Political Capitol
Republican rivalry divides conservatives, progressives in Concord
If you think politics is a dirty game now, what with the controversial “Citizen’s United” U-S Supreme Court decision giving corporations freedom of speech (and freedom to spend limitless amounts to influence elections), then travel back with us to the turn of the 20th century, as told in Crosscurrents of Change: Concord, N.H. in the 20th Century, the Concord Historical Society’s 20th century history of the Capital City. Here’s an excerpt from Editor John Milne’s chapter, “Political Capital”:
By John Milne
The first big snowstorm of the year 1901 fell on January 10th. Sumner A. Dow, who lived on Monroe Street, hitched up his old sleigh, the one once owned by former Governor Josiah Bartlett, a New Hampshire signer of the Declaration of Independence. Bartlett’s sleigh was one of the few modes of transportation not dominated by the Boston & Maine Railroad. B&M trains chugged over 2,280 miles of main track and several hundred miles more of sidings in 1901, making the road “greater in proportion to wealth and population than … any other New England state.” In the century’s first few days, the railroad won the century’s first political confrontation. On January 9th, the B&M and its allies in the Republican Old Guard defeated Concord’s political giant, William Eaton Chandler, born 1835, who sought re-election to the United States Senate. Cantankerous, quick to take offense, nearsighted–he needed those pince-nez spectacles– Chandler practiced law and had edited the Concord Monitor for forty years. He owned the Republican Press Association, forerunner of the Rumford Press. He was born and lived cater-corner from the State House, on the lot later occupied by the New Hampshire Historical Society. His second wife was the daughter of John Parker Hale, New Hampshire’s celebrated abolitionist, who, between 1855 and 1865, occupied the Senate seat that Chandler first assumed in 1887.
If you want to read the rest of this story about William Chandler, the influence of the railroads, and the political shenanigans inside the walls of Concord’s Eagle Hotel, click here:
There are fascinating stories like this throughout the 375 plus pages of “Crosscurrents of Change Concord, N.H. in the 20th Century.” Your own copy is waiting at the offices of the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce, 45 South Main Street, or Gibson’s Book Store, 45 South Main Street, both in Concord, N.H., 03301. To order online, visit the Concord Historical Society’s website at www.concordhistoricalsociety.org and visit the online store.
In addition to his legal and business achievements, Chandler had practiced the art of politics for most of his sixty-six years. “He assisted in the formation of the Republican Party and has since grown gray in its service,” wrote a successor, George H. Moses. During his term as speaker of the New Hampshire House, Chandler campaigned for Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in Democratic towns, signing up a woman abolitionist as a stump speaker. Chandler’s reward was a trip to Washington, carrying the formal notification that Lincoln had won New Hampshire’s electoral votes in 1864. As national GOP chairman, Chandler ran the presidential campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and 1872, but he took a back seat in the 1876 race–until November 7, election night, when even the Republican Party chairman concluded that Rutherford B. Hayes had lost the presidency to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Chandler arrived in New York, sized up the situation, jammed between $9,000 and $10,000 in greenbacks into a carpetbag and caught the train for Florida. He made sure Florida’s Board of Election Commissioners awarded all the state’s electoral votes to Hayes. Along with more chicanery in the South, Hayes won all the disputed states, and the presidency, by a single electoral vote. Chandler was no tenderfoot in the ethical wilderness of Gilded Age politics. At the same time, Chandler criticized his fellow Republicans for turning their backs on freed slaves in the South, as white intimidation and violence barred blacks from voting and economic activity. Chandler emerged as one of the first northeastern progressives, Republicans who believed corporations had too much power and needed public regulation. Certainly he was no friend of the Boston & Maine. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the railroad openly installed governors and legislative leaders. Chandler called for state regulation of rail freight rates. In 1892, he denounced as “criminals” two Democrats who were B&M executives. He labeled New Hampshire lawmakers slaves to the railroad, deliberately choosing fighting words during the days when Union Army veterans still walked Concord’s streets. Chandler’s ire was directed at the corporate contributions used in 1896 to elect Republican William McKinley president. “For the first time,” Chandler said, “corporations began to make political contributions directly from their corporate treasuries. Prior to that time no such thing would have been tolerated.” When the GOP campaigned to defeat William Jennings Bryan, the populist and labor-union advocate who campaigned for government ownership of railroads, Chandler said, “The opposition caved in. These Democratic minorities in railroad and bank corporations made no objection to contributions to the Republican Party taken from the treasuries of the companies.” To put it another way, as Hanover political historian Jack Beatty did at the century’s end, “In 1896 corporations bought a controlling stake in the GOP.”
Arrayed against Chandler were the satin-lapelled politicians and businessmen who, in alliance with the B&M, made Concord the dominant city in New Hampshire politics at the birth of the century.
“The Republican Party and the railroad corporation had a mutually beneficial relationship after 1896,” wrote James Wright, a Dartmouth historian and, at the century’s end, president of the college. “The railroad worked through effective lobbyists in Concord as well as through ties to key House and Senate committees.”
In his history of the era, The Progressive Yankees, Wright recorded that the B&M’s president, Lucius Tuttle of Boston, “allegedly participated in final choices” of those legislative leaders in “Statesman’s Row,” the seats facing the speaker’s dais in the House chamber. In pamphlets printed on his presses and distributed widely, Chandler accused the railroad of making deals in the selection of governors. The B&M exercised even more power through allies on the Executive Council, a relic of colonial days that approved state contracts and could veto a governor’s appointments.
“Men up and down the state do the bidding of Lucius Tuttle … as readily, and more willingly, than his regular employees,” wrote Alvin J. Lucier, a Nashua lawyer elected to the Legislature in 1906. A Democrat, Lucier served through 1916.
Tuttle made the most of the mutually beneficial relationship. In those horse-and-buggy days, when roads were primitive, the B&M reigned as the most efficient mode of human travel and the only way to carry freight. The B&M wielded considerable economic power; it secretly gave rebates to big customers, driving up the cost for smaller shippers – a practice banned by law in 1903. The railroad was one of New Hampshire’s largest taxpayers and faced innumerable land and regulatory issues. Railroad operations were dangerous; Concord newspapers were filled with stories about railroad injuries and fatalities. Tuttle preferred taxes low and regulators feeble. He got both wishes. “In the collection of lobby jewels,” Lucier wrote, “The kohinoor of the collection is Henry M. Putney, of Manchester.” Known throughout New England as Put, this editor of the Manchester Mirror was, according to one historian, “the practical boss of the Republican Party, the man behind the governors.” The B&M was behind Putney, who chaired the New Hampshire Board of Railroad Commissioners, earning $2,500 a year while the governor took home just $1,000. Put’s legislative overseer, the chairman of the House Railroad Committee, was a reliable supporter of both Put and the railroad. Session after session that post was assigned to a Putney crony, Representative James French of Moultonborough.
The B&M maintained support from rank-and-file legislators by giving away free transportation. Passes were doled out to legislators and members of their families in the “Throne Room,” Suite No. 56 in the Eagle Hotel, directly across the street from the State House.
Just a block or so away lived Chandler, who demanded that passes be abolished, that railroads pay more taxes, and that the state regulate the price of passenger tickets and freight rates. There is no way to measure whether Chandler had the support of the general public. It didn’t matter. The Legislature elected senators; the constitutional amendment providing for popular election of senators did not take effect until 1913. The group that really mattered in 1901 was the caucus of 322 Republicans who dominated the 421-member General Court. The Monitor predicted on its first front page of 1901: “The unmistakable drift has been found to be toward Chandler.”
The Monitor’s optimism apparently depended on recent promises from Tuttle and John Sanborn, the B&M’s lobbyist, to stay neutral in the Senate election. But the iron horse used an iron fist. Lawmakers chugged into Concord on Boston & Maine trains, undoubtedly using those free passes. The Republicans were scheduled to caucus in Representatives Hall, but “The Eagle Hotel is the principal scene of the contest.” Five rivals challenged Chandler’s re-election.
The Eagle lobby was so packed, the Monitor wrote, that a man could not take a step without running the risk of stepping on a legislator’s toe. Amid the crowd Sanborn whispered to legislators that the railroad preferred Henry M. Burnham, born in 1844, an unremarkable probate judge from Putney’s Manchester. The team pleaded for votes in person, by letter, by telegraph and the newest technology, the telephone. “Mr. Sanborn,” Chandler complained, “is making it his whole business to send for members of the Legislature and urge them to vote for Mr. Burnham.”
The Republican caucus gathered on January 9. As usual, the members griped that there was no place to hang their coats. When the sergeant-at-arms opened the spectators’ gallery, the People and Patriot newspaper likened the stampede to the rush for seats at the free Walker lectures. At ten minutes before 9 p.m. the caucus cast its ballots. Chandler mustered just 47 votes. Of Senator Burnham, the Monitor sneered: “It is fatuous to suppose that his polished and colorless personality could have won him the 198 votes, which he received on the first ballot, had not the most strenuous efforts of the railroad power been exerted on his behalf.” The most praise that George Franklyn Willey, a favorable biographer, could muster was that Burnham was “a safe and reliable and industrious legislator.”
You can read more about Concord in the 20th century by buying a copy of Crosscurrents of Change: Concord, N.H. in the 20th Century. Order your copy including shipping on this website at http://concordhistoricalsociety.org/store/Books-c3944607
or get your copy in Concord at the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce, 49 South Main Street, or Gibson’s Bookstore at 45 South Main Street.
Keep checking our website for future excerpts from Crosscurrents of Change. They will appear periodically. The next excerpt will be from the chapter of the book entitled “Called to the Colors.”
