Collis Potter Huntington Quotes
I do not think we can get any legislation this session for extension of land grants unless we pay more for it than it is worth.
Sometimes the costs of the bribes was too great an investment for the likely year. Bribery decisions were made with the same sort of analysis as buying land or a piece of capital machinery. Just business.
Collis P. Huntington, 1821-1900, President, Southern Pacific Railroad, Letter to his associate, November 9, 1877
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
$200,000 then was the equivalent of well over $10 million today, and this is about what it costs a company in lobbyists fees and Congressional Campaign Contributions to get a bill passed in the current political environment.
Bribing Congressmen was quite common. In those days, money to Congressmen and Senators was not even disguised as campaign contributions. The letters were the short terms for the different agents.
Huntington and his associates were used to bribing Congressmen to vote for favorable railroad legislation.
This is one of the rare quotations which shows how the paid lobbyists work with a few legislators and legislative staff members to get their legislative changes written into law without having to persuade a majority of the Congressional Committee much less a majority of the Congress. Abramoff went to jail along with others in one of the biggest political scandals in modern America.
In 1908 William Randolph Hurst made public a series of letters showing that the senator was being paid large sums by the Standard Oil company and was also being instructed on pending legislation. See John Archbold. The senator was pressured out of public life:
The bill went down to a narrow defeat, but the Republican leadership of the House held the vote open for a record setting 3 hours, until they could persuade enough members to reverse their vote. After the 3 hours, the bill passed by one vote. The House Ethics Committee did not see that as sufficient reason to start an ethics investigation.
He was referring to his practice of distributing shares of stock to other congressmen on behalf of Credit Mobilier and Union Pacific. Ames was censured by the Congress in 1872, for "seeking to procure congressional attention to the affairs of a corporation in which he was interested.” The cartoon to the left is from the period showing all the congressmen getting their piece of the Mobilier Credit cake.
Collis Potter Huntington was an American industrialist and railway magnate. He was one of the Big Four of western railroading (along with Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker) who invested in Theodore Judah's idea to build the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. Huntington helped lead and develop other major interstate lines, such as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O), which he was recruited to help complete. The C&O, completed in 1873, fulfilled a long-held dream of Virginians of a rail link from the James River at Richmond to the Ohio River Valley. The new railroad facilities adjacent to the river there resulted in expansion of the former small town of Guyandotte, West Virginia into part of a new city which was named Huntington in his honor.
