Indianapolis Times, Volume 38, Number 270, Indianapolis, Marion County, 16 February 1927 — Page 4

PAGE 4

Senator Reed Pictures ‘Sins * of Republicans Before Editors

Jeffersonian Principles Cited at Dinner of Democratic Scribes. Here is the speech o£ Senator James A. Heed of Missouri at the Indiana, ■ Democratic Editorial Association banquet Tuesday night at tlje Claypool: r * I trust that nothing I may say tonight will be taken as a reflection upon the integrity or patriotism of individual Republicans. We cannot determine /lie quality of a man’s integrity by ascertaining his political adherence. Men of all parties possess their virtues and vices. I frankly concede that the individual Republican is patriotic, desires good-government and would like to see the public business conducted impartially and honestly just as Democrats so desire. When, however, we consider the two parties in the aggregate, measuring them by their party policies and estimating them by the conduct of their party policies and estimating them by the conduct of their party leaders, we are forced to that nearly all the great political scandals which have shocked the national conscience must be laid at the door of the Republican party. The reason may be found in the influences which give direction tb party councils and dominate officers selected at such councils. If the purpose for which a party exists is to render disinterested service to the country, that spirit will influence the conduct of officers by it selected. If, however, the party is controlled by those who seek to exploit the government for their own advantage, bribery, fraud and all forms of villainy are bound to come into exk istence. Without for a moment pretending the Democratic party is composed exclusively of saints, or that selfish influences have not at times been exerted upon it, the truth nevertheless remains that, speaking broadly, this may be said of our party, viz: Its cardinal principles were first formulated In the brain of the greatest protagonist of human liberty who ever lived, Thomas Jefferson; He, more than all others, believed in the right of the people to govern themselves; His great blows were always struck for freedom; His pen never wrote a law limiting individual rights; He never framed a statute creating a special privilege or granting to any interest the power to prey upon the people. He constantly sought to limit the powers of government. Upon the anvil of justice' with the hammer of logic he broke into fragments the shackles of precedent and privilege. He declared that in the intellectual and spiritual world there were no human masters; that there were no dungeons for the mind—no prisons for the soul. In an age of intolerance, he compelled bigots to accept the statute of religious liberty. For the dogma of divine rights of kings he substi-

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tuted the doctrine of the inalienable liberties of man. Rights Set Out He abolished titles and conferred on all citizens the nobility of freemen. He sought to secure the liberties of individuals by limiting the powers of government and by writing in the fundamentals of our governmental structure such doctrines of limitation on Government as: “All men are born free and equal—- “ Are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “And these rights are inalienable.” He reserved the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Forbade Congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, abridging freedom of speech and of the press, the right of peaceable assemblage or of petition against grievances. He forbade the quartering of soldiers upon the citizen; the making of unreasonable searches and seizures; the trial of a citizen for an infamous crime except upon indictment; the placing of a citizen twice in jeopardy or compelling the citizen to give testimony against himself in criminal cases. He forbade the requirement of excessive bail; the imposition of cruel and unusual punishment; the refusal of speedy trial sided by witness and counsel; and denied to the Government the right to deprive a citizen of a trial by a jury of his peers. Nowhere do we find a law limiting individual liberty—always he built bulwarks against arbitrary power. The dominant element philosophy was that Government is established solely to secure and safeguard the natural rights of man. Government, therefore, was to be a simple thing. Its officers were the servants of the people; their chosen agents granted a limited authority to be exercised equally for the benefit of all. To such a scheme the regulation of personal habits or thought or the creation of special privilege was utterly repugnant. These iniquities were to be cast out along with traes of aristocracy, royal grants of monopoly and the prerogatives of kings. Such was the original direction given to the stream of democracy. That stress, subject to many meanderings and obstructions, has nevertheless held to its general course. Against it from the first was arrayed self-elected intellectuals who distrusted the people, and sordid interests seeking to employ the government for the exploitations of the masses. Under various names this opposition has rallied. Its management has usually been efficient and its financial resources incalculable. It early seized the Republican organization. United States Bank , One of the first prizes for which it contended was the right to set up the bank of the United States and to procure the purchase of colonial script, for the benefit of speculators. These objects were fathered by Alexander Hamilton, the idol of the Republican party, and were accomplished by corruption in Congress. Later, in 1869, the great money prize grew out of the financing of the Union Pacific Railway, resulting in the Credit Mobilier scandal. A

congressional investigation which demonstrated that large blocks of stock of the company had been distributed among members of Congress, by Oakes Ames, a Republican Representative from Massachusetts. The Wilson committee in 1873, investigating these frauds, traced the guilty participation to Schuyler Colfax, then Vice President of the United States, but speaker of the House of Representatives at the time of the transactions. The committee produced convincing evidence that other great Republicans were not free from taint and recommended expulsion from the Senate of Senator James W. Patterson of New Hampshire, a Republican. He escaped penalty, because his term of office expired before he could be brought to trial. At that early date the alliance between crooked money and the leaders of the Republican party was thus established beyond question. Whisky Ring The Administration of General Grant was blackened by the operations of the whisky ring, which robbed the Government of millions of revenue. . Among the members of this conspiracy was Avery, chief clerk of the Treasury Department, and O. E. Babcock, the private secretary and confidential advisor of the President. The scandal shocked the country and under normal conditions the Republican party would have suffered a crushing defeat. It survived only because the embers of the then existing hatreds of the North toward the South were fanned into a flame in the glare of which the people lost sight of the great issue of the hour. Samuel J. Tilden In 1876 Tilden was elected President of the United States upon the platform of “turn the rascals out.” He was deprived of his office by as villainous a piece of fraud as ever defaced the annals of any nation. It was probably due to the patriotism of Tilden, who counseled moderation and sacrifice, that a most serious condition was prevented. The great prize for which the exploiters of government have contended for the past seventy years has been the right to levy a tariff tax for the benefit of favored corporations engaged in manufacture. The Republican party yielded to the demands of these influences for the perpetuation of the tariff after the Civil War, and from that day to this their money and influence have been thrown to the Republican party in every election, and in turn that party has subserviently yielded to the demands made upon it. The result has been that vast sums of money have been collected and poured into every campaign. Corruption has become organized, and in some States has been almost uniformly successful. Quay and Penrose In Pennsylvania Quay collected immense corruption funds from the protected interests, and who boldly and blatantly carried on his operations. He was succeeded by Penrose, whose death disclosed a safe deposit box crammed with some two or three hundred thousand dollars of currency which was intended to be used

THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES

as the original ante in the political jackpot. That State had been organized, the groundwork laid by the successful perpetrators of the frauds and iniquities to which I shall later at some length refer. • Addiekts Addickts defiled the political waters of Delaware. The exposure of his iniquities amazed all decent people. Yet, he insolently persisted in his efforts to corruptly gain a seat in, the United States Senate, so that State- for some two years only had one representative in the Senate. The circumstances attending the election of Dupont were never fully revealed, but enough came to light to defeat that gentleman for re-elec-tion and to temporarily attach to the State of Delaware the inglorious title, "Rotten Borough of America.” This I do not say to reflect upon Delaware, but merely record the historical fact. The decent citizens of Delaware, of course, gravely regretted the condition. Clark of Montana, in this case a Democrat, undertook to bribe the Legislature of Montana. He was caught in the act. One of the results w’as the election to the Senate of an honest man tvho exposed the iniquity. Clark appears to have played the part of a lone-wolf. He possessed a great fortune. He simply undertook to buy a seat in the Senate on his own account, but all of the other operations to -which I have referred were related to and employed the machinery of the Republican party. Mark Hanna The control by corrupt money of the party machinery became absolute during the reign of Marcus A. Hanna. He boldly declared that the protected industries had become enriched by the policies of the Republican party, and that he proposed to fry the fat out of them for campaign purposes. He gathered an immense corrupt tion fund, lie purchased the Negro delegates from Southern States and thus controlled the party convention. Every form of coercion was used by employers to force their workmen to vote against their will. Every scheme of bribery was called into use. It was a saturnalia of boodle, bribery and force. • The infamous methods -were triumphant and accomplished the defeat of Bryan. From that day on the protected industries looked to the Republican party for the perpetuation of their legalized graft, and the Republican party management in turn has looked to the protected industries for its campaign funds. I am coming now to more recent events. The campaign of 1920 was approaching. There was a great scurrying about for a satisfactory candidate to the great protected interests. Borah and Johnson were looming on the horizon, but being honest men were regarded as inimical to the special interests. The notorious John King,, whose grafting proclivities were again dragged to light in the recent trial of former Attorney General Daugherty, was high in the councils of the Republican party.

He assembled four or five men in a, room. Then and there they agreed to underwrite the Campaign of General Wood to the amount of $200,000. The disclosure of this conspiracy resulted in the retirement of Wood as a presidential candidate. Governor Lowden At the same time the investigating committee of the Senate brought to light the fact that Governor Lowden had paid some $38,000 to certain politicians of the State of Missouri in consideration of the Missouri vote in the oncoming Republican convention would be delivered to Governor Lowden. The exposure of that transaction had the effect of retiring Governor Lowden. He is now appearing on the horizan again as the special angel and champion of the farmers. He is about as well-qualified for that position as I would be for leader of the angelic choir. All men know the story of the nomination of Warren G. Harding. It was accomplished when Harry M. Daugherty agreed with Penrose that Harding would be suitable to the great protected industries. The convention obeyed the mandare of the masters as obsequiously as a well-trained office boy obeys the command of his employer. From the seed thus planted only an evil crop could be expected. The whole story may never be disclosed completely, but there are certain outstanding facts the public will not soon forget. Fall, Denby, Doheny and Sinclair. Albert Fall resigned his seat in the Senate to take the vastly inferior position of secretary of the interior. The act at once caused speculation because, indicating as it did, some ulterior purpose as actuating the move. We all know the story. The first step in the program was to induce the President to sign an order attempting to transfer the control of the oil lands to the secretary of the interior. Then or previously there had developed a conspiracy which was at least aided and abetted by a high naval officer. The oil lands were surreptitiously transferred to Doheny and to Sinclair. A bribe of at least SIOO,OOO was paid to Fall. True, the story has never yet been disclosed because witnesses have fled to Europe, avoided subpoena or have refused to give their testimony; but enough circumstances upon the face of the record convinces any intelligent man that here was one of the most corrupt and infamous bargains ever made—a bargain which transferred from the United States to private corporations the great source of oils which the Taft administration and likewise the Wilson administration had sought to preserve to the people of the United States for our defense in time of war. Coming close on the heels of theqe disclosures is the- horrible story of the hold up perpetrated upon a German claimant for moneys which had been impounded during the war. That the hold-up was perpetrated is not subject to dispute. The only question today is whether Daugherty and Miller, who feared to take the stand in their own defense and escape because of the death of witnesses or the lack of sufficient documentary evidence.

I come now to consider a phase of this discussion which is to me very painful. Personally, D have a feeling of friendship for our President; but 1 cannot excuse his conduct with reference to the matters just referred to. * ! 1/ was the business of the President to carefully safeguard public interest. It is entirely possible that ho did not know of the rape of the public domain by Fall, Doheny and Denby; but the body of the fraud was dragged into the daylight by the United States Senate. The moment the facts became apparent, it was his duty to have set in motion every resource of the Government in order to apprehend the culprits. He remained impassive and silent. He allowed the machinery of justice to remain under the control of Mr. Daugherty, the chief of tjie culprits. Even the White House telegram instrument and the secret code of the Government were employed to convey information to those implicated in the scoundrelly transaction. Weeks went by and still Daugherty remained in his place of power, where he could, to a large extent, block and render nugatory the efforts of the Senate to ascertain the facts. At last, and for an assigned reason which in itself was utterly insufficient, he yielded to public indignation and gently, ceremoniously and almost apologetically requested Daugherty’s resignation. I declare within my judgment that if the President had acted vigorously and all of the employes of the Government ordinarily used in criminal cases had been put to work, a number of gentlemen now at large would be behind the walls of the penitentiary. It was the duty of Mr. Coolidge to have acted. He did not act. The scoundrels went unwhipped of justice, and accordingly corruption grew the more bold —the more intolerant. The ruthlessness of the Republican organization was especially manifested in 1888. It was at that time the official letter of the Republican! committee, signed by W. W. Dudley, treasurer of the committee, gave this significant advice to the political lieutenants of Indiana: “Divide the floaters into blocks of five and put a trusted man with the necessary funds in charge of those five, and make him responsible that none get away, and that all vote our ticket.” The writer of such a letter ought to repose the balance of his natural life in a pentitentiary. The Newberry Case In the latter part of 1921 Henry Ford exposed the corrupt methods by wh’ch Truman H. Newberry had been elected to the United States Senate. It was found that in order to r*cure his nomint ion he had expended $195,00* The contest of his seat raged in the Senate for months. 'Finally the Republican organization, taken as a whole, determined to seat him, regardless of the slush fund he had employed. They thereupon adopted a resolution, the last clause of Which read as follows: “The expenditure of such excessive sums in behalf of a candidate eeither with or without his

knowledge and consent, being contrary to sound public policy, harmful to the honor and dignity of the Senate, and dangerous to the perpetuity of a free government, such excessive expenditures are hereby severely condemnd and disapproved.” Nevertheless, the other part of the resolution in substance declared: Whereby we declare that Truman : H. Newberry is hereby declared to be a duly elected Senator from the State of Michigan. It was a monstrous resolution. It was an open confession of villainy. It certified to the country that the Republican machine would seat one of its adherents, even though he had gained his seat by methods “contrary to sound public policy, harmful to the honor and dignity of the Senate and dangerous to the perpetuity of a free government.” Pennsylvania Iniquity Here again we must literally start at the White House. The Secretary of the Treasury, doubtless with the consent of the President, proceeded to Pennsylvania, publicly declared in favor of Pepper and actively engaged in the business of organizing his campaign. Together with his brothers and nephews, the Mellon family contributed $75,000, which is admitted. How much more they contributed, I am unable to state. They engaged at once in the gathering of the largest slush fund ever accumulated to nominate any man for the United States Senate. The fact has already been disclosed that tlris campaigp, largely controlled and dominated by the Mellon family, raised and expended in the primary campaign alone $1,804,000. Once the Praetorian Guard murdered the just Pertinax upon the steps of the Capitol and standing in the welter of his blood sold Rome at auction. Are we approaching such a catastrophe? There is but one force that can rescue our country from this quagmire of iniquity—an aroused public opinion. A flame of public indignation can alone bring the Government back to hohest standards. That great work must be chiefly intrusted to the newspapers of the land. I do not hesitate to criticise you gentlemen. If you gave more of your pages to the discussion of public plunder and less to the exploitation of "Peaches” and “Bunny Browning,” more of your space to acts of this Government than to the baseball score, more to public business and less to private scandal, a healthier public opinion would be created. The pens of writers are, after all, mightier than swords of warriors. The conscience is sound, but It has been sleeping. It will be aroused when the press of the land exposes Iniquity and rallies the people to the cause of righteousness. A single manufacturer, who frankly admitted his purpose was to prevent taxation of manufacturers, contributed approximately $400,000. That the money was used for corrupt purposes is not open to question. From thirty-five to fifty thousand men were employed In the city of Pittsburgh alone to work at the election at $lO per day per head. For days and days these men stood in line while they were being paid off in $lO notes. No on© but a fool will fail to understand that th® wofk they were to do on election day con-

FEB. Ifi, 1927

sisted chiefly in casting vote* for Mr. Pepper. Mmiiiar Methods Similar methods were employed in other parts of the State. At the same time Vare, the op- | posing candidate, was gathering ills sinews of war. The curious thing about his contributions are that men known as notorious'grafters at elections were admitted to have given sums ranging from $50,000 to $76,000 and some of them refused to disclose the source from which they obtained their money and others failed to give a satisfactory account. The political machine in Philadelphia is so closely organized that it is commonly understood that money and power and not the votes of the people control tlr® election. Against Vare and his cohort* the Mellon forces pronounced anathema maranaths. They decided Vare unfit for the office of United States Senator, that his methods w r er® villainous and corrupt, that he was altogether bad. Yet the day after Vare’s victory, these same force* rallied to his support. Mr. Mellon became the chairman of the committee to conduct Vare’s campaign and to consummate at the poll* the election of this man whom they had pronounced so utterly unworthy of the high office of United States Senator during the primary campaign. The election was held and William B. Wilson swept to the corporate limits of Philadelphia with a majority of 50,000. The election carried to the people of Pennsylvania, they were allowed to vote and where the votes were counted, they rallied to his support. Deoont Republicans everywhere revolted at the atrocities committed to which I have referred. But the Republican mkcliino at Philadelphia did its work. It rolled up an apparent vote so great that Vare apparently was elected by a majority of approximately 200,000 votes. This spectacle has horrified this country. It has turned the stomach of decency and has seared the conscience of men as with a red-hot iron. Yet we find that one of the chief actors in this iniquity was W. I*. Mellon, who not only sits serenely in the Capitol of the United States, but almost from the White House steps declares to the country that the. moneys contributed and used in Pennsylvania were as honestly contributed and as fairly expended as contributions to a church of Jesus Christ. And so I say that the red line of corruption runs through the Capitol of the Nation and crosses the White House grounds. ITCHING MAKES MAN CRAZY “Itching almost drove ms crazy. Tried many remedies without relief, but one tube of SAXCAL salve rid me of the itch and healed my skin." —A. L. Morgan. Saxol stops itching in ONE minute. Often the rash disappears in TWO days and the soothed skin begins to heal. For Saxol gets in deep and destroy* the germs. Nothing equals it for eczema, pimples, ring worm or other local skin nffectlons. Hook Drug Co.—Advertisement.