Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  His technical knowledge proved equal to Spear’s, and superior to Wainwright’s, Melville’s, or O’Neil’s. He was so effective that even when Alston Dayton tried to break him down, the tone of his questions lacked the hostility and sarcasm to which Dayton had subjected other witnesses.7 When asked for specifics on the Fulton’s performance, the congressman learned that Nelson had kept a detailed record, which included scrupulous data on diving, surfacing, speed, course, torpedo launches, as well as fuel and air usage, even the agreeability of the food and accommodations available to the crew.

  Nelson pronounced the boat’s performance as “excellent” and also clarified another point that Lake had put at issue. When the chairman noted that the Fulton was “not the government’s boat,” which Lake had intimated was somehow conspiratorial, Nelson agreed that “she is the company’s boat,” but added, “she is the counterpart of the boats built for the government. While at New Suffolk, I took special care to go through these boats and to see that their arrangement is the same. She is an exact counterpart of the government boats.”

  Another point Lake had raised was that the Fulton’s gasoline tank, mounted inside the hull, was, due to the possibility of leaks or explosion, a danger to the crew. Lake’s notion was to mount the tank externally, on the deck. Nelson gave short shrift to that idea. “I think it is more safe to have it in the boat . . . the gasoline tank corresponds to a magazine on a ship. It is the most explosive part of the whole boat. If it is put on deck, and that boat is hit, the only part of her that is visible is her superstructure. If a shot hits that superstructure it goes right into your gasoline tank. If that tank should blow up, the fact that the thing was on the outside of the boat would not save the boat at all, because the explosion would be violent enough to smash her all to pieces; whereas a shot will not penetrate the water to any depth, and by having the tank below the water line you make it safe from that source. The leakage of a gasoline tank is very improbable, because as it is intended to contain an inflammable material, it is about the strongest and most carefully constructed part of the whole boat.”

  In the end, while Ensign Nelson agreed that the government should only purchase “the best available boats,” he insisted Holland’s were “the only proven reality.” Finally, when asked, “Is it then your deliberate, candid opinion that the Holland submarine boat in its present state of development is a practical weapon of war, and that its possession in sufficient numbers by this country would be a valuable and economical feature of defense?” Nelson replied, “I am very strongly of that opinion, sir.”

  With the naval officers done, the committee moved to Electric Boat personnel. They asked Frank Cable much the same questions they had asked of the officers, briefly questioned Charles Creecy about a competing patent claim that turned out to be frivolous—although Congressman Dayton did his best to make it sound legitimate—and then, finally, heard from Isaac Rice.

  Unlike most of the other witnesses, Rice would have no defenders. The tone of the questioning varied from cold to antagonistic and focused only on money. Even members in favor of the boat seemed to dislike him. At the outset, some implied that, as the Holland Torpedo Boat Company did not actually build the submarines, it was merely a shell to funnel government funds into Rice’s pockets.

  It was the obvious opening, and Rice was prepared. He parried that line of questioning with a shot at one of Simon Lake’s most vociferous supporters. “I see Admiral Melville, in an article in the North American Review, says anybody can build a submarine boat; that all you have got to do is to go around and buy some machinery and put it in a boat. I told a friend of mind that reminded me of a criticism of Columbus. It was said that Columbus really did not do anything; he just bought an ordinary boat; it was not even the best boat in the market at the time; he just sailed on an ordinary ocean, and that all he had to do was to sail west and find something.”

  He had also anticipated that Electric Boat would be accused of conspiring to prevent the Lake submarine from being evaluated against theirs. “We are not opposed in any shape or form to competition. The idea has grown up, somehow or other, that we are a monopoly and want to keep a monopoly. Not at all. What we do believe we are entitled to is what we have purchased under the Constitution of the United States in our patent rights. That is all we ask. We have to take our chances in business in any other respects. Everybody else ought to be allowed to compete with us. If a better submarine boat is built, we have to take our chances.”

  But when pressed as to whether he was willing to conduct the test, Rice became incredulous. “At our expense, of another boat? That is too much to ask.” When one of the committee members countered, “You have seven million dollars, according to your own figures. Why should you not be willing to make tests?” Rice replied, “If Mr. Lake has his own boat, we cannot make tests for him.”

  But at that point, Simon Lake did not have a boat to test. “If Mr. Lake . . . should come in and say the Government must only have the best, you cannot tell whether you have the best or not until the boats are built. Let them first build all these boats, and then you can see which boat you want. If this were a plaything, that is all right; but the Government is in the business of defending the country. Suppose I was in need of machinery and the inventors came around to tell me they have a machine that is better than mine. I would keep on buying my machine. I need it for my business, until the next best invention was produced. Then I would drop the old machine. That is the point we make. We are a little afraid that a good deal of this cannot possibly be in good faith . . . but is merely designed for the purpose of saying: ‘This may be better or that may be better,’ and we get no appropriation, and nobody else gets an appropriation. That is what we object to.”

  When the committee tried to pin Rice down, have him agree on the record to an actual test, rather than simply acceding to the principle, Rice said, “You would not require our permission. You have got the Government boats, and could make the tests with them. We could not help that. We would give you every facility, everything we knew of, to make that test.”

  There didn’t seem anywhere to go with that line of inquiry, so the committee switched to questioning why Electric Boat could possibly ask for appropriations for additional submarines when they had yet to deliver a single completed boat that had been contracted for. Rice was characteristically deft in his reply. After noting, “No company has ever treated the Government with the consideration that we have given,” he said, “we could have finished these boats if we had gone simply on the specifications which were drawn by the Department. But in order to give the Government the very best possible results, we first built our own boat, the Fulton, at our own expense, because on that boat we are permitted to make such changes and experiments as we chose. We could not do it with a Government boat. There is too much red tape. So we built our own boat [which] cost us fully as much as the Government pays us for boats. As changes have proved themselves on [the Fulton], we tore things out and put other things in, and gave the Government the benefit without one cent of charge.” And besides, he added, the Adder and other contracted for boats were either completed or virtually so and would be delivered as soon as they were tested, a matter of weeks.

  The committee members next appealed to Rice’s patriotism, or rather his lack of it. Electric Boat had concluded a deal with Vickers, Sons & Maxim in Great Britain to build five Holland submarines, which the Admiralty had agreed to purchase for £35,000, or $175,000, each. The first of these boats had been tested and accepted by the Royal Navy, the first Holland boat to actually be purchased. Terms of the agreement were vague—Rice first claimed he was paid a royalty, but when pressed, said it was instead a “consideration arrangement,” a sharing of profits, although he declined to be more precise. In any case, it later became clear that when Vickers built subsequent models, they owed Electric Boat nothing. Rice dismissed the committee’s concerns by indicating that accessing the British market simply gave the company another opportunity to impr
ove the product for the American navy at no cost to the American taxpayer.

  With every successful feint and dodge by their chess-master witness, the frustrated congressmen’s questions grew more hostile. Even a cursory reading of the record reveals an antagonism to Isaac Rice that was absent with any preceding witness. In some ways, this should not be surprising. Rice was rich, urbane, condescending, and Jewish, all traits that the committee members, most from rural districts outside the northeast, might well have found at the least unappealing. That they were unable to squeeze from him the slightest concession or admission would hardly have softened their dislike.

  They remained determined, however. When Rice claimed the company needed “encouragement” from Congress in the form of continued appropriations or Electric Boat would not be able to afford to keep its experts employed, Chairman Foss repeated the accusation, once again by O’Neil and Melville, that Holland boats cost only about $70,000 to build, less than half of the selling price to the navy.

  Foss then asked, “If it be true, what Admiral Melville or Admiral O’Neil says, that you have made a profit of $100,000 on each of these boats, do you not think that is pretty good encouragement on the part of the Government?”

  This allegation was absurd since, in the first place, neither O’Neil nor Melville would have had the vaguest firsthand knowledge of the costs of a Holland submarine—although Lake had almost certainly been whispering numbers in their ears—and in the second, Holland Torpedo Boat had yet to recoup a penny of the more than $250,000 they had spent in development. After besting the committee members on far more difficult issues, Rice should have been able to brush away this question with ease.

  Instead, he blundered.

  Whether he had become overconfident, distracted, or merely bored, instead of the adroit, ambiguous responses he had given previously, Rice instead replied, “In answer to that, I will say very frankly that if we made $20,000 on each of the boats, we would be perfectly satisfied.”

  Foss pounced. “Twenty thousand dollars? . . . Would you be willing then for the Government to build these boats to pay you a royalty of $20,000 on each one?”

  Rice was caught. He tried to backpedal, citing the need to satisfy stockholders, “who were entitled to something,” and that $20,000 allowed the company to “simply get along,” but the committee would not budge from $20,000 as a fair profit.

  The hearing was adjourned soon afterward. How much Rice’s testimony harmed his case cannot be determined, but when the House passed its naval appropriations bill the following month, there was no provision for purchasing additional submarines. The Senate tried to restore the appropriation, but the House rejected it once more. Finally, Ernest W. Roberts of Massachusetts, a member of the naval affairs committee who was favorable to the Holland submarine—although the reasons for his advocacy would come under serious scrutiny—introduced a separate bill to provide funding for ten additional boats.

  That bill set off months of bare-knuckle fighting, which culminated in a scandal that was splashed across front pages throughout the United States. And so, history’s first submarine battle took place not on the high seas, but in a committee room of the United States House of Representatives.

  CHAPTER 22

  PROXY WAR

  The unlikely centerpiece of the spectacle was an obscure, half-term congressman named Montague Lessler, who for one year only represented New York’s Seventh District, which comprised parts of lower Manhattan—including Wall Street—and all of Staten Island. Lessler had won a scandal-scarred special election to fill out the term of Nicholas Muller, a Tammany Hall Democrat who had resigned in December 1901, because of what he said was “ill-health.” The real reason, it was widely believed, was to allow August Belmont’s son Perry to be elected in his place. Money was said to have changed hands to induce Muller to step aside. (Perry Belmont later admitted to giving a “valuable oil painting” as a gift to Muller’s son.)

  Cornelius Vanderbilt took umbrage at such a blatant abuse of the public trust by his fellow millionaire and threatened to contest the race as a Republican. Vanderbilt, like Belmont, did not live in the district, which was reliably Democratic and heavily favored to remain so, and thus his flirtation with public office quickly faded. Forced to put a name on the ballot, Republicans chose Lessler, a Staten Island lawyer who had never before held public office. In a brief but acrimonious campaign, the patrician Belmont committed the fatal error of refusing to pay due homage to Tammany Hall, who began a “down with the carpetbagger” whispering campaign. Amid charges by Belmont that operatives of his own party had sabotaged his coronation with bribery and vote rigging—a former Democratic alderman would be indicted and acquitted of both charges—Lessler won by only 394 votes on January 7, 1902.

  Lessler, who seemed stunned that he had actually been elected, arrived in Washington to take his seat only days later, and was promptly assigned to the naval affairs committee, just in time to be present for Simon Lake’s appearance in February and the hearings on Lake’s charges in May.

  Montague Lessler

  During the hearings, Lessler looked favorably on Simon Lake and was mildly antagonistic to the witnesses supporting the Holland submarine, although not as blatantly as was Alston Dayton. He did, however, exhibit marked antipathy to Isaac Rice who was, even at that time, a business associate and close friend of August Belmont. Afterward, Lessler announced his opposition to further appropriations for Holland submarines and, although he had been a guest on a test voyage—which he described as “quite an experience”—he voted to cut off funding.

  In November 1902, Lessler ran for a full term but, because of reapportionment, was in the Eighth District rather than the Seventh. There, despite a substantial overlap in the districts’ territories, he had the misfortune to be matched against Big Tim Sullivan, a Tammany Hall leader so corrupt that the New York Times called his nomination “disgraceful and revolting.”1 Sullivan, as predicted, won easily, and as a result, the following March, when the new Congress was sworn in, Montague Lessler would be sent home.

  The House convened for its lame-duck session in early January 1903. Two weeks later, on January 20, Lessler approached his colleagues on the naval affairs committee with stunning revelations that he later claimed he expected to remain private.

  Just weeks after his defeat at the polls, he said, in either late November or early December 1902—he couldn’t recall which—a Republican operative from his district named Philip Doblin paid a visit to his congressional office on Nassau Street in New York City. Doblin, who he described as a “young man” he knew only casually—although Doblin, at thirty-seven, was four years Lessler’s senior—was a familiar figure on the fringes of New York politics, having served as a state convention delegate and a member of the board of elections. He was also familiar to Lessler, as he had worked full-time on Lessler’s reelection campaign and continued to have permission to use the congressman’s office and telephone whenever he needed to. Newspapers would later describe him as “known around City Hall as Lessler’s man.”2 When Doblin was appointed as a receiver for bankruptcy court in mid-1902, he gave Lessler’s office as his business address.

  As Lessler recalled the encounter, Doblin “came in one morning and he asked me if the Holland submarine boat proposition was would come again before the House and I said that I supposed so. He said, ‘Are you still opposed to it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He then said that he had been sent for by [former New York congressman Lemuel] Quigg, and that Quigg had said to him that there was $5,000 in it if I could be brought to the other side. My recollection is that I simply laughed at it and told him that I did not want to hear anything more about it. . . . He said that Quigg was a man of power and influence in New York, and that of course if subsequently I wanted to come back here [to Congress], in aiding him I would aid myself in such a proposition in doing him such a favor.”3

  According to Lessler, Doblin was summarily dismissed. Then, either the following day or as long as ten days afterwa
rd—Lessler was again uncertain—Quigg telephoned him from his office at 100 Broadway and asked to come by. That Lessler’s timeline seemed indistinct struck some as odd since the incidents had occurred less than two months before and were such that they should have left a stronger impression. In any event, Lessler said that Quigg showed up at his office an hour after the telephone call, where the two “passed amenities,” and, before Quigg could even mention the Holland submarine, Lessler “said at once that there should be no question of money in this business.”

  Quigg was then said to have fallen silent while Lessler “explained to him at quite some length” the source of his opposition “going into the history of the construction, and what they were, and describing the whole business—the technical—so far as I knew it.” Quigg then “got up and said, ‘I see that you are opposed to this proposition, and have evidently looked into it. I have no interest in it.’” Lessler also recalled Quigg expressing distaste for Isaac Rice, although he could not recall the reason. Finally, Quigg said “he had absolutely no interest in the boat or the company, but said that a man by the name of Hunter—my recollection is that he had done him some favors—had asked him to see me and look into it. That ended the conversation, and he went out.”

  In addition, Lessler confided to the committee members, Doblin’s visit was not the first instance in which he had been approached. In June 1902, after the Senate had reinstated the submarine appropriations, but before the Roberts bill had been introduced in the House, John McCullagh, New York State superintendent of elections, paid Lessler a visit in his Washington office. “The conversation took place on the Monday night preceding the first meeting of the committee when we considered the Senate bill . . . and so he said, ‘I have been sent by some men in New York who can reelect you or beat you, to ask you to vote for the Holland submarine boat.’ I said to him, ‘I will see you in hell first—I will see them in hell first.’ He then said, ‘Then do it for me,’ but I said, ‘No, Chief; I can not do it.’”