By Phil Roberts
Copyright by Phil Roberts, 1989.
This article began as a graduate seminar paper in a class at the University of Washington in the middle 1980s. Later, it was posted on the Phil Roberts Wyoming history website that no longer exists on the web (as of June 20, 2018).
During the first decade of the 20th century, a new form of journalism captured the public interest. Muckrakers, a name originally applied disparagingly by President Theodore Roosevelt, provided the public with exposes on corruption and sensational accounts of business abuses of customers and competitors. Foremost in the muckraker ranks stood Ida Tarbell, who wrote exposes of Standard Oil, and Lincoln Steffens, a crusader against municipal political machines. But there were at least two dozen others. Many concentrated on specific problems and then turned to other news-writing pursuits.
C. P. Connolly’s name does not rank with those of Tarbell and Steffens. Nonetheless, his career as a muckraker calls into question some of the assumptions made about those individuals. Late twentieth century readers are accustomed to objective reporting and the investigative reporter has been a cult hero in some quarters, at least since the days of Watergate. The paradigm is one of utter objectivity with no personal agenda involved in either the investigation or the final writing. The investigative reporter “tells it like it is” regardless of personal feelings, in the minds of the reading public anyway. Further, he/she pursues the truth wherever it may lead.
Muckrakers, as predecessors of today’s investigative reporters, were held in similar respect in their heyday. They cultivated the image, taking care to point out to readers how they held no portfolio for any cause, person or organization. Connolly himself made the claim in muckraking pieces in McClure’s and Everybody’s. The muckraker “had a passion for dispassionate investigation, an assumption that the defects of democracy could be remedied by an increase in democracy and a faith that exposure would manifest truth through public awakening and legislation.”[1]
It was the progressive era and progressive politicians were taking aim at big city machines, corrupt judges, rigged elections, impure food and drugs, corporate monopolies. The term “progressive” could include nearly every politician of the period if one were to accept some definitions. The same is true of muckraking. Like progressivism, muckraking is a difficult word to define. For example, if the criteria were magazine writers forCollier’s, McClure’s and a handful of others, Rudyard Kipling, O. Henry, Rex Beach and Willa Cather would be muckrakers. Of them, only Beach comes close to the more specific definition.
Theodore Roosevelt, who first applied the word in a pejorative sense to reform journalists, had no precise definition and no clear view of who fit the characterization. The confusion is evident in the words in his speech in which he coined the word. Lincoln Steffens called on him the day after the speech. When he accused Roosevelt of putting an end to investigative journalism by his remarks, TR replied that he intended no such thing and added that he did not mean Steffens when he used the word.[2]
Lawyers, the frequent targets of crusading journalists, rarely found themselves on the same side as muckrakers. Even more rare were lawyers who themselves wrote such exposes. One of these few was Christopher Powell Connolly, a middle-aged former prosecutor from Montana. Just after the turn of the century, Connolly won election to the post of district prosecutor in Butte, Montana, with the strong support of Butte’s political machine. Within the decade, he made the startling transformation into C. P. Connolly, American muckraker. Nonetheless, he did not abandon advocacy. Even though muckrakers were considered non-partisan reporters aimed only at reform, Connolly’s story illustrates the close connections between journalistic exposes and partisan advocacy.
When Connolly was a prosecutor, he gained local notice for able prosecution of criminal cases, but also wide notoriety for his political machinations. After he turned to journalism, many of the exposes he wrote between 1906 and 1914 for Collier’s, Everybody’s, and McClure’s,focused on judicial corruption in the Pacific Northwest where he had seen the improprieties first hand. The 20 years of law practice served him well in uncovering the inside stories of sensational trials and crooked judges.[3]
While his experience provided a unique perspective, Connolly’s legal background left one indelible imprint. Even though he apparently believed otherwise, Connolly never entirely made the transition from advocate to that most rare of creatures, the disinterested reporter. Throughout his career as a journalist, he often ignored the shortcomings of his heroes and condemned similar flaws in their opponents.[4] Despite the change of career, the lawyer-turned-journalist was an advocate for a particular cause and a particular person. The cause was progressivism; the person was Theodore Roosevelt.[5] According to his admirers, Connolly “gave himself wholeheartedly to the new movement for exposure and reform.”[6] Like many journalists before and since, there were cases when his objectivity was clouded by partisanship.
Connolly had another serious flaw hardly unique among reporters of his time or ours. Throughout his career, he frequently exaggerated the significance of his exposes. In some cases, he simply repeated charges in a national forum which already had been made by local investigative reporters. At other times, he combined a series of such reports into what appeared to be a story he had researched and written alone. Throughout, his stories darkly suggested webs of conspiracy at work in the politics of state and nation. This fascination with conspiracy theories may have been rooted in Connolly’s prosecutorial experience, although it can not be proven from the scant evidence. (Connolly’s personal and legal papers apparently do not survive).
* * *
The post-Civil War industrial boom brought thriving industry to Newark, New Jersey. On Fulton Street, the mammoth Peter Ballentine and Sons brewery bordered the waterfront. The huge trading firm of Hewes and Phillips, capitalizing from Civil War munitions contracts, occupied another tract while Lister Brothers’ bone-grinding plant on the Passaic River included more than 15 buildings. The Clark Thread Company employed more than 1,000 workers and Seth Boyden’s patent leather factory made 90 percent of the world’s production in 1870. The young inventor, Thomas A. Edison, arrived in Newark in the winter of 1871 and within two years, he employed 70 men at his Ward Street factory.
It was in this teeming industrial city that young Christopher Powell Connolly was reared. Born in Wappingers Falls, New York, a small Hudson Valley town in eastern New York, on Dec. 23, 1863, Connolly moved with his Irish-born parents to Newark when he was nine years old.[7] There, he attended parochial school for two years. He claimed he was almost wholly self-educated. “My only schooling was two years of public school in Wappingers Falls, N. Y….[and] two years at St. Patrick’s Parochial School, Newark, N. J.” Like other children of immigrant parents, he dropped out to go to work.[8]
His personal background appeared to be an unlikely beginning for a man who would become a Western lawyer, a muckraking journalist and a nationally known critic of the nation’s legal system. Most of the two dozen or so journalists who also called themselves muckrakers were from native American stock. Connolly’s parents were Irish Catholic immigrants. His colleagues generally were “soundly educated” and “cherished literary ambitions.”[9] Connolly, self-educated in the law, barely completed fourth grade. Little in Connolly’s background, in fact, suggested he would be attracted to or skilled in journalism or writing of any kind.[10]
He did not take a factory or day-labor job like many of his contemporaries among the children of immigrants in Newark. At the age of 15, he became “the youngest court reporter in New York” and soon after, he joined the New York City banking firm of Donnell, Lawson and Simpson as a “stenographer and general secretary.”[11] Formed in 1870 by Leonidas M. Lawson, his brother-in-law Robert W. Donnell, and George E. Simpson, the firm invested heavily in Florida real estate, financed sales of mining and irrigation properties in Texas and New Mexico and aided in early mining developments in Butte, Montana, “and was for many years the fiscal agent for the sale of bonds of many counties in the western states.”[12]
He held the job six years until the bank collapsed in the panic of 1884. The firm owned a bank in Deer Lodge, Montana, from which mining ventures were financed.[13] Apparently, Lawson encouraged Connolly to move West where the economic potential seemed limitless for an ambitious businessman. Besides, the Connolly hoped the healthful Montana climate would repair his nerves, frayed by the bank’s declining fortunes. In fact, a brief biographical sketch published a few years later in the Helena Weekly Independent, attributed Connolly’s move entirely to health considerations. “After 18 months of constant work night and day in the interest of his employers [Donnell, Lawson and Simpson,] he was stricken with nervous prostration and was ordered west by his physician.” This account claimed R. W. Donnell had a close tie with Montana: “[He] was one of the first pioneers of Montana, and well known to all the old residents here.” Connolly arrived in Montana Territory early in 1885.[14]
He found work in Helena as a stenographer and, soon after, he met and married Mary Ellen Fallon, an Ohio native two years his junior. In the course of his other duties, he contributed “several of his articles on Montana” to the New York World, apparently printed without his byline.[15] In 1889 he received a political appointment to serve as the “official stenographer” for the Montana Constitutional Convention.[16] William A. Clark, who was to be a future Connolly opponent, served as convention president. The motion to appoint Connolly came from another prominent Montanan, Joseph K. Toole. Such associations brought him into close contact with the most prominent men in the territory–future leaders in the state of Montana.
At the same time, he studied law in the offices of Albert G. Clarke, Jr., an established young attorney. Soon after Montana gained statehood in 1890, Connolly was admitted to the bar. He became Clarke’s law partner in Helena, a city only recently designated the capital of the new state after winning a bitter election contest.[17] No record exists as to the cause, but Connolly left the partnership the next year. He accepted the financially secure post of district court stenographer and recorder in Helena.[18] Connolly claimed President Grover Cleveland offered him an appointment as U. S. Attorney for Montana in 1893, but he said he declined the position, apparently unsure whether he had sufficient experience to handle the position. Whether or not the offer was made for that post, Connolly did accept a lesser state appointment as court commissioner for Lewis and Clark County.[19]
During this period Connolly took note of the work of Theodore Roosevelt, a fellow New Yorker who was then serving as a United States Civil Service commissioner. Roosevelt wrote to Connolly in 1894 thanking him for his “comments” about an unspecified Roosevelt article which Connolly had complimented. Roosevelt, apparently in answer to a question from Connolly, wrote that he did not approve of the American Protective Association’s anti-Catholic agitation, concluding that if it were up to him, he “would appoint” Catholics to federal positions.[20] The statement suggests Connolly might have applied unsuccessfully for a federal position and believed his religion had been a factor in the adverse result.[21] In an era when Catholicism was looked upon by many as alien to America, Connolly had every reason to suspect such discrimination, but like the story of the Cleveland offer, there is no firm evidence. Years later, Connolly made frequent references to his Catholicism in letters to Roosevelt and he occasionally made mention of discrimination he had suffered on the basis of religion. Throughout his career, Connolly would point to examples of how opposition to his religion cut off career advancements. Even in 1912 when he was a famous writer, Connolly worried over public reaction to his Catholicism. He wrote to Roosevelt, returning the original of the 1894 Roosevelt reply, adding a note asking Roosevelt not to “emphasize my religious persuasion” if he planned to use the letter. “[I am] utterly out of sympathy with religious prejudice of any kind,” Connolly wrote, but he stressed that should his religious affiliation become known, his “earning power” would suffer.[22]
In the heat of the 1912 campaign, Roosevelt agreed not to broach the subject publicly. “You are just about as orthodox a Catholic as I am orthodox Dutch Reformed! In other words, we are more interested in religion than in theology. It does make me boil to think that any people should have been against you merely because they ‘hated Catholics.’…Always your very staunch friend…”[23]
Such ambivalence about one’s religion was typical among striving young Catholic professionals throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at least in many parts of the country. At the same time, the 1894 claim seems curious, given that Montana had a relatively high proportion of Catholics in the population and many of the prominent political figures were practicing members of the faith. Such action suggests Connolly did have an eye toward a nationally appointive office, even at that early stage in his legal career. Yet, even though he apparently viewed it as a liability to his career, throughout his life, Connolly never waivered from his faith. A very devout Catholic, the letters and articles he wrote after his muckraking days, particularly, reflect his strong adherence to religion.[24]
The Connollys, by then parents of three young daughters, moved to Butte in 1897 where he was appointed chief deputy Silver Bow county attorney.[25] He was a man rapidly rising in law and politics. After just two years in the deputy’s position, he was elected Silver Bow County prosecuting attorney. Apparently, he served with some success. Years later, he wrote of “securing the first convictions of murder in the first degree ever secured in Butte.”[26] Even though he did prosecute a capital case in 1900, it was not the first in Butte’s violent history. In fact, in 1889, the year after Connolly came to Montana, Harry Roberts, a teamster, was hanged in Butte for murdering a man during a quarrel. Through 1904, five men met the noose in Butte. Connolly was involved in only the 1900 case.[27]
Even though hanging may not have been novel in Butte, Connolly did gain local fame in September 1900, for sending Dan Lucey to the gallows. Lucey murdered his mining partner in a remote mountainous area of the county.[28] The local newspaper applauded Connolly’s prosecutorial skills, but the Anaconda Standard asserted its claim for a share of the victory: “His [Lucey’s] last words were a tribute to the Standard and County Attorney Connolly, between whom, he said, was divided the credit of bringing about his conviction–the conviction of one of the most cold-blooded and ferocious murderers ever hanged in the state of Montana.”[29] Lucey’s lawyer unsuccessfully appealed the case to the Montana Supreme Court, but Connolly did not appear before the appellate court in the case.[31] The hanging, which Connolly attended, caused “great excitement in Butte…crowds collected around the courthouse and every possible opportunity to see the hanging was taken advantage of.”[30]
The Anaconda newspaper, founded by Marcus Daly, the well-known “copper king,” reflected Daly’s positions in his on-going political struggles against William A. Clark who owned the rival paper in Butte. The newspaper’s editorials saluted Connolly because as prosecutor, he was a Daly loyalist. Later, Augustus Heinze, a newcomer, rivaled both Daly and Clark in wealth and political influence. He headed a third faction in the intricate web of Montana politics.
When Clark first came to the territory, he worked for Connolly’s old boss Lawson, although it is unclear whether Clark and Connolly were acquainted at that time. Later, Clark managed Lawson’s Butte bank and bought it when the New York firm collapsed, the event which precipitated Connolly’s move to Montana.[32]
Connolly’s career as prosecutor provides no sign of his later progressivism and, except for minor incidents Connolly described years later in the court article and in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, little is known of his term. Two incidents tell much about Connolly’s personal courage and some about his political beliefs at the time. One day, he returned to Butte to discover a mob breaking into the county jail in an angry attempt to lynch a prisoner. The prosecutor rounded up four men who joined him inside the jail where they fended off the crowd. “I did not show the white feather to those men but I remember that my knees trembled,” he wrote Roosevelt years later.[33]
In a second incident, Butte gambling den operators bilked “a poor Swede” of his paycheck. Connolly demanded that the sheriff, the chief of police and the mayor take action against the “crooked gambling-joint.” When they refused, he “found a willing constable and a gun and made the raid” himself. The two men broke up the place “while 25-30 husky fellows made themselves scarce,” Connolly recalled in a letter to TR two decades after the incident. Roosevelt must have enjoyed the tales of Old West bravery. He wrote Connolly about some of his hunting escapades in Africa then concluded, “You are naturally much bolder than I was.”[34]
The incidents reveal bravery but also hint at two other facets of Connolly’s character. They reveal his “progressive concern for the little man,” a conviction that he retained when he “muckraked” for Collier’s. Yet, the compassion seems incidental to the personal loyalty he gave Marcus Daly, his political chief. Had he not maintained such allegiance to Daly, prosecutor Connolly might have been expected to remove the three officials who refused to take action in the gambling case. In his letter to Roosevelt years later, he never mentioned that he had even considered such a move. He was a cog in a political machine, the type of organization he would later attack. Nonetheless, his later loyalty to political allies, most notably Roosevelt, remained as unshakable as it had with Daly years before. Whatever the corrupt actions, they could be blamed on the system or on enemies of his friends. It seemed not to occur to Connolly that his heroes, too, might have faults, least of all Theodore Roosevelt.
Connolly did not seek reelection as prosecutor in 1900. Instead, he became Daly’s handpicked candidate to oppose Judge William Clancy, described by Connolly later as “an illiterate incumbent” who was in Connolly’s view, little more than a henchman for Heinze’s faction. Daly, Clark and Heinze each claimed nominal allegiance to the Democratic Party, making party labels insignificant. The candidates ran with the support of one of the three machines. Clancy nominally represented the regular Democratic Party, “People’s Party” and the “Labor Party,” each controlled by Heinze at that time. Both the Republicans and “Independent Democrats” nominated Connolly, but he was hardly a reform candidate. Even though Daly’s Amalgamated Copper Company hired most of the miners in Butte, Heinze consistently captured most of that vote. Connolly, the “Amalgamated man,” lost the election to Clancy. The “saloon lounger” received 8,481 votes to Connolly’s 7,099.[35]
About the same time, Connolly became more enmeshed in factional politics when he represented a state legislator suing Clark’s Butte newspaper for libel. The Butte paper claimed Connolly’s client accepted a bribe from the Daly faction in an attempt to keep Clark from winning the contest for the U. S. Senate. The Amalgamated faction contended (and Connolly wrote years later), Clark’s man bribed the legislators.[36]
Connolly traveled “about the state, putting members of the legislature on the stand, and forcing reluctant admissions from their lips.” Later, in court, he tried to cross-examine Clark who refused to answer any questions. Connolly then “argued for his commitment to prison.”[37] Connolly won the case.
Although Clark was not jailed, the charges forced a U. S. Senate committee to investigate the election. Before the committee reported its findings against Clark, the newly elected senator resigned and returned to Montana.[38] The extent of Connolly’s role, which may have played a part in an important reform, is not clear. Nonetheless, Connolly later exaggerated the significance of the case and his involvement in it. He claimed that the Clark case prompted direct election of senators and, thus, the reform was an unintended by-product of his support for the Daly faction.
His success against Clark should have guaranteed Connolly continued Daly and Amalgamated political sponsorship, particularly after Lawson, his old New York banking boss, bought an interest in the company. However, Daly died and, soon after his death, Amalgamated made a “compact” with Clark. These events put Connolly in a difficult position. From 1901 to 1903, Amalgamated was Connolly’s landlord. The company’s legal department occupied the sixth floor of the firm’s Hennessey Building in Butte. Connolly had offices two floors below. Clark’s reprisals shut Connolly out of “any professional or political career in the state.” As Connolly readily conceded, a lawyer opposed by “the combination” had little future in Butte where the courts “were monopolized by these powerful individuals and corporations to the exclusion of practically all other business.” Clearly, his practice diminished in size. Connolly had become disenchanted with the court system, but also, he had financial reasons for quitting the practice in Butte. Part of the practice’s decline can be attributed to his expose writing. “When a friend high in the councils of the Amalgamated [Copper Company] brought to me confidentially the ukase of these powers who controlled [the community], and advised me to go rather than await my punishment, I was prepared for what lay ahead though I foolishly determined for a while to struggle against these forces. When I gave up the struggle, I gave up the practise [sic] of my profession.”[40] Consequently, he abandoned the law practice and left Butte in 1904 or 1905. It was his only recourse if he wanted to continue to succeed in the legal profession.[39]
* * *
Connolly moved to Missoula. There, he researched and wrote his first series for a national magazine, an expose of the corrupting hands of the “copper kings” in Montana politics.[41] He submitted the unsolicited free-lance piece to McClure’sin the spring of 1906, but he continued to practice law with a new partner, 41-year-old Charles F. Crutchfield, a native Virginian who had a small practice in the university town.[42]
The first installment in the Montana series read like an early history of “law and order” in the state. Historian Louis Filler later called all of the articles “a series of dramatic exposures that amounted in essence to the history of the state.”[43] Present-day Montana historians Michael Malone and Richard B. Roeder acknowledged Connolly’s abilities: “[He was] an observer who wrote accurately and well.” Aside from the history Connolly compiled in the series, the work included a biting partisan component. His attacks on Clark and his political associates were particularly savage.[44]
Connolly combined historical narrative with investigative reporting. Although there is no surviving evidence of the Connolly’s research techniques, the McClure’s editor assured readers of the piece’s accuracy. The editor added some puffery about the writer’s credentials: “C. P. Connolly, the author of this series, is an attorney and has been a resident of Montana for over 20 years. He is an important figure in the public life of the State, and saw from behind the scenes the making of the history that he tells.” After revealing that Connolly served as prosecuting attorney at Butte, Montana, for one term, the editor concluded: “His narrative has been written without bias, with impartiality and fairness as the first consideration and with rigid adherence to documents and records.”[45]
The series caused a sensation nationally, but within Montana, most of the intrigues had long since become part of local folklore.[46] Observers, remembering Connolly’s past connections with the Daly faction, claimed the exposes were simply partisan attacks issued by a disgruntled member of the losing side. The Great Falls newspaper articulated the point. Connolly was “merely giving his factional side” of the story. “The facts are distorted to make points for those he favors and against those of the opposite faction.”[47] Similar complaints followed many of Connolly’s later pieces.[48
Connolly enjoyed high professional and political status in Butte prior to the shift in allegiances. In the series, Connolly described a formal dinner honoring President Roosevelt’s visit to Butte in 1903, an event Connolly himself helped plan for the Amalgamated faction. Inclusion of the incident in the article is curious because it is apparent from the writing that Roosevelt refused to become involved in the Montana intrigues. Connolly’s report proclaimed that by the time the banquet ended, Roosevelt gained the respect and admiration of both sides. Reciting TR’s visit seems to have little purpose except as a laudatory paeon to Roosevelt. It leaves no doubt as to Connolly’s own political preference and his continuing advocacy for Roosevelt.[49]
The Montana work, a historical achievement and a muckraking triumph, illustrates several patterns which recur in Connolly’s later works. He carefully combined stale old charges with new evidence to create sweeping indictments of corruption. In this sense, his writing had sensationalist antecedents. Nonetheless, in writing style, Connolly’s articles resembled legal briefs because of their one-sided perspective. His sources often were people with scores to settle and, unlike the editor’s note in the Montana series, Connolly rarely divulged their bias. Also, his exposures often coincided with political campaigns and the incidents he described frequently had occurred years earlier. For example, the Montana events about which he wrote took place more than six years before his first series was published.
Connolly often singled out corrupt judges for particular venom and the articles are not without some intended political revenge. On both scores, he condemned Judge Clancy to whom he had lost in his only try for a judicial post. He would display similar tactics against Roosevelt’s opponents and other enemies of progressive causes. In sum, Connolly’s muckraking, far from investigative journalism, more closely resembled an attorney’s unswerving advocacy for a client.[50]
A Butte newspaper quoted F. E. Schoonover, the artist who accompanied Connolly on his trips around Montana, as saying that McClure’s paid Connolly $25,000 for the series on Montana.[51] The amount was probably much lower because it is doubtful McClure would have paid a novice writer such an amount for a series with relatively limited appeal. Well-established writers like Lincoln Steffens commanded about $2,000 per article on the four he wrote for McClure’s each year. McClure’s paid Ida Tarbell $4,000 per article for her Standard Oil series on which she had been working for five years.[52]
Regardless of the amount, the exaggeration may have been calculated to increase interest in the forthcoming series. Also, talk of such money may have been sufficient to induce Connolly to quit the law and take up journalism as a full-time occupation. At first, he tried combining the careers, perhaps to recover from personal financial crisis his departure from Butte must have engendered or because of the impact he may have seen from his series on Montana politicians.
He accepted an assignment from Collier’s to cover the Bill Haywood trial in Boise, Idaho, in the spring of 1907.[53] At the same time, he conducted legal work for a client in Boise, making it unclear which job initially motivated his trip.[54] He wrote a series on the trial which included extensive background on Colorado labor violence in the mines, the so-called “battle of Coeur d’ Alene” between miners and the companies in Idaho, and personality sketches of the main participants. The coverage appears evenhanded although one writer believes his analysis favored the labor point of view.[55]
During the Haywood trial, Connolly became acquainted with one of the prosecutors, William E. Borah, who had been elected to the U. S. Senate the previous year. At the time of the trial, Borah himself faced a criminal charge of land fraud. The government charged officials of Barber Lumber Company with trying to defraud the government by submitting timber claims in the names of fictitious individuals. Borah served briefly as the company’s attorney, a fact not lost on U. S. Attorney Norman Ruick, a Borah opponent who unsuccessfully challenged him for the U. S. Senate seat in 1910. Borah explained his role in the affair and swore his innocence as early as April in a letter to his friend, William Allen White.[56]
Although White acknowledged Borah’s request for help years later, the Kansas editor did not tell Theodore Roosevelt of the contact. In his autobiography, White acknowledged that Borah approached him personally about his problem. White’s story is confused, however. He claimed he alone represented Borah at the meeting with Roosevelt and that Borah, only after the trial, told him how important the case was to his career. [57] Instead, White wrote Roosevelt that S. S. McClure, who was attending the Haywood trial, contacted him about the Borah matter. “McClure wants me to write something favorable about Borah,” White wrote Roosevelt.[58] He added that he declined. “Borah is my personal friend and I do not want ever to be put in the attitude of a literary back-scratcher.” White wrote Roosevelt that he had contacted Connolly through Mark Sullivan at Collier’s in order to “investigate the Borah case, and not mention my name and send his conclusions to Sullivan for me.”[59]
The letters between Borah and White indicate the Borah and White carried on almost daily correspondence about the matter. In coded letters and telegrams, in which President Roosevelt was “Hilton,” Attorney General Bonaparte was “Davis” and Borah and White referred to themselves by aliases. Borah begged White to use his influence with “Hilton” to have the Justice Department dismiss the case. Borah asked White to personally see the president on his behalf.[60] “Perhaps our friend [Roosevelt] in the East does not understand the situation here….” At one point Borah, concerned that the Haywood trial would be jeopardized by his own difficulties, told White he might be forced to withdraw from prosecuting the case. Within ten days, the threat was unnecessary. On July 29, 1907, Haywood was acquitted.[61]
Connolly emphatically asserted Borah’s innocence in the timber land matter: “Have made best investigation possible: believe there is no foundation in fact for indictment, and have learned facts which I believe exonerate party,” he telegraphed White. Connolly added it was his belief that U. S. Attorney Ruick brought the indictment through personal malice. “Looks very much like a job,” Connolly concluded, echoing Borah’s position.[62]
White, who did not reveal to the President that Connolly and Borah were friends, told Roosevelt, “Connolly and McClure, with no personal predilection in Borah’s favor, believe that he is legally and morally innocent.” He further claimed that Borah knew nothing of White’s contact with Connolly and suggested that the President hear Borah’s side. Borah had written Sen. Jonathan Bourne as early as April 1907, explaining his connection to the Barber Lumber Company, the firm accused of the fraud, and asking for his advice and assistance in the matter. Bourne forwarded the letter to President Roosevelt.[63]
Roosevelt responded that he and Attorney-General Charles Bonaparte would meet with a lawyer representing Borah “but not the Senator himself,” the next Friday, Aug. 9, at the President’s home at Oyster Bay. “How would Connolly do?” the President asked, adding that White may wish to bring more than one lawyer.[64] Borah, meeting with White in Salt Lake City, telegraphed Connolly who immediately agreed to go on his behalf. “Mrs. Connolly and I were going through the Yellowstone, but she is well satisfied to have me go to New York if I can do anything for you,” Connolly wrote.[65]
Borah, taking no chances, designated another representative, Washington, D. C., lawyer John W. Yerkes. The three men, Connolly, Yerkes and White, met in Washington and proceeded on to Oyster Bay. It was Connolly’s first lengthy personal contact with the President. Except for a brief encounter in Butte in 1903, the two men were not personally acquainted.[66]
The meeting came 12 days after Haywood’s acquittal. Borah’s representatives could not change the President’s mind. Roosevelt stood by his position that the Borah case should go to trial. Otherwise, the President believed, Borah’s reputation would remain clouded. The senator needed exoneration in court, not Presidential interference with the Justice Department, TR told Connolly, White and Yerkes. White incorrectly credits Borah with the demand that the trial proceed. Borah’s letters, however, indicate he had no such desire, preferring that the Department of Justice dismiss the case. Roosevelt and Bonaparte wanted the trial over the objections of White, Borah and Borah’s representatives. Borah’s friends reluctantly accepted the President’s decision.[67]
Neither White nor Roosevelt made any mention of reimbursing Connolly for the trip, and presumably, Collier’s editors, even if they had been informed, could not have been expected to underwrite his fare and expenses. “Regarding my expenses,” Connolly wrote Borah later in the month, “I hate to mention this matter, but as you perhaps know, I am not overly endowed financially, and the matter of expense is a serious one with me.” He estimated the trip cost him about $300.[68] Attorney Yerkes received a fee of $400 also for representing Borah at the meeting.[69]
Connolly gratefully acknowledged receipt of the money but publicly, he never wrote about his role in the Borah matter.[70] If he saw nothing improper about becoming an actor in a story he was covering as a supposed disinterested reporter, his reticence seems curious. His friendship with Borah continued and years later, he wrote of his old friend as “presidential material.”[71]
* * *
In the months following the trial, Connolly returned regularly to Missoula where his family still lived and where he kept the law partnership intact.[72] By March 1908, he was writing full-time for Collier’s and traveling extensively in search of stories, south to Nevada and west to Seattle.[73] It is unclear when he and law colleague Crutchfield severed their partnership. Connolly maintained Missoula as his mailing address until the end of the year.
In 1908, the political scene in Washington attracted Connolly’s attention because voters there were choosing a United States Senator in a direct primary that September. Incumbent Sen. Levi Ankeny faced the voters directly for the first time. Six years earlier, his election by a vote of the legislature raised questions of improper influence.[74]
Based on the available evidence, Connolly’s research for Ankeny story was far from thorough.[75] He did not use investigative techniques, such as interviewing people who held contrasting views on Ankeny’s past record. Neither did he “take depositions” from the opponent or his partisans.
He wrote to Joe Smith, already a well-traveled political writer and progressive activist whose opinions on Ankeny were hardly positive or secret. “Mr. Lerton of Walla Walla gave me your name,” Connolly introduced himself. “I am preparing an article on Sen. Ankeny…I understand you are an authority on Washington politics.”[76] In mid-July Connolly toured eastern Washington, checking with sources in Ankeny’s hometown of Walla Walla and stopping to see Smith who, at the time, was a reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review. He called on Erastus Brainerd, the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and he stayed as a guest in the Brainerd home. The P-I was owned by John L. Wilson, a political opponent of Ankeny although throughout the period, the newspaper was basically a Republican party organ, equivocating on progressive issues.[77]There is no record that he spoke with Ankeny, the subject of the investigative story.
In August, he had the Ankeny piece ready for publication and he wrote Brainerd: “Collier’s did think of giving politics a rest not knowing there was a primary election in Washington in September.” He thanked the P-I editor for sending copies of some Ankeny speeches and advised that the article would appear later in the month. If Brainerd had any previous doubts about the thrust of Connolly’s work, they must have ended with the concluding sentence: “Don’t let up on Ankeny on account of Collier’s in any way.”[78]
Later, Connolly wrote Brainerd again, asking whether or not Collier’s should run the Ankeny piece August 29, “so that the article itself would be one of the last pleas to the voter, or let it seep?”[79] Brainerd (and Smith) would not have been disappointed with the article, a biting attack on Ankeny, subtitled, “The History of a Senate Undesirable who is unfit, personally and politically, to represent his state and whose main strength is his bank account.”[80] Ankeny lost the election although the effect of the Collier’s story can not be determined.[81] In following years, similar strong language peppered other Connolly exposes of reactionary senators.[82]
The knowledge and sources Connolly gained in the Northwest became a great asset when the Ballinger case broke just after the November elections. Louis Glavis, the Seattle-based Land Office employee fired by Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger, made his charges against his old boss in an article published in Collier’s.[83] About that time, Connolly finished research for a piece in which he denounced the land office for giving away public lands to the railroads during the time Ballinger headed the agency.[84] The controversy heated up through the spring and Collier’s writers were in the thick of it, along with Glavis, Gifford Pinchot, and, in the background, Theodore Roosevelt. Ballinger wrote to a friend: “The representatives of Collier’s Weekly have been trailing me throughout the United States…endeavoring to find some thing with which to besmirch my character.”[85]
Connolly was one of the writers on his trail. During the winter, Connolly went to Seattle to gather more evidence on Ballinger’s past legal work for Clarence Cunningham, the man Glavis said Ballinger was favoring with federal coal leases in Alaska.[86] Connolly probed for other charges he could make against the embattled interior secretary. When he returned to New York, Connolly wrote Joe Smith, no fan of Ballinger’s, asking if he could “substantiate” the accusation that Ballinger fought railroad regulation legislation in Washington and had once urged “a legislator…against fulfilling the party pledge” for a regulatory commission.[87] Connolly’s resulting story in the April 2 Collier’s directly attacked Ballinger. The article was titled, “Ballinger–Shyster,” and it questioned the Secretary’s honesty and legal integrity.[88]
A congressional investigating committee, dominated by Taft and Ballinger supporters, convened in early 1910 to look into the charges. Collier’s editor Norman Hapgood, fearing Ballinger might sue the magazine for libel, retained Louis Brandeis to represent the publication and Glavis. Brandeis turned the case around when he got administration officials to admit they had postdated a crucial memorandum and then lied about it.[89]
An ironic incident, one of the most unusual in Connolly’s career, occurred during the hearings. Oscar Lawler, assistant attorney general assigned to Ballinger’s Interior Department as counsel, had written the post-dated memo. During his testimony, Lawler mistook Connolly for the short story writer on the Collier’s staff by the same last name–James B. Connolly. The short story writer was on his way to a magazine assignment in the Mediterranean when the ship on which he was a passenger sank off Nantucket Jan. 23, 1909. He wrote a story for Collier’s about the sinking, although he downplayed his own bravery in the incident.[90] In the hearing, Lawler pointedly accused Christopher Connolly of pushing ahead of women and children to get off the sinking ship. Lawler claimed his friends on the ship witnessed Connolly cowardice.[91]
Obviously, the charges (and even the identification) were false, but without a trace of cynicism, the noted muckraker who had called Ballinger a shyster, and Ankeny a “Senate Undesirable,” sued Lawler for slander! [92] The case did not go to trial, but Collier’s editors made prominent mention of Lawler’s intemperate statements that added more pressure to the embattled administration’s position.
The incident shows more than journalistic strategies or the value Connolly placed on his reputation for courage he believed he earned as a prosecutor in the West. It is an example of how tightly Connolly had become enmeshed in the highly charged partisan battle on the side of Glavis, Pinchot and, ultimately, Connolly’s hero Theodore Roosevelt.
In late 1911, Connolly covered another trial, the prosecution of the McNamara brothers who were charged with dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building. The writer blamed the court system for allowing defense lawyer Clarence Darrow to “get away with” many questionable tactics.[93] Connolly described the active role journalist Lincoln Steffens took in the case. Steffens found himself in the precarious position of mediator between Darrow and the prosecution. The parties agreed to a plan of having one brother plead guilty, freeing the other brother. The effect of the guilty plea was to discredit Socialist leaders three days before a hotly contested city-wide election and call into question the accuracy of articles Steffens had penned earlier in which he swore of the McNamaras’ innocence. Connolly was compassionate with Steffens who sat next to Darrow when the guilty plea was made, “blanched and worried, suffering the fate of all unselfish mediators, in that both sides were condemning him.”[94]
Steffens’ role was not a footnote in Connolly’s story. In fact, the entire story focused on Steffens’ role. “Mr. Steffens, without thought for the judicial end of the case, was honestly trying, as he said, to put effect in Los Angeles the spirit of real Christianity,” Connolly wrote, “but he had a bad coach and the occasion was unfortunate.”[95] The title of the article was ironic: “Protest by Dynamite: Similarities and Contrasts Between the McNamara Affair in Los Angeles and the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone Trial in Boise.” One similarity was left unwritten: the collaboration between journalist and attorney, which in the latter cases was between Connolly and Borah.
* * *
Throughout this period, Connolly gathered material for the series for which he is best remembered, a muckraking six-part examination of the country’s court systems.[96] Titled “Big Business and the Bench,” the series ran monthly in Everybody’s Magazine from February through July, 1912. The series repeated many familiar Connolly themes. Judges were reactionary and corrupt; they had to be replaced with men sympathetic to progressive goals.
In the mostly partisan attack, Connolly did endorse one reform: judicial recall, the authority for the electorate to overturn unpopular court decisions. In this respect, Connolly’s views hardly deviated from partisanship. Theodore Roosevelt had adopted the issue and had been making similar proposals for almost two years.[97] Connolly kept informed about Roosevelt’s positions on legal reform. In January, 1912, he wrote Roosevelt recommending that he “watch for” the article in “the forthcoming Everybody’s.”[98]
The ex-president wrote back to Connolly two days later. He promised he would read the articles and he called attention to his own column in the “current issue” of Outlook, a sharp attack on the court system.[99] Connolly replied that he had read the Outlook article “with pleasure” and encouraged Roosevelt to continue his attacks: “I hope you will not weary in that kind of well-doing. The country is ripe for it, and if we reap any tangible results, they will be due to your leadership in this most necessary of all reforms.”[100]
In the winter of 1912, candidate Theodore Roosevelt made judicial recall a crucial part of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Connolly wrote him to express his delight with the stand he had taken in a critical speech at Columbus, Ohio, in February 1912. “Your Columbus speech is really one of your most momentous utterances,” Connolly wrote.[101] The former president responded, “Let me repeat how much I like your article [the first in the court series]. If ever there was an important movement it is this in which we are now engaged to purify the courts…”[102]
Some historians believe Roosevelt may have lost the Republican presidential nomination in 1912 as a result of his controversial attacks on the court system such as those he made in the Columbus address. The speech frightened Republican leaders who might otherwise have supported Roosevelt against the unpopular Taft who already was written off as a sure loser in the general election.[103]
Connolly’s court series, consistent with his earlier writings, was as much a partisan broadside against reactionary judges in various states as it was a call for reform. Nowhere is it more clear than in his startling attack on the Washington State Supreme Court. The tone and the specific charges indicate Connolly must have drawn much of his information from a series Joe Smith wrote two years earlier for the Seattle Star. During the heat of the 1910 election campaign in which two slates of candidates vied for the justice positions, Smith accused the incumbents of bending to the will of “the interests” and rejecting progressive measures.[104]
For the most part, Smith’s charges lacked foundation. The court had a high reputation for “progressivism” and even Theodore Roosevelt remarked it was the “most progressive court in the United States.”[105] The court, in fact, upheld the constitutionality of reform measures governing the eight-hour day for public employees, minimum wages, municipally owned utilities, licensing of occupations and control over railroad rates.[106] At the time the Smith series ran, other newspapers treated the Smith expose as they would any pre-election partisan attack. The reaction from Smith’s political opponents ranged from laughter to disgust.[107] Had Connolly sought an even-handed view of the issues, he might have been expected to examine the court records and other evidence rather than relying solely on Smith’s research. Nothing indicates he did.
Connolly sought Smith’s materials of “wrongdoing” by Washington judges nearly a year after the Washington writer’s series was published locally. Howard DeWolfe, a Seattle attorney disciplined by the State Bar for his intemperate remarks about the court, gave Smith documents purporting to back up charges of judicial misconduct. In June 1911, DeWolfe wrote Smith who had passed on the material to Connolly. “[I’m in] no hurry for supreme court investigation papers,” DeWolfe wrote, “I trust Mr. Connelly [sic] will give the matter a good write-up.”[108]
Connolly apparently did not ask for court materials from a second important source in Seattle, Erastus Brainerd. Brainerd, fired from the P-I in August 1911, had editorialized against Smith’s articles.[109] He must have been surprised when in one of the frequent letters he received from Connolly, he was advised to “watch for my series on the Courts,” and then read what was a summarized duplication of the charges he belittled.[110]
Similarities between the two series did not go unnoticed. Seattle publications drew the comparison between Smith’s dated series and Connolly’s “revelations.”[111] But even beyond the Washington stories, the Connolly articles “had very little new to say about the system.”[112] He advocated few reforms, suggesting that personnel changes would solve the problems. Again, his was a partisan solution rather than one advocating structural reform. Historian David Chalmers credits Carl Snyder, an economist who wrote a similar series in Collier’s about the same time, for offering “the fullest view of the justice crisis.” Unlike Connolly, Snyder did recommend significant structural changes in the court system. Neither series seemed to stir up much popular interest. But, probably more important for Connolly, his series did nothing for Theodore Roosevelt’s candidacy either.[113]
Nonetheless, after his hero lost the presidential election, Connolly continued to “expose” reactionary senators and rail against “over-superior superior judges.”[114] The attacks seemed repetitive. Roosevelt’s defeat signaled the beginning of the end for Connolly’s “partisan” muckraking career.
* * *
Even before the 1912 election, Collier’sseemed to be tiring of Connolly’s style. “I’m through with Collier’s for a while,” he wrote Brainerd in Seattle in September 1912. “The business is unsatisfactory for the reason that there is no future in it. As soon as you are squeezed, you are dropped,” he complained. “The proof seems to be a good deal like the IWW. It hollers an awful lot, but as soon as real trouble comes, it is the first to run. Just about the time to get results from agitation, they [magazine publishers] lay down and quit and the storm blows over.”[115]
As the years passed, Connolly, like the publishers he criticized, dropped most pretenses of reformist progressivism and, consistent with his role as a partisan advocate, followed Roosevelt back to Republican conservatism. It began earlier, but the start of World War I rang down the curtain on progressivism and the age of the muckraker.[116]
Connolly returned to the practice of law sometime in 1913, locating in Newark, New Jersey.[117] In 1915, he become involved in the unsuccessful effort to prevent the execution of Leo Frank, a young Jewish Atlantan charged with a heinous murder. Connolly wrote a booklet denouncing the “miscarriage of justice,” but the extent of his involvement in the case was insignificant. Frank, convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, temporarily escaped execution when the governor commuted his sentence. A month later, he was lynched by a mob.[118]
No longer outwardly nonpartisan, Connolly accepted an invitation from the Republican National Committee in 1916 to conduct a speaking tour in Maine for presidential nominee Hughes and other Republicans.[119] His friendly but formal correspondence with Theodore Roosevelt shows his continued admiration for the former president and support for Roosevelt’s diverse political views.[120] In the closing months of World War I, he visited France, met with Roosevelt’s son Archie, and laid a wreath on the grave of TR’s other son Quentin who had died in the war. “I am sorry it took America so long to respond to your first bugle calls,” he wrote Roosevelt from Paris. Connolly, again following Roosevelt’s lead, denounced Wilson’s proposals for a non-punitive victory in Europe.[121]
By the time Roosevelt died in 1919, most of Connolly’s political crusades had met with failure. In the remaining years of his life, he practiced law and worked actively for his Catholic faith and prohibition, a social movement he strongly favored.[122] But his disillusionment was clear. He wrote to an old Montana friend in 1924: “I am practicing law here in this benighted country–and ‘benighted’ is no misnomer. I am glad of one thing. I am out of the limelight as a muck-raker.” He then referred to Henry Plummer, a notorious outlaw from the vigilante days of Montana. “If Plummer…were alive today and at his old game, I wouldn’t have a word to say. In fact, I am not sure I would not join his band. Every time a crook goes wrong…I join the universal chorus and give three cheers. It is the popular thing to do. And it isn’t half as lonesome as holding aloft the torch of those twin-evils, truth and righteousness.”[123] His concluding statement summed up his own view of his career as a partisan muckraker: “[I]f I have any friends in Montana, it is all I have left out of the wreck of a mis-spent life.”
He died at a hospital near his home in East Orange, N. J., on Nov. 8, 1933.[124] Less than a month later, the nation’s voters ratified repeal of prohibition. Had he lived to have seen it, it would have been but another defeat for C. P. Connolly, the progressive era muckraker whose writings were rooted in the advocacy traditions of the legal profession from whence he had come.
[1]Lewis Filler, The Muckrakers. (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1976, 103.
2] Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931), 357. Edwin E. Slosson already had called the style of magazine writing “the literature of exposure,” probably a better description, but the term “muckraking” caught on. Slosson, “The Literature of Exposure,” The Independent, 60 (1906), 690. Roosevelt’s letters to Connolly, whom he had met casually in 1903, do not indicate whether or not he believed Connolly fit his definition. Clearly, after they became better acquainted about 1911, he viewed the writer as a political ally and a loyal follower. For a review of the definitions, see Harry H. Stein, “American Muckrakers and Muckraking: The 50-Year Scholarship,” Journalism Quarterly 56 (Spring, 1979), 9-17.
[3]A thorough search of archival manuscript inventories has failed to locate the Connolly records, if they still exist. His letters referred to in this paper were found in the collections of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, (all three in Library of Congress microfilm); the papers of Richard Ballinger, Joe Smith, Erastus Brainerd, (all three collections held by the Manuscripts Division, Suzzallo Graduate Library, University of Washington); the William E. Borah collection (Idaho State Historical Society); and the Joseph H. Dixon papers (Montana Historical Society collection). My thanks to the archivists of these institutions for providing me with copies and assistance in conducting this research.
[4] Connolly is classed a “second-rank” muckraker by Judson Grenier, “The Origins and Nature of Progressive Muckraking,” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, U.C.L.A., 1965). Connolly’s daughter Lillian told Grenier that her father’s middle name was “Patrick,” but there is no evidence Connolly himself used any other middle name than “Powell.” Grenier, 43. “C. P. Connolly was, from my perspective, a second-rank figure among the muckrakers (although a first-rank figure from the perspective of Montana fiction),” Grenier wrote to the author. (Letter, Feb. 9, 1987). Might the depiction of the work as “fiction” indicate Grenier’s view of some of the wild claims Connolly made in his magazine articles?
[5]See Filler, 4. For examples of the various subgroups of “progressives”, see Link and McCormick, Progressivism, (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983).
[6]Lewis Filler, The Muckrakers, (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1976), 4. Not all “muckrakers” admired TR. William Randolph Hearst, whom Filler characterizes as a muckraker, did not support Roosevelt. For example, in 1912 he believed Roosevelt was “an opportunist,” and only for a short time in 1916, were they on friendly terms. See Littlefield, 293, 320.
[7]CPC to White. Oddly, in his biographical entry in Who’s Who in America, Connolly omitted mention of his two years at St. Patrick’s. See Who Was Who in America, (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1943), II, 251. According to the brief biography in the Helena Weekly Independent, Sept. 13, 1888, Connolly’s father “was for 16 years superintendent of construction of Commodore Garner’s famous fruit works” at Wappingers Falls.
[8] The family does not appear in the 1870 census for Dutchess County, New York. See 1870 Census of New York, T-765, Reel T-23, National Archives Seattle Records Center.
[9] See Filler, 3-7, for his profile of the composite muckraker.
[10]The most complete biographical material about Connolly comes from two sources: an article printed in Helena (Mont.)Independent, Sept. 13, 1888, and a letter he wrote to Theodore Roosevelt’s confidante William Allen White in November, 1907, making application for a position as Roosevelt’s “private secretary.” He was not hired. Connolly to William Allen White, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress microfilm (1969), Series 1, Reel 78 (Nov. 8, 1907). The papers will hereafter be cited as TR Papers and Connolly as CPC.
[11] Connolly’s obituary, however, states he first clerked in New Jersey. “His first job was as clerk in the law office of the late Chief Justice William S. Gummere of New Jersey.” Obituary, New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 9, 1933, p. 19. The same article also claimed, inaccurately, that Connolly studied law “under the late Sen. Thomas J. Walsh in Montana.” No evidence shows this association.
[12]The National Cyclopedia of American Biography. (New York: James T. White and Co., 1921), v. II, 120.
[13] See Connolly, The Devil Learns to Vote, (New York: Covici Friede, 1938), 94. The book, posthumously published, adds little information to the Montana series from which the story was adapted.
[14]CPC to White. See also “Big Business and the Bench,” Everybody’s, 26 (Feb. 1912), 152. The brief biographical sketch is in theHelena Weekly Independent, Sept. 13, 1888.
[15] City Directory of Helena, 1888, Montana Historical Society collections. See also Who Was Who in America, 251. For his contributions to the New York World, see Helena Weekly Independent, Sept. 13, 1888.
[16]See Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention Held in Helena, July 4, 1889-Aug. 17, 1889, (Helena: State Publishing Co., 1921), facing p. 880, for “stenographer Connolly’s” portrait, and p. 16, for his appointment as “temporary stenographer.” See also, John Welling Smurr, “Montana Tax Conspiracy of 1889,” Montana: Magazine of the West, 5 (Spring, 1955), 48, fn. 3.
[17]Clarke, born in Missouri in 1860, remained a close Connolly friend. “I studied law in Montana in the office of one of the best types of men and of lawyers I have ever known,” Connolly later wrote of Clarke. See “Big Business…”, 154.
[18]1900 U. S. Census of Montana, Silver Bow County, T-623, Reel 915, Vol. 8, E.D. 121, Sheet 7, Line 33. National Archives Seattle Records Center.
[19]CPC to White. No independent evidence supports his claim that Cleveland offered the appointment. For his service as United States Commissioner for Lewis and Clark County, see CPC letter to Joseph K. Toole in Montana 37 (Autumn, 1987), 51.
[20]CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 3A, Reel 363, (April 11, 1894).
[21] For CPC references to his Catholicism in letters to Roosevelt, see, for example, the letter of Dec. 18, 1912. On his “earning power” suffering, see TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 161.
[22]On his “earning power” suffering, see TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 161.
[23]TR Papers, Series 2, Reel 354, (Dec. 23, 1912).
[24]See CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 251 (Nov. 2, 1917); Letter to the Editor, “From Temperance to Wheelerism,”Commonweal 12 (June 18, 1930), 191, one of Connolly’s last published works.
[25] CPC to White. Also, 1900 U. S. Census for Montana, Microfilm T-623, Reel 915, Silver Bow County, Vol. 9, E. D. 121, Sheet 7, Lines 32-36, held in the collections of the National Archives Seattle Records Center.
[26]CPC to White. Also, see introduction for “Big Business…” and introduction for “Loopholes of the Law,” Collier’s 42 (Sept. 26, 1908), 14.
[27]The defense claimed he was insane because he had suffered a serious head wound in the Civil War. The Montana Supreme Court rejected the appeal. For the Supreme Court decision on the case, see Territory v. Roberts, 9 Mont. 12, 22 P. 132 (1889). See the Butte Miner, Feb. 23, 1904, for detailed descriptions of all five legal executions in Butte to 1904.
[28]For details of the case, see State v. Lucey, 24 Mont. 295, 61 P. 994 (1900).
[29]Anaconda Standard, Sept. 15, 1900, 1, c. 1. The record of the appeal is Supreme Court Docket 1496, on microfiche in the State Records Center, Helena. For the denial of the appeal, see State v. Lucey, 24 Mont. 295, 61 P. 994 (1900)
[30]Butte Miner, Feb. 23, 1904, 3. For Connolly’s presence, see Anaconda Standard, Sept. 15, 1900, 1, c. 1.
[31]C. B. Nolan, the state attorney general, argued the case for the state on appeal. State v. Lucey, 24 Mont. 295, 61 P. 994 (1900).
[32] For Connolly’s account, see The Devil Learns to Vote, 94-106; for a concise understanding of the complicated politics in Montana during the period, see Michael P. Malone and Richard B. Roeder, Montana: A History of Two Centuries, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), chap. 9, “Copper and Politics, 1880-1910.” For collapse of the Donnell, Lawson firm, see Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 38 (May 10, 1884), 552-553.
[33] “Big Business…”, 153, and CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 171 (April 17, 1913).
[34]TR to CPC, TR Papers, Series 2, Reel 356 (April 25, 1913).
[35] See Ellis Waldron and Paul B. Wilson, Atlas of Montana Elections, 1889-1976, (Missoula: University of Montana Publications, 1978), 294. For Connolly’s characterization of Clancy as an “illiterate…saloon lounger,” see The Devil Learns to Vote, 184, in a chapter titled “A Clown Mounts the Judicial Bench.” Between 1899 and 1915, Amalgamated, controlled by Standard Oil, was the holding company for Anaconda. In 1915 Amalgamated was dissolved and the name Anaconda was again adopted for the entire organization.
[36] See The Devil Learns to Vote, 262.
[37]See Connolly, “The Story of Montana,” McClure’s, 29 (June, 1907), for the election story, and “Big Business…”, 155, for Connolly’s statements about the libel suit and Clark’s attitude toward him.
[38] See Malone and Roeder, chap. 9.
[39] “Big Business and the Bench,” 155.
[40] “Big Business and the Bench,” 155.
[41]Polk’s City Directory, Butte, 1901-1903, Montana Historical Society collections; Letter, Ellie Arguimbau to author, (Nov. 13, 1986).
[42] Letterhead stationery gave the firm name as “Crutchfield and Connolly.” Specifics on Crutchfield are from 1900 U. S. Census of Montana, T-623, Reel 914, Ravelli County, Vol. 8, E.D. 81, Sheet 13, Line 71. Connolly’s “application letter” to Roosevelt was written on the firm’s stationery, suggesting that business may not have been brisk and he was scouting around for another endeavor. See CPC to White.
[43] Filler, 231.
[44]Malone and Roeder, 319. Other historians have called attention to Connolly’s magazine attacks on Clark. For example, see James W. Hulse, “W. A. Clark and the Las Vegas Connection,” Montana 37 (Winter, 1987), 50fn.
[45] “The Story of Montana,” McClure’s, 27 (Aug. 1906), 347.
[46]Author Harold S. Wilson completely misread the thrust of Connolly’s series: “Connolly continued the theme of miner violence in the west with his ‘The Story of Montana.’ A lawyer for 20 years and a county prosecuting attorney for one term, Connolly supplied the gruesome details of his state’s ‘reign of lawlessness and its overthrow’ by vigilantes who hanged from forty to sixty men.” Harold S. Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 154. Later, Wilson incorrectly stated that Roosevelt adopted Connolly’s earlier views on judicial recall. In actuality, Roosevelt’s opinion was well established by the time Connolly’s court series appeared. It probably only confirmed TR’s views.
[47]The Great Falls Daily Leader, Sept. 6, 1906.
[48] For example, see Town Crier (Seattle), June 1, 1912, 4, for comments about Connolly’s expose of U. S. District Judge C. H. Hanford. In “Lies Rehashed,” the editor claimed Hanford was a victim of the “Eastern magazine of muck-raking tendencies.” Seattle Times editor Col. Alden J. Blethen, who coincidentally also was a former lawyer, once charged McClure’s for being “the character assassin of the age.” In the same article, Blethen accused Erastus Brainerd of being an accomplice to the magazine. SeeSeattle Times, Aug. 25, 1912, editorial.
[49] “The Story of Montana,” 347. Might they have become acquainted at the dinner? Regular correspondence between the two men did not begin until 1911 after Connolly was a recognized magazine writer and Roosevelt, an ambitious ex-president. The correspondence is generally warm, but formal, indicating they were political acquaintances, not close friends.
[50]During the period Connolly wrote for “muckraking” journals, 1906-1914, only three articles did not have legal or political themes. They were: “Rush to Rawhide,” Collier’s, 41 (March 28, 1908), 12, a piece about a mining town in Nevada; “Dangers from Plague,” Collier’s, 42 (Nov. 7, 1908), 12; and “Navy Control,” Collier’s, 42 (Nov. 21, 1908), 12, a call for “reorganization of the Navy and preparedness,” a theme Theodore Roosevelt took up just before World War I. A reading of his work demonstrates Connolly’s skill with political or legal issues and his obvious unfamiliarity in other fields. An example of an investigative reporter was Ida Tarbell who exposed the monopolistic excesses of Standard Oil. Tarbell’s series began in McClure’s in November 1902. See Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work: An Autobiography, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939). Little mention is made of the muckraking period in her sentimental life story, but she does include an interesting example of the kind of letters Theodore Roosevelt wrote to journalists, p. 276. For a biography, see Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker, (New York: Seaview-Putnam, 1984). Brady points out a characteristic Tarbell shared with Connolly and other muckrakers–she became conservative after World War I. Tarbell, in fact, became an apologist for the misdeeds of big industry. Another investigative muckraker was her McClure’s associate, Ray Stannard Baker who described how the railroads manipulated public opinion for their ends. See McClure’s, 26 (March, 1906), 535, for the Baker article, “How Railroads Make Public Opinion.”
[51] Butte Evening News, July 10, 1906. Shortly after the Montana series concluded, Connolly’s single article on Heinze’s political manipulations was published. McClure’s, 29 (July, 1907), 317-332.
[52] See S. S. McClure, My Autobiography, (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1913), 245: “Of course, subjects that will repay the editor for so expensive a method of presentation are few and important.” If the amount was accurate, inadvertently, the claim may have cast doubt on the facts in Connolly’s story. Might detractors claim the writer had been influenced to exaggerate the nature and extent of the wrong-doing in order to earn a huge payment from a magazine seeking sensationalism?
[53] Missoula Herald, March 25, 1907, 1, noted his departure for Boise on the assignment. Accounts of the case appear in several books including: David H. Glover, Debaters and Dynamiters, (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1964); Kevin Tierney,Darrow: A Biography, (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1979), Chap. 20; Arthur and Lila Weinberg, Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel, (New York: Putnam’s, 1980), Chap. 9; Claudius O. Johnson, Borah of Idaho, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 78-87. See also Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States, (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1967).
[54] See Joseph M. Dixon to CPC, Joseph M. Dixon Papers, University of Montana Archives, (March 25, 1907), which refers to Connolly’s representation of “Utah Fire Proofing Company,” a firm then working on the Boise-Payette irrigation project.
[55] See Glover, 19. The magazine did not take a formal position on the trial. “Out of Connolly’s narrative…clearly stands the fact that neither side has ever been wholly right in Idaho.” Collier’s, 40 (May 11, 1907), 9. Theodore Roosevelt called Haywood’s supporters, “undesirable citizens.” Collier’s, 40 (May 18, 1907), 23.
[56]Borah to White, April 29, 1907, Borah Papers, Idaho Historical Society. For a complete account of the Borah’s difficulties with the land fraud charges, see Merle W. Wells, “Timber Frauds on Crooked River,” Idaho Yesterdays 29 (Summer, 1985), 2-13.
[57] The Autobiography of William Allen White. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1946), 374-375.
[58]White to TR, datelined Manitou, Colo., TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 75, (July 25, 1907).
[59]Ibid.
[60] See Borah to White, July 6, 1907.
[61]Borah to White, July 19, 1907, Borah Papers.
[62]Connolly’s telegram reply is quoted by White, infra. The political alignments of the period are discussed in Wells, 4-5.
[63] See Borah to Bourne, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 73, (April 13, 1907).
[64]TR to White, TR Papers, Series 2, Reel 346, (July 30, 1907).
[65] Connolly to Borah, August 1, 1907, Borah Papers.
[66]Borah biographer Johnson relates the incident but does not mention Connolly by name. He mentions his presence but incorrectly identified him as a “writer of sea stories.” Johnson, 86.
[67] For White’s crediting Borah, see White, 374. For Borah’s preference for dismissal, see for example, Borah to White, July 6, 1907, and Connolly to Borah, Aug. 26, 1907, both in Borah Papers.
[68] Connolly to Borah, Aug. 26, 1907, Borah Papers. Historian David E. Glover contended the payment was “presumably for his influence in Washington.” Glover uses as evidence two letters from Connolly to Borah, the first dated Aug. 1, 1907, and the second, Sept. 12, 1907, purporting to acknowledge receipt of the money. See Glover, 90, 276, for his explanation of the payment.
[69]See Yerkes to Borah, Sept. 14, 1907, Borah Papers.
[70]Connolly to Borah, Sept. 12, 1907, Borah Papers.
[71]For Connolly’s laudatory article about Borah, see “Presidential Possibilities: Borah of Idaho,” Collier’s, 55 (July 31, 1915).
[72] By 1906, he was the father of a fourth child, a son who was hearing impaired. See CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Roll 294, (Oct. 1, 1918).
[73] Anaconda Standard, April 9, 1908, 9.
[74] See Carl J. Moses, “The Washington State Railroad Commission, 1905-1911: A History of a Progressive Reform,” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington), 134, for Ankeny’s connections with railroad interests.
[75] He may have used similar research techniques involving his other articles. Any study of his methods is handicapped by the absence of personal papers.
[76] Connolly to Joe Smith, Joe Smith Papers, University of Washington Suzzallo Library manuscripts division, (hereafter cited as Smith Papers), File 7-20, (July 3, 1908). For a biography of Smith, see Warren B. Johnson, “Muckraking in the Northwest: Joe Smith and Seattle Reform,” Pacific Historical Review XL (Nov. 1971), 478-500. A fragmentary unpublished autobiography is in file 1 of the Smith Papers.
[77] For reference to his stay with the Brainerds in Seattle, see Connolly to Brainerd, Erastus Brainerd Papers, University of Washington Suzzallo Library manuscripts division, (hereafter cited as Brainerd Papers), File 2-11, (Sept. 11, 1912). For the Wilson ownership and political orientation, see Robert Saltvig, “The Progressive Movement in Washington,” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, 1966), 183.
[78] Brainerd papers, undated 1908 letter. Brainerd, however, was no friend of Smith’s as Smith later indicated in his unpublished autobiography: “[Brainerd] was an egotistic dyspeptic who wielded a trenchant pen [and] made enemies for himself and the [Post-Intelligencer] until Wilson fired him in 1911.” Smith Papers, Folder 1-19, 26.
[79]CPC to Brainerd, Brainerd Papers, (July 28, 1908).
[80] “Ankeny of Washington,” Collier’s, 41 (Aug. 22, 1908), 15.
[81]“[The] articles were an example of the influence of the popular muckraking style of journalism which influenced Washington state politics.” Moses, 191.
[82] In an earlier piece about Oregon Sen. Charles W. Fulton, Connolly branded him one of the “political crooks and thumbriggers.” Fulton was defeated in the Oregon direct primary in April. “Senate Undesirables: Fulton of Oregon, The Story of the Rise of the Political Understrapper of the late John H. Mitchell,” Collier’s, 41 (April 17, 1908), 13-14. Later, Connolly condemned Sen. Francis E. Warren of Wyoming as “a proven perjurer” and a man who “used public funds for private benefit.” See “Senator Warren of Wyoming,” Collier’s, 49 (Aug. 31, 1912), 10-11. The charges against Warren were not new. As early as 1905, a legislator introduced resolutions in the Wyoming legislature accusing Warren of land fraud and calling for an investigation. Warren survived similar charges throughout his long political career. See T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 381-384. About those years, Norman Hapgood, Collier’s editor, wrote: “We cleaned out some of the worst senators.” See Hapgood’s autobiography, The Changing Years, (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930), 168.
[83] “The Whitewashing of Ballinger,” Collier’s, 44 (Nov. 13, 1909), 15-17.
[84] “Raiding the People’s Land,” Collier’s, 44 (Jan. 8, 1910), 18-19.
[85] Quoted in James Penick, Progressive Politics and Conservation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 130.
[86]Historian James Penick concluded Connolly displayed poor research techniques. “[It] was the result of a brief visit to Seattle during which Connolly became convinced that Ballinger was a ‘high-toned crook,’ chiefly by interviewing everyone in the area who bore the secretary a grudge.” Ibid. An examination of letters to Ballinger from Seattle friends, however, seems to suggest that Connolly indeed tried to obtain information from Ballinger’s friends. The following letter shows the difficulty Connolly faced in getting responses from people who knew and supported Ballinger: “Connolly asked M. R. Proebstel from Alaska for information, but he refused…. Connolly went to Judge Garretson, a lawyer of Tacoma whom you know and said that if Garretson would go to his friend Proebstel and get him to tell the story [about the coal leases], there would be money in it for him.” Judge James T. Ronald to Ballinger, Richard A. Ballinger Papers, University of Washington manuscripts collection, Box 11-22, (May 4, 1910). See also, Everett Smith to Ballinger, Ballinger Papers, Box 12-2, (Jan. 24, 1910); and G. A. Taylor to Ballinger, Ballinger Papers, Box 13-6, (Jan. 29, 1910), both of whom reported Connolly’s attempts to gain information from them.
[87]CPC to Smith, Smith Papers, File 7-24, (March 23, 1910).
[88]Collier’s, 45 (April 2, 1910), 16-17. A Seattle newspaper guessed the anti-Ballinger articles meant Collier’s “lost circulation in the neighborhood of Seattle.” Seattle Times, Aug. 20, 1910, 9. From the start, Brainerd and the P-Iwere counted among Ballinger’s strongest supporters. See, for example, J. J. Donovan to Ballinger, Ballinger Papers, Box 6-4, (Nov. 27, 1909): “You are fortunate in having two staunch friends in Harvey Scott of the Oregonian and Erastus Brainerd of the P-I.”
[89] For the legal maneuvers in the case, see Lewis J. Paper, Louis Brandeis, (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983), as well as Penick, chap. 6. Years later, Connolly wrote to President Wilson, endorsing Brandeis’ nomination to the Supreme Court. See Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress microfilm, Series 4, Reel 345, (Jan. 28, 1916).
[90]“Sinking of the Republic,” Collier’s, 43 (Feb. 6, 1909), 11.
[91]Collier’s, 45 (June 4, 1910), 9, quotes Lawler’s slanderous statements. Claudius O. Johnson made a similar incorrect identification between the two Connollys in Borah of Idaho, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 86. See footnote 62, infra. For Ballinger’s later opinion of Connolly, see Ballinger to Dr. W. A. White, Ballinger Papers, Box 13-66, (May 3, 1915), in which he asked Dr. White, the head of St. Elizabeth’s Insane Asylum, Washington, D. C., if rumors were correct that Connolly had been one of his patients. “I would not be surprised at the truth of the statement, except that I do not think the hospital is where he belongs; a more secure place suggests itself to my mind,” Ballinger wrote. The doctor did not reply; the charge was entirely rumor.
[92] See “Connolly Brings Suit for Slander,” Anaconda Standard, May 28, 1910, 1. Filed May 27, 1910, the suit sought damages of $20,000. Connolly claimed in the complaint that he was in Los Angeles at the time the Republic sank.
[93]His portrayal of Darrow, who had opposed his friend Borah in the Boise trial, was less than flattering. “Darrow [is] a greater artist than a lawyer…”. Collier’s 48 (Dec. 23, 1911), 9. The Weinbergs called the case Darrow’s “greatest personal catastrophe.” Weinberg and Weinberg, Clarence Darrow…, 240.
[94] CPC, “Protest by Dynamite: Similarities and Contrasts Between the McNamara Affair in Los Angeles and the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone Trial in Boise,” Collier’s, 48 (Jan. 13, 1912), 9.
[95] Ibid., 9, 24.
[96]In April, 1909, while he was in Los Angeles covering the Times trial, Connolly wrote to Smith in Seattle asking for “particulars of the Root case,” an incident the previous year in which a Washington State Supreme Court justice resigned when it was revealed that he had sought the advice of a former justice, then counsel for a railroad, about a decision affecting the railroad. CPC to Smith, Smith Papers, File 7-21, (April 21, 1909). The incident is repeated in “Big Business…”, Everybody’s Magazine, 26 (Feb. 1912), 155-156; and in Joe Smith’s pre-election series “The Supreme Court Unmasked: The Supreme Court Decision Written by the Great Northern Attorney,” Seattle Star, Oct. 27, 1910, 1.
[97] For instance, see “Criticism of the Courts,” Outlook, 96 (Sept. 24, 1910), 149-153, in which the former president responded to critics of his speech Aug. 29 in Denver. University teams chose the topic for their debates in the winter of 1911-12. See H. M. Chambers, State College of Washington, to Smith, Smith Papers, (Dec. 14, 1911), in which Chambers requests Smith’s help and repeats the debate question, “Resolved: that the municipal, county and state judges of the courts of the states of the United States should be subject to ‘Popular Recall.'”
[98]CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 122, (Jan. 4, 1912).
[99]TR to CPC, TR Papers, Series 3A, Reel 371, (Jan. 6, 1912). Roosevelt’s article, “The Right of the People to Rule,” was published in Outlook at the same time the second installment of Connolly’s series appeared in Everybody’s. See Outlook, 100 (March 23, 1912), 618-626.
[100]CPC to TR, written on Brown Palace Hotel, Denver, letterhead, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 123, (Jan. 15, 1912).
[101] CPC to Roosevelt, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 131, (Feb. 29, 1912).
[102] TR to CPC, TR Papers, Series 3A, Reel 374, (March 5, 1912).
[103] For example, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1983), 158: “In their [Republican leaders] rejection of Roosevelt, no single element weighed more than his criticism of the courts. That criticism had convinced conservatives that he held dangerous views…”
[104] “The Supreme Court Unmasked,” Seattle Star, Oct. 20-29, 1910.
[105]For the court’s reputation among contemporaries, see Carl Snyder, “Justice v. Technicality: Courts in Reform,” Collier’s, 48 (Feb. 24, 1912), 12, applauding the Washington court for “progressivism.” For a study of one aspect of the court’s progressive decisions in the field of labor law, see Joseph F. Tripp, “Progressive Jurisprudence in the West: The Washington Supreme Court, Labor Law, and the Problem of Industrial Accidents,” Labor History, (1983), 342-365. Roosevelt’s statement is quoted in Tripp, 342.
[106]The author read the court’s opinions in a variety of cases for the period, 1908-1912. He plans to write a paper addressing the more general question of the court’s “progressivism,” using the evidence he compiled from those readings. The findings show the court deserved its progressive reputation. Even many of Smith’s progressive friends took issue with his views on the Washington State Supreme Court. Historian Mike Jordan thinks the court issue was one area where the normally dependable Smith had “a blind spot” to the facts. Conversation with author, Dec. 10, 1986.
[107]B. Brooks, a Seattle Argus columnist, reflected the former view: “A good deal of laughing comment has been made recently over ‘the Unmasking of the Supreme Court’ as written by Joe Smith…Joe has been in the limelight for a long time and this made such a desparate [sic] effort to break into the legislature that he ran for the house on three distinct tickets. The idea of Joe Smith unmasking anything is what has caused the laughing comment.” Argus, Oct. 29, 1910, 4. At the other end was Connolly’s friend, Erastus Brainerd, the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who boomed: “The rawest political fake and fraud which was ever attempted in this state is the move to drag the supreme court into disreputable partisan politics…” P-I, Oct. 25, 1910, 6. Four days later the P-I ran a series of “biographies” of the nominees Smith had endorsed. The paper dismissed one as a “professional office-seeker”, two others as “corporation lawyers,” and another, a “legal amateur” with only five years of experience. See P-I, Oct. 29, 1910, 12, c. 2. For an example of a publication supporting Smith’s view, see The Weekend (Seattle), Oct. 15, 1910, 1: “Judicial usurpation will not be tolerated by a free people….”
[108]Howard DeWolfe to Smith, Smith Papers, Box 8-4, (June 20, 1911). A special committee appointed by the Washington State Bar Association asked DeWolfe for evidence of his charges, but he refused to produce it. For the State Bar’s handling of the DeWolfe case, see Proceedings, Washington State Bar Association Convention held in Aberdeen, 1909, (Olympia: Recorder Press, 1910), 92-95.
[109] Brainerd, a Connecticut native educated at Harvard, edited the P-I from 1904-1911. Some months after he was fired, he asked Connolly to help find him a job with one of the New York magazines. Connolly responded he would recommend him, but Brainerd remained in Washington, indicating the search was not successful. He died in 1922 in Tacoma at the age of 67. See CPC to Brainerd, Brainerd Papers, (Sept. 11, 1912); and Brainerd’s obituary, Seattle Times, Dec. 26, 1922.
[110]CPC to Brainerd, Brainerd Papers, (Dec. 16, 1911).
[111]“The recent article…contains nothing that has not previously been said by a local foreign-owned publication [the Star, owned by E. W. Scripps] which caters specially to all that is low and disorderly in the community, but Connolly has brought all these things together in a running yarn that is remarkable chiefly for its lack of truthfulness and has, thus, provided pleasurable reading for those who naturally prefer think evil rather than good…the form of the Connolly article shows this notorious hasher of scandal and falsehood at his characteristic worst.” “Lies Rehashed,” Town Crier (Seattle), June 1, 1912, 4.
[112] David L. Chalmers, “Law, Justice and the Muckrakers,” in John M. Harrison and Harry H. Stein, Muckraking, (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1973), 73.
[113]Ibid., 74.
[114] See “Case of West Virginia,” Collier’s, 50 (Dec. 21, 1912), 12-13; “Gov. Glynn of New York,” Collier’s, 52 (March 7, 1914), 7-8; and an unsigned piece written in Connolly’s style criticizing Seattle Judge John E. Humphries, in Collier’s, (Nov. 1, 1913), 14.
[115] CPC to Brainerd, on Hotel Kanawha, Charleston, W. Va., stationery, Brainerd Papers, (Sept. 11, 1912).
[116]John Whiteclay Chambers III, The Tyranny of Change, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 236. For another view of the end of muckraking, see Ron Marmerelli, “William Hard as Progressive Journalist,” American Journalism, 3 (1986), 142-153. See also Arthur and Lila Weinberg, xvi, who placed the beginnings of muckraking in 1902, but contended it “ebbed” in 1911 and then “merged” into the Progressive movement by 1912.
[117]The return address on his letters indicates he retained his home on East Munn Street, East Orange, N. J., where he and his family lived during at least his last two years with Collier’s. Nearly all of his 30 letters to Theodore Roosevelt bear the East Munn address. Oddly, he apparently had no admiration for Woodrow Wilson, the New Jersey governor elected president in 1912. He wrote two letters to Wilson. The first was a formal request asking Wilson to consider a friend for a judicial appointment. The second letter endorsed Louis Brandeis’ nomination to the Supreme Court. See Woodrow Wilson Papers, Series 2, Reel 45 (Feb. 9. 1913), and Series 4, Reel 345, (Jan. 28, 1916).
[118]He wrote to Roosevelt asking for his help, but TR responded: “I have the same impression about Frank that you have, although with nothing to base it on. There isn’t any way I can help.” See CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Roll 194, (Nov. 24, 1914); and TR to CPC, TR Papers, Series 3A, Roll 357, (Nov. 30, 1914). The best account of the incident is in Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). For the political issues surrounding the case, see C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 435-448. See also Dinnerstein, “Atlanta in the Progressive Era: A Dreyfus Affair in Georgia,” in Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson (eds.), Jews in the South, (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1973), 186-197. For Connolly’s defense of Frank, see The Truth About the Frank Case, (New York: Vail-Ballow Co., 1915).
[119]Connolly sent Roosevelt a clipping from an unidentified New Jersey newspaper, announcing his Maine speaking engagements. See TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 214, (Sept. 4, 1916).
[120]For an example of a non-political issue they discussed, see CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Roll 251, (Nov. 2, 1917), in which Connolly asked Roosevelt to restate his opposition to the YMCA policy of excluding Catholics and TR’s response, TR Papers, Series 3A, Roll 397, (Nov. 5, 1917).
[121] See CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 271, (April 5, 1918). For his agreement with Roosevelt that Wilson was “showing weakness and vacillation” as to what should be done about Germany after the war, see “Severe Justice is ‘Square Deal’ for Murderous Huns,” New York Herald (European Ed.), Nov. 27, 1918, clipping sent by CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 303, (Nov. 28, 1918); and, for example, CPC to TR, TR Papers, Series 1, Reel 246, (Sept. 20, 1917). For his last published article involving “court corruption,” see “Caillaux Case: The Campaign of LeFigaro,” Everybody’s Magazine, 40 (May, 1919), 27-28, a piece he wrote from France about how a newspaper took on what Connolly called “the pro-German” finance minister of France. “…[T]here were other and more powerful influences at work for Caillaux and his wife during her trial [for murder]. The judge who presided was so partial in his rulings in favor of the defense that one of his fellow judges reprimanded him, and a duel between the two resulted.” Like his other work, it was an old story, from a July, 1914, trial, and a corrupt judge caused the problem. In same issue, Connolly’s friend, Capt. Archibald Roosevelt, wrote “Lest We Forget,” a salute to his late father, brother, and fellow soldiers.
[122]In his last published article, Connolly made a case for retaining Prohibition, arguing that alcoholism deaths would rise if it were repealed. See “Saving Lives by Prohibition,” Religious Education, 25 (Oct. 1930), 763-766. He had written a letter to a Catholic magazine earlier in 1930, taking issue with a columnist’s sarcastic view of the “Anti-Saloon League.” See Commonweal, 191.
[123]CPC to Joseph M. Dixon, Dixon Papers, University of Montana Archives, Box 331-A, (Dec. 29, 1924). Earlier in his career, Connolly had not considered Dixon a political friend. In 1909 he had written President Taft recommending that he not choose Dixon for his Secretary of the Interior. “I recognize his social qualities,” Connolly wrote, “but he has never secured any political office in Montana, outside of county attorney, without the help of the Amalgamated Copper Co., and, of the public men who owe their political elevation to that corporation, he is the most servile in his obedience.” CPC to William H. Taft, Taft Papers, Library of Congress microfilm, Series 3, Part 4, Reel 119 (Jan. 23, 1909). Until 1911, the Amalgamated believed Dixon to be “loyal” to their position, but he soon became a vocal opponent of the company. See Merrill G. Burlingame, A History of Montana. (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1957), 250.
[124]New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 9, 1933, p. 19. See also: Who Was Who…, 251. The newspaper obituary listed his survivors as his wife Mary; “three daughters, Sister Helen, a nun, of Yakima, Wash., Miss Lillian Connolly of Orange, and Mrs. B. S. O’Hara of West Orange, and a son, Walter J. Connolly of Baltimore.”