Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1908 — BONAPARTE ELUSIVE [ARTICLE]

BONAPARTE ELUSIVE

Fails to Furnish Correct Information Asked by Josephus Daniels. ATTY. GENERAL IS DIPLOMATIC Mixes Up the Prosecutions Undec Anti-Tnut Law. V r Records* ShoW That 287 Trusts Are Thriving; Under the Republican Administration Prosecutions Slow _Department bf Justice Answer Awaited.

Chicago, Oct ©.—(Special.)—Josephus Daniels, chairman of the publicity bureau at Democratic national headquarters, recently wrote a letter to Attorney General Bonaparte, In which he asked for information showing the character and extent of suits Instituted by the federal government against the trusts. Mr. Bonaparte made reply In a very lengthy letter, but was careful not to give the information requested. Mr. Daniels has forwarded a second letter to the Attorney General which is reproduced herewith:. Hon. C. J. Bonaparte, United States Attorney General. My Dear Sir: —I am in receipt of your letter of Oct. 2d. On the 30th day of September I wrote you and asked for a statement showing how many of the 287 trusts doing business in the United States had been prosecuted by the department of Justice, the amount of fines collected, etc. In your answer you do not furnish the information desired. The inquiry was specifically directed to the action taken with reference to the 287 trusta named. Instead of furnishing that information, you mix up the prosecutions under the Sherman anti-trust law with the prosecutions of railroads and individuals under other acts. No question was asked as to proceedings against railroads or other corporations except the well known and recognized trusts that are daily, by violating the law, “taking from the mouth of labor the bread it baa earned.” The public Is well aware that a number of railroads have been fined for giving rebates. That law ought to be enforced, even though your department refused to prosecute the admitted violations of the law by 1 a railroad official who received an immunity bath and was gben a place in the cabinet; and those two able attorneys, Hon. Judson Harmon and Hon. Frederick N. Judson, who had been employed to prosecute, refused to continue with your department -when It would not permit them to prosecute the confessedly guilty secretary of the navy as well as the lesser railroad officials who had nearly all given rebates. ' s Having failed to furnish the specific information requested, and. wishing to have a statement of exactly what has been done to prevent the extortions and to end the existence of the trusts, I am forced to ask you, omitting all prosecutions against railroads and other legal corporations, the following questions:

1. How many of the 287 trusts, giving the names, doing business in the United States, have been prosecuted by the present administration? 2. How many of these trusts, naming them separately, have been fined, and the separate amounts? 3. After a trust has been fliuM, what other steps have been taken to prevent its continuing its illegal practlces for which it was forced to pay the penalty? 4. How many of the ofllclals of these 287 trusts have been criminally prosecuted, and how many have been convicted and the term of imprisonment, giving the names of each person who has been imprisoned for vio lating the law? In your letter, in which you mix up the prosecution of railroads and other legal corporations with the trusts Which exist in defiance of law, you take occasion to contract the record of the Roosevelt administration with the four preceding administrations. In the pamphlet which you send with your letter, it appears that Mr. Harrison pAsecuted seven trusts under the Sherman anti-trust law; Mr. Cleveland. nine; MM McKinley, three, and the present administration, nineteen civil and twenty-five criminal cases. You include the cases against the beef and meat trusts where the government won these important suits. Has the meat trust gone out of business, and have the people obtained the relief from high prices which they had a right to expect and for which reason they demanded the prosecution of that trust? An examination of the twentyfive cases vou say have been prosecuted criminally shows that in no single case has any violation of the law been followed fry imprisonment. Do you believe that the men who operate the trusts to their enrichment by systematic robbery, enjoyed by immunity from imprisonment, will ever be deterred by the methods so far employed by the department of justice? As long as the meat trust can pay a small fine ,ind collect it an hundred times over the next day, by putting up the price of what it sells, when do you think that trust will quit charging prices that put necessary food out of the reach of the poor? The spectacle of a few of the predatory wealth. In convict garb—as the law contemplated—would dp mure in one week to break up the trust evil than all the prosecutions Inaugurated. By giving the comparison of the record of the Roosevelt administration in the nintter of prosecutions as contrasted with the records of Cleveland, McKinley and Harrison you invite a Comparison of the records of these administrations as to trusts. Carefully compiled statistics show that trusts were organized in the United States under the past four administrations as follows: Under Harrison, 25; under Cleveland (second term) 6; under McKinley, 127; and under Rooseveltj 106. Inasmuch as there are now 287 trusts in America" It appears that there were twenty-three before Mr. Harrison became president and that 264 have been organized since 1888. If the department of justice has been os dMigent an

the Interests of the people demand, would the number of trusts have multiplied so rapidly? Not only would the trusts doing business have been put out of business, but men would not have put money into new trusta if they bad bel.eved that the law against trusts and against persons guilty of combining would be vigorously enforced. I submit that >y the test of punishing lawbreakers and deterring others from violating the law—the eternal and true test—the execution of the anti-trust laws by the federal government is a failure; and that the existence and nourishing condition of the very trusts you have prosecuted convinces the people that the trusts are superior to law, or as Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton university, said last week: “The most striking fact abput the actual organization of modern society is that the most conspicuous, thp most readily wielded, and the most formidable power is not the power of the government, but the power of capital. Men of our day in England and America have almost forgotten what It is to fear the government, but have found out what it is to fear the power of capital, to watch it with Jealousy and suspicion, and trace to it the source of every open or bidden wrong.” I submit that the collection of fines from trusts aggregating a million dollars, if you bad collected so much, which has not been done, would be no punishment worth the name of punishment to the 287 trusts with an aggregate capitalization of $6,072,448,851.00. The fining process in trust prosecution is analogous to those fines imposed by a police justice upon persons keeping illegal resorts in towns. These fines often operate as a sliding scale of license lax—so may dollars whenever the aroused moral sense of the community will no longer be silent while the lawless dive debauches the people. What the people wish to know is this: How many trusts have yen compelled to dissolve—in truth, and not merely to officially dissolve, and then continue to fix the price, as the dissolved paper trust has done? The meat trust paid a fine and soon put up the prices of all that men must eat by some now-you-see-lt-and-uow-you-don’t sleight of band that seems to escape further prosecution while continuing to levy a tax upon all the people. No prosecution of the trusts is effective that Is not felt by the public in relieving them of trust imposition in what they buy. Your department says the paper trust was prosecuted and dissolved, but the publishers lAow that the mills in the trust have a combination now as Injurious to them as before your .prosecution. You say you have prosecuted the tobacco trust, but that trust has put up the price of the manufactured product it sells and put down at will the price of the raw material it buys from the farmer. You do not claim, I believe, to have ever even instituted proceedings against the steel trust, and only last year, in the teeth of the law, your department acquiesced in the complete monopoly of that giant of trusts when it took over the only large company able to compete with it In any line of production. If your department in seven years has prosecuted nineteen civil and twenty-five criminal cases, in which no trust official has been Jailed and no trust robbing the people has been compelled to take its grasp from the throat of free competition while 223 new trusts have been born during the McKinley and Roosevelt Republican administrations, how long at this rate of progress will it take the Republican administration to stop the extortion of 287 trusts that fatten by taxing the people? That is the question that the voters are propounding and -it is a question which the department of justice should answer. 1 am, sir— Yours very respectfully, [Signed] JOSEPHUS DANIELS. Chairman Press Bureau.