Commissions. My successor acknowledged the right, upheld the view of the politicians in question, and abandoned the commissions, to the lasting detriment of the people as a whole.
One thing is worth pointing out: During the seven and a half years of my Administration we greatly and usefully extended the sphere of Governmental action, and yet we reduced the burden of the taxpayers; for we reduced the interest-bearing debt by more than $90,000,000. To achieve a marked increase in efficiency and at the same time an increase in economy is not an easy feat; but we performed it.
There was one ugly and very necessary task. This was to discover and root out corruption wherever it was found in any of the departments. The first essential was to make it clearly understood that no political or business or social influence of any kind would for one moment be even considered when the honesty of a public official was at issue. It took a little time to get this fact thoroughly drilled into the heads both of the men within the service and of the political leaders without. The feat was accomplished so thoroughly that every effort to interfere in any shape or way with the course of justice was abandoned definitely and for good. Most, although not all, of the frauds occurred in connection with the Post-Office Department and the Land Office.
It was in the Post-Office Department that we first definitely established the rule of conduct which became universal throughout the whole service. Rumors of corruption in the department became rife, and finally I spoke of them to the then First Assistant Postmaster-General, afterwards Postmaster-General, Robert J. Wynne. He reported to me, after some investigation, that in his belief there was doubtless corruption, but that it was very difficult to get at it, and that the offenders were confident and defiant because of their great political and business backing and the ramifications of their crimes. Talking the matter over with him, I came to the conclusion that the right man to carry on the investigation was the then Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General, now a Senator from Kansas, Joseph L. Bristow, who possessed the iron fearlessness needful to front such a situation. Mr. Bristow had perforce seen a good deal of the seamy side of politics, and of the extent of the unscrupulousness with which powerful influence was brought to bear to shield offenders. Before undertaking the investigation he came to see me, and said that he did not wish to go into it unless he could be assured that I would stand personally behind him, and, no matter where his inquiries led him, would support him and prevent interference with him. I answered that I would certainly do so. He went into the investigation with relentless energy, dogged courage, and keen intelligence. His success was complete, and the extent of his services to the Nation are not easily to be exaggerated. He unearthed a really appalling amount of corruption, and he did his work with such absolute thoroughness that the corruption was completely eradicated.
We had, of course, the experience usual in all such investigations. At first there was popular incredulity and disbelief that there was much behind the charges, or that much could be unearthed. Then when the corruption was shown there followed a yell of anger from all directions, and a period during which any man accused was forthwith held guilty by the public; and violent demands were made by the newspapers for the prosecution not only of the men who could be prosecuted with a fair chance of securing conviction and imprisonment, but of other men whose misconduct had been such as to warrant my removing them from office, but against whom it was not possible to get the kind of evidence which would render likely conviction in a criminal case. Suits were brought against all the officials whom we thought we could convict; and the public complained bitterly that we did not bring further suits. We secured several convictions, including convictions of the most notable offenders. The trials consumed a good deal of time. Public attention was attracted to something else. Indifference succeeded to excitement, and in some subtle way the juries seemed to respond to the indifference. One of the worst offenders was acquitted by a jury; whereupon not a few of the same men who had insisted that the Government was derelict in not criminally prosecuting every man whose misconduct was established so as to make it necessary to turn him out of office, now turned round and, inasmuch as the jury had not found this man guilty of crime, demanded that he should be reinstated in office! It is needless to say that the demand was not granted. There were two or three other acquittals, of prominent outsiders. Nevertheless the net result was that the majority of the worst offenders were sent to prison, and the remainder dismissed from the Government service, if they were public officials, and if they were not public officials at least so advertised as to render it impossible that they should ever again have dealings with the Government. The department was absolutely cleaned and became one of the very best in the Government. Several Senators came to me—Mr. Garfield was present on the occasion—and said that they were glad I was putting a stop to corruption, but they hoped I would avoid all scandal; that if I would make an example of some one man and then let the others quietly resign, it would avoid a disturbance which might hurt the party. They were advising me in good faith, and I was as courteous as possible in my answer, but explained that I would have to act with the utmost rigor against the offenders, no matter what the effect on the party, and, moreover, that I did not believe it would hurt the party. It did not hurt the party. It helped the party. A favorite war-cry in American political life has always been, "Turn the rascals out." We made it evident that, as far as we were concerned, this war-cry was pointless; for we turned our own rascals out.
There were important and successful land fraud prosecutions in several Western States. Probably the most important were the cases prosecuted in Oregon by Francis J. Heney, with the assistance of William J. Burns, a secret service agent who at that time began his career as a great detective. It would be impossible to overstate the services rendered to the cause of decency and honesty by Messrs. Heney and Burns. Mr. Heney was my close and intimate adviser professionally and non-professionally, not only as regards putting a stop to frauds in the public lands, but in many other matters of vital interest to the Republic. No man in the country has waged the battle for National honesty with greater courage and success, with more whole-hearted devotion to the public good; and no man has been more traduced and maligned by the wrong-doing agents and representatives of the great sinister forces of evil. He secured the conviction of various men of high political and financial standing in connection with the Oregon prosecutions; he and Burns behaved with scrupulous fairness and propriety; but their services to the public caused them to incur the bitter hatred of those who had wronged the public, and after I left office the National Administration turned against them. One of the most conspicuous of the men whom they had succeeded in convicting was pardoned by President Taft—in spite of the fact that the presiding Judge, Judge Hunt, had held that the evidence amply warranted the conviction, and had sentenced the man to imprisonment. As was natural, the one hundred and forty-six land-fraud defendants in Oregon, who included the foremost machine political leaders in the State, furnished the backbone of the opposition to me in the Presidential contest of 1912. The opposition rallied behind Messrs. Taft and LaFollette; and although I carried the primaries handsomely, half of the delegates elected from Oregon under instructions to vote for me, sided with my opponents in the National Convention—and as regards some of them I became convinced that the mainspring of their motive lay in the intrigue for securing the pardon of certain of the men whose conviction Heney had secured.
Land fraud and post-office cases were not the only ones. We were especially zealous in prosecuting all of the "higher up" offenders in the realms of politics and finance who swindled on a large scale. Special assistants of the Attorney-General, such as Mr. Frank Kellogg, of St. Paul, and various first-class Federal district attorneys in different parts of the country secured notable results: Mr. Stimson and his assistants, Messrs. Wise, Denison, and Frankfurter, in New York, for instance, in connection with the prosecution of the Sugar Trust and of the banker Morse, and of a great metropolitan newspaper for opening its columns to obscene and immoral advertisements; and in St. Louis Messrs. Dyer and Nortoni, who, among other services, secured the conviction and imprisonment of Senator Burton, of Kansas; and in Chicago Mr. Sims, who raised his office to the highest pitch of efficiency, secured the conviction of the banker Walsh and of the Beef Trust, and first broke through the armor of the Standard Oil Trust. It is not too much to say that these men, and others like them, worked a complete revolution in the enforcement of the Federal laws, and made their offices organized legal machines fit and ready to conduct smashing fights for the people's rights and to enforce the laws in aggressive fashion. When I took the Presidency, it was a common and bitter saying that a big man, a rich man, could not be put in jail. We put many big and rich men in