by Charles Lane
The solution they hit upon was to call for the abolition of the Secret Service, at least as it was currently constituted, but for reasons unrelated, ostensibly, to the bungled burglary.
Wilson’s forty-page handwritten report to Bristow, submitted on July 27, 1874, and quickly leaked to the press, described Wilson’s safe burglary inquiry as active but incomplete and, in any case, no substitute for the more definitive work of the grand jury. The solicitor of the Treasury emphasized, however, that he had identified many other irregularities at the Secret Service. The detective force was “not now and never has been expressly authorized by any act of Congress.” The dual lines of authority connecting it to the secretary of the Treasury and the attorney general created “confusion in the public business.” Placing Secret Service headquarters in New York “served to weaken that sense of direct personal responsibility necessary to perfect discipline and efficiency.”
Worst of all, Wilson contended, the Secret Service was just not getting tangible results proportionate to the money it expended. As authority for this accusation, Wilson cited opinions he had received from United States Attorneys and Marshals around the country, the latter of whom assured him that they and their deputies could do the same job cheaper.53 The time had come, Wilson asserted, for the Secret Service to “be thoroughly reorganized and largely reduced,” so that the United States could revert to a decentralized federal law enforcement structure more appropriate to its “free government.” This would rely on United States Attorneys and Marshals, as had been the case before the Civil War. Congressional appropriations would be limited to subsidizing rewards for citizens’ tips to these officials.
As a final courtesy to Whitley before he submitted this report, Bluford Wilson gave the Secret Service chief twenty-four hours to file a written defense of the detective force he had led for the previous five years.
By now, Whitley boiled with paranoia and fury. Yet he managed to keep his emotions under control as he dictated his point-by-point rebuttal to Wilson. It was as if he knew this might be his final official submission as Secret Service chief, and had determined to go out on a high note.
Whitley’s closely reasoned sixteen-page argument for a modern, national detective force did indeed represent the Secret Service chief at his polemical best. It began with a pointed mention of his “detective experience of upward of twelve years in the service of the United States.” This experience showed that the division enabled the government to develop “a compact organization which should permeate all parts of the country, and have a responsible central head,” and that specialized in truly national crimes: counterfeiting, revenue fraud, and smuggling. Federal marshals, working in their state-level districts, could never match those capabilities.
Proof of this was the central archive of criminal records Whitley’s team had assembled, including the photographs and biographies of chronic offenders, which was property of the United States government, and available upon request to all federal officers. Such a database could never have been collected under the reward system—which, Whitley noted, had led to corruption and abuse during William P. Wood’s tenure, and would do so again if Wilson insisted on resurrecting it.54
These were all excellent points. Whitley might also have noted that gutting the Secret Service would leave the federal government unable to penetrate the Ku Klux Klan, or similar organizations, if and when they staged a comeback in the volatile South. The only United States Attorney who expressed unequivocal support for the Secret Service in response to Bluford Wilson’s survey was James R. Beckwith of New Orleans, who had just prosecuted the massacre of more than sixty black men by a white mob at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. The Secret Service had helped identify and arrest the suspects, through dangerous undercover work in remote areas.55
Whitley concluded his letter to Solicitor Wilson with a defiant plea:
I have labored to render the Secret Service Division of the Treasury Department a compact organization, steady in its purpose of suppressing the crime of counterfeiting, unceasing in the vigilance rendered imperative by its discipline, and which the records show to have been successful in its results.
The solicitor of the Treasury was having none of it. The youthful lawyer countered Whitley’s pragmatic arguments with ideological assertions. His trump card was the inveterate American disdain for European-style surveillance and centralized policing. “Upon principle,” Bluford Wilson wrote, “I am radically opposed to any organized system of espionage in connection with our free government.”
The courts, federal marshals, and United States Attorneys were the only “safe agencies with which to cope with offenders against the United States laws,” Wilson insisted. If they were not effective, he insisted, “they should be made so.” In any case, they would be preferable to Hiram C. Whitley and his Secret Service, “whose arts and presence are hardly more tolerable to the public than those of the criminals they seek to detect.”
Wilson made no comment on the similarity between his views and those voiced by Representative James B. Beck and other white supremacist Democratic foes of the Republican government he served. The convergence was not altogether surprising; the Grant administration’s “corruption” had been the joint rallying cry of Democrats and Liberal Republicans in the 1872 election. Whitley’s escapades provided an all-too-valid excuse for both to raise it again in 1874.
* * *
No one fought more fiercely when cornered than Hiram C. Whitley. He also could tell when he was licked. On September 3, 1874, he submitted his letter of resignation as chief of the Secret Service Division, the job he had held for half a decade and considered preferable to the presidency itself. Secretary Bristow accepted it, effective September 30. Ichabod C. Nettleship, the assistant chief whose warning against the safe burglary Whitley had failed to heed, also stepped down, along with a half dozen of their top detectives.
In interviews with the press, Whitley insisted that he resigned due to ill health. He denied involvement in the safe burglary and declared himself “the victim of as foul a conspiracy as has ever been concocted in this or any other country for the defamation of the character of a public officer.” He took a parting shot at Bluford Wilson, describing him, not entirely inaccurately, as “violently prejudiced against the Government system of secret service.”56 It was an exercise in futility. As chief, Whitley had made it his “great aim,” as one of his detectives put it, “to lift the Secret Service Division up in respectability and in the confidence of the people,” yet now the division faced not only condemnation but extinction.57
Whitley’s sudden fall, and that of his celebrated force, astonished America. The public’s amazement only increased after the grand jury indicted him and Nettleship in October. “Then a whole division, and one that deemed itself impregnably intrenched, by virtue of the confidences it possessed and the work it had performed, was virtually thrust out of the government employ, and its head-quarters removed from New York to the Treasury Department, where, in future, the Secretary could have it under his eye,” journalist Henry V. Boynton wrote. “Such an event had never happened before in the history of the government.”58
Many welcomed it. “The extirpation of that branch of the Treasury service...will not grieve the American people,” Bluford Wilson’s brother, James H. Wilson, wrote to Bristow. “The superiors of those officers have discovered that the secret service [sic] was entirely too secret for the interests of the government,” the Philadelphia Inquirer opined on September 14, 1874. “The system is wrong. It has grown up by degrees, and assumed power after power until it became an inquisition menacing the liberties of citizens and proving an instrument of unmitigated evil.” Reminiscent of the secret police in France, “such a department in connection with any American official establishment is contrary to the principles and traditions which we have inherited from our forefathers,” the Inquirer concluded.59
In the end, it would not prove quite as easy to
“extirpate” the Secret Service, as James H. Wilson assumed. The division still had friends in high places. One of Washington’s most powerful Republicans, Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, had been a believer in undercover operations since his days directing Hiram C. Whitley’s activities in New Orleans. He urged Secretary Bristow not to liquidate the Secret Service precipitously.60 Now that the 1874 elections were over—the Democrats had swept back into control of the House of Representatives—there was less for the Republicans to gain, politically, from abolishing it anyway, at least in the short term.
What’s more, Bristow realized that the post–Civil War United States could not so easily revert to the pre–Civil War status quo in federal law enforcement. Among other things, the country had shifted irreversibly to a national currency, which necessitated a national means of fighting counterfeiting.
Shortly before Christmas 1874, the New York Evening Post reported that Bristow had decided against the division’s outright abolition. Instead, he would try to reform it.61 He would retain a streamlined group of newly hired, carefully screened detectives, but also a few holdovers who had proven themselves honest and effective. Bristow would pick a new chief, one who could replicate Whitley’s successes without replicating his excesses.
Some crimes really did have national impact; they really could be combated only with the help of specialized personnel, recruited nationally, working undercover, and drawing on a common base of verified information, just as Whitley had always said.
He had lost his power, but he had not lost that argument.
7
“Suspicions come from Heaven.”
The Ku Klux Klan arrived in Emporia, Kansas, on March 23, 1906. More than a thousand people—business leaders, farmers, railroad workers—turned out to see the mysterious men in their robes and hoods. Even a few men and women of color joined the audience. These Midwesterners watched, transfixed, as Klansmen captured an African American man who had chased a white girl to the edge of a cliff, where she leaped to her death rather than submit to his lust. Applause erupted when they heard that the Klan had hanged the dark-skinned villain, tied his lifeless body with ropes to the saddle of a galloping horse, and dragged the corpse through the streets.
None of this violence, to be sure, had occurred in real life. The awful events were fictional, acted out on stage at Emporia’s thousand-seat opera house. The Clansman, Thomas Dixon Jr.’s play presenting his version of Reconstruction in the South, had come to town.1
Based on Dixon’s bestselling novel, the melodrama demonized African Americans, and glorified the Klan, to a degree that was extreme even for the Jim Crow era. Controversy followed Dixon’s show as it played theaters across the United States. Editorialists, politicians, and clergy—white and black—denounced it. Some cities, including Southern towns like Macon and Atlanta in Georgia, banned it. Yet the play’s racial, political, and sexual themes, lavish costumes, and live horses prancing across the boards made The Clansman a hit. It sold out wherever it did appear, beginning with a September 1905 production in Norfolk, Virginia.2
Emporia, a stop along the transcontinental railroad that The Clansman cast was riding to engagements in California, proved no exception.
Antislavery emigrants from New England founded the frontier town in the 1850s, and it remained staunchly Republican, with Union veterans among its leading citizens, and a significant African American population.3 Emporia’s Methodist minister sermonized against seeing The Clansman, warning that it was “calculated to stir up race strife.” Those who attended the performance would be “almost guilty of treason,” he preached.4 The Emporia Gazette, under the renowned progressive editor William Allen White, branded Dixon’s work “the sort of play that Emporia people ought to avoid.”5
Nevertheless, Emporia’s bookstores sold hundreds of copies of Dixon’s novel. At 7:00 a.m. on March 20, 1906, an hour before the box office opened, Emporians lined up in freezing weather to buy seats for the one-night-only March 23 performance, even though the opera house had doubled its usual prices. The prevailing sentiment, it seemed, was that everyone was entitled to make up his or her own mind about The Clansman.6
To the undoubted dismay of Emporia’s religious and journalistic leaders, many who did watch the play seemed receptive to Dixon’s message: the Ku Klux Klan had saved the white race during Reconstruction. Women in the audience cried, and men hissed, as an actor portraying a mixed-race Republican politician demanded to marry the play’s Southern white heroine. The spectators laughed uproariously as white actors in blackface—the comic relief—stumbled and bumbled with stereotypical hilarity.7
There were no such expressions from the Emporia opera house’s proprietor, the wealthy citizen who had supplied most of the initial $35,000 cost of the building, and who took in The Clansman from his private box near the stage.8
The blue-eyed gentleman in his seventies happened to have extensive firsthand experience with the Reconstruction-era Klan, probably as much as anyone else in the United States. His assessment of The Clansman, when and if he made it public, would be especially well-informed, and, accordingly, influential.
First, though, Hiram C. Whitley wanted to witness Dixon’s show for himself.
* * *
Whitley and his family had settled in Emporia roughly three decades earlier, following his forced resignation from the Secret Service. All things considered, Whitley had been fortunate to avoid incarceration.
Whitley’s trial, on two counts of conspiring against Columbus Alexander “to cause it to be believed by the people of the United States that he was a corrupt and infamous man,” began on October 20, 1874.9 With a midterm election campaign in full swing, pro-Democratic newspapers trumpeted the alleged abuse of power by the former architect of federal undercover operations against the Ku Klux Klan in the South, and counterfeiters in New York. The Republican press countered that the trial demonstrated the Grant administration’s willingness to crack down on wrongdoing, even within its own ranks.
Michael Hayes was the government’s star witness, testifying in return for immunity from prosecution. His story received corroboration from a Treasury Department clerk who swore the signature on the receipt for Hayes’s now-notorious telegram to Whitley in New York was indeed that of the erstwhile Secret Service chief. Whitley’s lawyer called Whitley’s friends and former Secret Service detectives to vouch for his version of events: Whitley was in Boston at a dinner party when the telegram supposedly arrived, so the handwriting on the receipt must be that of someone he had delegated to sign for him.
An advertisement for The Clansman at the Whitley Opera House. (Emporia Gazette)
Whitley did not take the stand, but was otherwise his usual combative self—admitting nothing, denying everything, making wild counteraccusations. Outside court one day, he accosted Columbus Alexander, pointed at a prosecution witness, and shouted, “All that man testifies to there is lies; I just want to tell you that.” Refusing to acknowledge Whitley directly, Alexander turned to a bystander and huffed, “I don’t want any such man to approach me.”10 In a clumsy effort at revenge, Whitley lodged formal perjury charges against Michael Hayes, only to have the trial judge accuse Whitley himself of “interference with this court,” and hold him in contempt.11
After thirty-six days, the trial ended—in a hung jury. The twelve men split 9–3 in favor of “not guilty.”12 Democratic newspapers ridiculed the result, attributing it to the fact that the jurors had been drawn from a largely Republican jury pool. It was an understandable complaint, given that the defense scenario—Whitley was not a conspirator, but the victim of a conspiracy engineered by Michael Hayes—was so far-fetched.
Nevertheless, a reasonable juror could have had doubts. Even if the charges against Whitley were true, as they probably were, did they really amount to a crime, as opposed to a political dirty trick? Newspapers called it the Washington Safe Burglary Case, but it was an odd
sort of burglary in which the alleged perpetrators had permission to enter. The plot may have been designed to plant incriminating documents on Columbus Alexander, but that had never actually occurred. If anything, Alexander emerged with his reputation enhanced.
Whitley probably also benefited from a widespread suspicion that whatever he had done must have been on orders from above. “If Whitley were involved, and the whole secret service [sic] with him,” a Baltimore Sun editorial wondered, “what influence enlisted their agency in a vulgar conspiracy to rob a safe and ‘put up the job’ on a Washington taxpayer?”13 Speculation centered on Orville E. Babcock, President Grant’s right-hand man, as the real mastermind.
This wasn’t true, as Whitley knew. Yet many people believed it, which gave the former Secret Service chief leverage over Babcock. Consequently, the president’s aide lived “in fear of Whitley for the past,” as solicitor of the Treasury Bluford Wilson noted in a March letter to his brother.14
For about half a year after his trial, Whitley maneuvered at the edges of official Washington, attempting to exploit his inside knowledge, actual and perceived. He sought a new federal job, and permanent immunity from criminal liability in the safe burglary case, which was technically still open because his trial had ended in a hung jury, not acquittal.
* * *
Whitley’s first ploy was to persuade Kate Williams, wife of the attorney general, to write anonymous blackmail notes to the wives of various cabinet officers and to First Lady Julia Grant. The notes threatened to expose alleged corruption in the administration. Then, Whitley approached Babcock, told him who the author of the notes was, and offered to blackmail Kate Williams into ceasing her threats. Babcock, beholden to Whitley for reasons of his own, agreed to pursue the idea.