The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment by C. Hoebeke

Author:C. Hoebeke [Hoebeke, C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Legislative Branch, Political Science, American Government, History, General
ISBN: 9781560002178
Google: QWLuAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 8641057
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1995-01-15T13:32:26+00:00

The Muckrakers

This predisposition to accept a senator’s credentials was not at all shared, on the other hand, by that generation of journalists who founded the business of reporting political scandal for handsome profits. Naturally, the “muckrakers” found a good deal more “taint” than the Senate ever bothered to investigate. In 1907, Arena accused Simon Guggenheim of blackmailing the Colorado legislature, charging him with threatening to publish a list of every person to whom he had “paid a dollar, and what it was paid for,” if he was not chosen for the senatorship.39 In Cosmopolitan, George Creel’s “Carnival of Corruption in Mississippi” told a lurid tale of money, whiskey and women, proffered by the “lumber trust, oil-mill trust, and the rest,” in order to install Le Roy Percy to the Senate in 1910.40 Previously, in 1906, Cosmopolitan had run the most famous “exposure” of senatorial perfidy in a series of articles entitled, “The Treason of the Senate,” written by a popular social novelist named David Graham Phillips.41

One can only speculate as to the impact of the muckrakers on the movement for direct democracy, a movement predicated in large part on the enlightening possibilities of the modern press. Certainly, their stories sold. Phillips’ articles, for instance, were reprinted and reviewed in small town newspapers across the country. City newsstands were sold out two months in a row. By the third issue in the series, Cosmopolitan’s subscriptions were up by fifty percent, no doubt satisfying the magazine’s owner and publisher, William Randolph Hearst, one of the founding fathers of yellow journalism.42

Although these reports were generally founded on sly distortions and mendacious innuendo, their truth is not of primary concern here. Assuming the public took any stock in what it read, why should it have sought the remedy in direct elections? The candidacy of Le Roy Percy, like Lorimer’s, was the result of compromise, necessitated by a senatorial primary in a one-party state which split the popular votes among six candidates with no majority. Guggenheim (the same corrupted Guggenheim who established, in memory of his son, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for advanced study abroad) had also made his public “canvass,” and what is more, he voted for the Seventeenth Amendment when the question was finally put to the Senate in 1911. Phillips’ “Treason” indictments were leveled against twenty-one senatorial corruptionists who supposedly could not have been chosen in a fair election by the people, but among them were six former members of state legislatures, eleven former members of the House (serving repeated terms), one lieutenant governor, four governors, and one vice president of the United states, all of whom held their former offices by popular vote.43

Another fact often disregarded about Senate elections is that corruption was simply more sensational, but certainly not more frequent than in other elections at the time. The people of Adams County, Ohio, effectively demolished the premise that direct elections were inherently purer elections. During the months of December 1910 and January 1911, more than fifteen hundred people were indicted for taking bribes at the polls.

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