Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/371

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LINCOLN STEFFENS
355

the rest of the Big Four were busy and the Young Democrats were enthusiastic in their offices.

Good government didn't last long in Arizona, however. Pretty soon a change occurred. The first sign of it was the gradual disintegration of the unsalaried boards. The "leading citizens" on them tired of the work. Then the leading banker began to play politics. Heney didn't sus- pect Fleming. He assumed that a national banker, having so much at stake, would be interested in having the territory run right, and he did not learn till later that his banker-treasurer had taken a mortgage on the " Governor " by lending Hughes $6,000 on his newspaper. He let Fleming fill the places vacated by the leading citizens and by and by the Treasurer was boss, not Heney, not the Big Four.


A Banker as a Boss

Heney's suspicions were first aroused by the efforts of Hughes and Fleming to pay him extra compensation. It was the cus- tom they said, and they were right. Heney had found that Hughes's predecessor. Gov- ernor Oakes Murphy, had drawn illegally thousands of dollars for expenses in market- ing territorial bonds "out East"; and the former auditor, who was allowed $10 for affixing his seal to 1,500 of the bonds, had charged $1,500 and besides $10 "for one day's labor." This sort of graft had run all through the old administration. But Heney, the Attorney General, was suing for the recovery of these moneys and he couldn't understand why Hughes and Fleming were so anxious to have him break the law he was enforcing. Once when he was in Washington on his own political business he was notified of a suit brought by certain Eastern bankers against Fleming as treasurer to recover $10,000 put up to bind an agreement to take $500,000 of the territorial bonds. The panic of '93 had changed the bankers' minds, and all they had to sue on was a letter from John M. Dillon advising them to have the bonds re-executed by the new offi- cers of the territory. Heney went to New York to see this distinguished Wall Street attorney. Dillon was " out." "All right," said Heney to Dillon's part- ner. "These bankers think Dillon's letter means that the bonds are not valid unless they are re-executed. That isn't the law and you know it. But if Judge Dillon will write a statement that it is, I'll quit and the territory will pay back the $10,000. If he won't do that, I'm going to denounce him in the newspapers for deception and tricker}'." "Wait a moment," said Mr. Dillon's partner. He disappeared and when he came back Dillon was "in." He saw Heney, sized him up and he admitted most courteously that the bonds were valid. His clients, the bankers, dropped their contest. When Heney reported this, Hughes and Fleming voted him a handsome sum to de- fray his expenses East. That made him angry. " Whether I had earned the money or not, it was unlawful to pay me," he says, " and they knew that." The next thing was a wire from his brother Ben asking whether he should accept a warrant for $1,000 is- sued to him for his expert work. Since Frank had warned Ben that he must look to the Legislature for his pay and that he might never get it, he telegraphed him to refuse the warrant and, cutting short his trip, hurried home to see what the matter was. Why the Good Men were Bad "And I found out mighty soon," he says, "that the reason that they were so urgent about paying me extras was that they were issuing warrants to one another. They were grafting. There was the manipulation of public funds and contracts; that's what Fleming was after. And there was the smaller graft; extra salaries, commissions and expenses; and that's what Hughes was after, Hughes and the political camp fol- lowers all up and down the line." The Big Four's good government had failed. Heney 's " good men " had gone wrong. He was dis- gusted, but he fought. He brought suits against his own good men just as he had against'the bad men in the old administra- tion. The "party" and his friends pro- tested; there was a terrible hullabaloo and Hughes was put up to forbid the suits. "You can't sue without my authoriza- tion," he told Heney. "No?" said Heney. "Well, the only way you can prevent me is by removing me, and you don't dare do that." Among these suits was one against his own brother. Ben was innocent of offense,