of two potential triangles. Triangle No. 1 is composed of Messrs. Clarkson, Dudley, and Quay, and triangle No. 2 of Lemon, Dudley, and Tanner. At present Dudley’s business amounts to about fifteen thousand [lending cases, and ho employs fifteen clerks. When Tanner first came into office there was talk that Dudley and Lemon were rival bidders for the busler’B and that Tanner was Dudley’s man and Bussey was Lemon’s, but now it is pretty well understood that the three are cheek by jowl. Fighting didn’t pay, and now all three are for Tanner and against Noble and Bussey. Some of the gossips even go so far as to say that Lemon and Dudley are in seoret partnership, and that a sort of pension trust has been formed, with a view of monopolizing everything in that line. At any rate, they are in partnership in their efforts to have Tanner retained and to force Noble out of the Interior Department so that a more friendly man may be put in his place. In this feature of the pension business Dudley is by long odds the most important partner, for he has a long pull with the National Republican triangle, which is just now doing its best, with some signs of success, to throw Ben Harrison down in the sewer. It was Dudley who engineered the scheme pf reorganizing the medical boards so that there would not be so much difficulty in getting reratings through, a valuable piece of work, as every one will admit, for it is on the reratings, as already stated, that the pension attorneys are chiefly depending for an honest livelihood.

There is some doubt as to the part Ben Harrison is playing in this patriotic pension scheme. Last March, when Ben came down here to occupy the office to which he had been elevated by the political genius of John New aud Dudley early in the summer, and of Matt Quay in the autumn, theie were rumors of a snub administered by ungrateful Mr. Harrison to faithful Colonel Dudley. As the story ran, Harrison had met Dudley in the inaugural ball-room and cut him dead with a cold and fishy stare. This story has been generally believed, but a little investigation has shown that the truth is not in it. An Assistant Attorney-General of the United States and two or throe Indiana politicians of note are authority for the statement that Harrison did not cut Dudley at the inaugural ball, but that on the contrary Harrison nud his wife, Dudley and his wife, and a large number of lndianians mot in the rooms of the Pension Commissioner th it night and carried on a friendly conversation. One of these gentlemen avers that he saw Dudley and the President talking together and laughing together on that occasion. It is true thut Dudley has not been in the White House since Harrison took possession, but it is equally true that his influence in the National Committee, in the departments, and in the grand hustle for the spoils was never so great as it is at this minute. A theory entitled to some credence is to the effect that there has never been any ?uarrel between Dudley and Harrison, udeed, it is certain that there has been none. All the trouble that exists is of Dudley’s own making, and many people believe he has purposely spread the impress on that he and Ben are out to relieve himself of the importunities of officeseekers on the ope hand and on the other to better enable him to carry on his manipulations of the Pension Office without involving Harrison in a direct kitchen-cabinet scandal. It is not impossible Dudley knew there would be scandal in the Pension Office, and that in the end the President would thank him for remaining away from the White House. At any rate, a good deal of mystery exists as to the real nature of the relationship of Dudley to Harrison, though there is no doubt of the wide swath, financial and political, which the famous author of the “blocks of five’’ letter is cutting under Mr. Harrison’s administration.