"
By the side of the partizan motives stalked the desire for gain.
There were those to whom parties meant but the opportunity for
sudden wealth. The President's admiration for commercial success
and his inability to read the motives of sycophants multiplied
their opportunities, and in the eight years of his administration
there was consummated the baneful union of business and politics.
During the second Grant campaign (1872), when Horace Greeley was
making his astounding run for President, the New York Sun hinted
at gross and wholesale briberies of Congressmen by Oakes Ames and
his associates who had built the Union Pacific Railroad, an
enterprise which the United States had generously aided with
loans and gifts.
Three committees of Congress, two in the House and one in the
Senate (the Poland Committee, the Wilson Committee, and the
Senate Committee), subsequently investigated the charges. Their
investigations disclosed the fact that Ames, then a member of the
House of Representatives, the principal stockholder in the Union
Pacific, and the soul of the enterprise, had organized, under an
existing Pennsylvania charter, a construction company called the
Credit Mobilier, whose shares were issued to Ames and his
associates. To the Credit Mobilier were issued the bonds and
stock of the Union Pacific, which had been paid for "at not more
than thirty cents on the dollar in road-making."* As the United
States, in addition to princely gifts of land, had in effect
guaranteed the cost of construction by authorizing the issue of
Government bonds, dollar for dollar and side by side with the
bonds of the road, the motive of the magnificent shuffle, which
gave the road into the hands of a construction company, was
clear.
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