Conkling, R Sen

uber1  <a href="https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-3656">https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-3656</a>
=credit moblier scandal<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corporations-people-adam-winkler/554852/">https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corporations-people-adam-winkler/554852/</a>
=<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corporations-people-adam-winkler/554852/">https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corporations-people-adam-winkler/554852/</a>no lnxBUSINESS‘Corporations Are People’ Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century LieHow a farcical series of events in the 1880s produced an enduring and controversial legal precedent
By Adam Winkler[An archival caricature of a railroad baron swallowing America’s train linesA 1907 caricature of the railroad baron Edward H. Harriman swallowing America’s train lines. (Luther Bradley / Library of Congress / Corbis / Getty)]MARCH 5, 2018Somewhat counterintuitively, American corporations today enjoy many of the same rights as American citizens. Both, for instance, are entitled to the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion. How exactly did corporations come to be understood as “people” bestowed with the most fundamental constitutional rights? The answer can be found in a bizarre—even farcical—series of lawsuits more than 130 years ago involving a lawyer who lied to the Supreme Court, an ethically challenged justice, and one of the most powerful corporations of the day.That corporation was the Southern Pacific Railroad, owned by the robber baron Leland Stanford. In 1881, after California lawmakers imposed a special tax on railroad property, Southern Pacific pushed back, making the bold argument that the law was an act of unconstitutional discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of freed slaves, that amendment guarantees  every “person” the “equal protection of the laws.” Stanford’s railroad argued that it was a person too, reasoning that just as the Constitution prohibited discrimination on the basis of racial identity, so did it bar discrimination against Southern Pacific on the basis of its corporate identity.The head lawyer representing Southern Pacific was a man named Roscoe Conkling. A leader of the Republican Party for more than a decade, Conkling had even been nominated to the Supreme Court twice. He begged off both times, the second time after the Senate had confirmed him. (He remains the last person to turn down a Supreme Court seat after winning confirmation). More than most lawyers, Conkling was seen by the justices as a peer.It was a trust Conkling would betray. As he spoke before the Court on Southern Pacific’s behalf, Conkling recounted an astonishing tale. In the 1860s, when he was a young congressman, Conkling had served on the drafting committee that was responsible for writing the Fourteenth Amendment. Then the last member of the committee still living, Conkling told the justices that the drafters had changed the wording of the amendment, replacing “citizens” with “persons” in order to cover corporations too. Laws referring to “persons,” he said, have “by long and constant acceptance … been held to embrace artificial persons as well as natural persons.” Conkling buttressed his account with a surprising piece of evidence: a musty old journal he claimed was a previously unpublished record of the deliberations of the drafting committee.Years later, historians would discover that Conkling’s journal was real but his story was a fraud. The journal was in fact a record of the congressional committee’s deliberations, but, upon close examination, it offered no evidence that the drafters intended to protect corporations. It showed, in fact, that the language of the equal-protection clause was never changed from “citizen” to “person.” So far as anyone can tell, the rights of corporations were not raised in the public debates over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment or in any of the states’ ratifying conventions. And prior to Conkling’s appearance on behalf of Southern Pacific, no member of the drafting committee had ever suggested that corporations were covered.There’s reason to suspect that Conkling’s deception was uncovered back in his time too. The justices held onto the case for three years without ever issuing a decision, until Southern Pacific unexpectedly settled the case. Then, shortly after, another case from Southern Pacific reached the Supreme Court, raising the exact same legal question. The company had the same team of lawyers, with the exception of Conkling. Tellingly, Southern Pacific’s lawyers omitted any mention of Conkling’s drafting history or his journal. Had those lawyers believed Conkling, it would have been malpractice to leave out his story.When the Court issued its decision on this second case, the justices expressly declined to decide if corporations were people. The dispute could be, and was, resolved on other grounds, prompting an angry rebuke from one justice, Stephen J. Field, who castigated his colleagues for failing to address “the important constitutional questions involved.” “At the present day, nearly all great enterprises are conducted by corporations,” he wrote, and they deserved to know if they had equal rights too.Rumored to carry a gun with him at all times, the colorful Field was the only sitting justice ever arrested—and the charge was murder. He was innocent, but nonetheless guilty of serious ethical violations in the Southern Pacific cases, at least by modern standards: A confidant of Leland Stanford, Field had advised the company on which lawyers to hire for this very series of cases and thus should have recused himself from them. He refused to—and, worse, while the first case was pending, covertly shared internal memoranda of the justices with Southern Pacific’s legal team.The rules of judicial ethics were not well developed in the Gilded Age, however, and the self-assured Field, who feared the forces of socialism, did not hesitate to weigh in. Taxing the property of railroads differently, he said, was like allowing deductions for property “owned by white men or by old men, and not deducted if owned by black men or young men.”So, with Field on the Court, still more twists were yet to come. The Supreme Court’s opinions are officially published in volumes edited by an administrator called the reporter of decisions. By tradition, the reporter writes up a summary of the Court’s opinion and includes it at the beginning of the opinion. The reporter in the 1880s was J. C. Bancroft Davis, whose wildly inaccurate summary of the Southern Pacific case said that the Court had ruled that “corporations are persons within … the Fourteenth Amendment.” Whether his summary was an error or something more nefarious—Davis had once been the president of the Newburgh and New York Railway company—will likely never be known.Field nonetheless saw Davis’s erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.His gambit worked. In the following years, the case would be cited over and over by courts across the nation, including the Supreme Court, for deciding that corporations had rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.Indeed, the faux precedent in the Southern Pacific case would go on to be used by a Supreme Court that in the early 20th century became famous for striking down numerous economic regulations, including federal child-labor laws, zoning laws, and wage-and-hour laws. Meanwhile, in cases like the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), those same justices refused to read the Constitution as protecting the rights of African Americans, the real intended beneficiaries of the Fourteenth Amendment. Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court would rule on 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations.The day back in 1882 when the Supreme Court first heard Roscoe Conkling’s argument, the New-York Daily Tribune featured a story on the case with a headline that would turn out to be prophetic: “Civil Rights of Corporations.” Indeed, in a feat of deceitful legal alchemy, Southern Pacific and its wily legal team had, with the help of an audacious Supreme Court justice, set up the Fourteenth Amendment to be more of a bulwark for the rights of businesses than the rights of minorities.Adam Winkler is a professor at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights and Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.
==utica<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; color: rgb(35, 35, 35); font-family: " crimson="Crimson" text="Text" georgia="Georgia" cambria="Cambria" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">conkling says ‘no’<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; color: rgb(35, 35, 35); font-family: " crimson="Crimson" text="Text" georgia="Georgia" cambria="Cambria" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">Congressmen buy stock in the Credit Mobilier of America construction company at discounted prices lower than market value and make a large profit from the dividend money. Oh yes, the congressmen are asked to vote for any legislation giving the company – which is building the Union Pacific Railroad – federal loans and land grants. Utica’s U.S. Sen. Roscoe Conkling refuses to have anything to do with the scheme.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; color: rgb(35, 35, 35); font-family: " crimson="Crimson" text="Text" georgia="Georgia" cambria="Cambria" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">Rumors have been circulating in Washington for weeks that Oakes Ames, a Republican congressman from Massachusetts and an officer with Credit Mobilier, has been selling shares in the company to congressmen in exchange for votes for any legislation favoring the railroad and the construction company. When Conkling is approached by Ames, he quickly learns that the Utica senator’s vote is not for sale.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; color: rgb(35, 35, 35); font-family: " crimson="Crimson" text="Text" georgia="Georgia" cambria="Cambria" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">(In 1873, the shady operation gave rise to one of the biggest political scandals in the history of Congress. It was learned that Credit Mobilier had received $72 million in contracts to build a section of the Union Pacific Railroad worth about $53 million. Much of the $72 million came from federal subsides. The railroad also received millions of acres in land grants.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; color: rgb(35, 35, 35); font-family: " crimson="Crimson" text="Text" georgia="Georgia" cambria="Cambria" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">(The House of Representatives created a committee to investigate. As a result, Ames and Rep. James Brooks, a Democrat from New York, were formally censured by the House. The Department of Justice also investigated and found that more than two dozen congressmen from both political parties had bought shares. Its investigation included nine senators, including Conkling. Its conclusion: “Mr. Conkling does not appear to have been connected in any way with Credit Mobilier or the Union Pacific Railroad and consequently is in no way affected thereby.”)=// personhood? see alaso mcconn covid liability immunityadam winklerSomewhat counterintuitively, American corporations today enjoy many of the same rights as American citizens. Both, for instance, are entitled to the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion. How exactly did corporations come to be understood as “people” bestowed with the most fundamental constitutional rights? The answer can be found in a bizarre—even farcical—series of lawsuits more than 130 years ago involving a lawyer who lied to the Supreme Court, an ethically challenged justice, and one of the most powerful corporations of the day.<div class="blah" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2em; display: grid; grid-template-areas: " a="a" b="b" grid-template-columns="grid-template-columns" fr="fr" px="px"><div class="l-articlecontainercontainer" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: none; width: 736px; -webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1; align-self: start; grid-area: 1 / 1 / auto / span 1;"><section class="l-articlesection s-cms-content" itemprop="articleBody" id="article-section-0" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: 64px; line-height: 1.4;"><div data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-mobile.html" data-native="standard,gift" data-pos="boxinjector-m" class=" ad-boxinjector-m-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 16px; margin-top: 0px;">That corporation was the Southern Pacific Railroad, owned by the robber baron Leland Stanford. In 1881, after California lawmakers imposed a special tax on railroad property, Southern Pacific pushed back, making the bold argument that the law was an act of unconstitutional discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of freed slaves, that amendment guarantees  every “person” the “equal protection of the laws.” Stanford’s railroad argued that it was a person too, reasoning that just as the Constitution prohibited discrimination on the basis of racial identity, so did it bar discrimination against Southern Pacific on the basis of its corporate identity.</div></section></div></div><div data-section="full" data-pos="boxinjector-d" data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-desktop.html" data-native="standard,gift" class=" ad-boxinjector-d-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div class="blah" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2em; display: grid; grid-template-areas: " a="a" b="b" grid-template-columns="grid-template-columns" fr="fr" px="px" margin-top="margin-top" em="em"><div class="l-articlecontainercontainer" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: none; width: 736px; -webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1; align-self: start; grid-area: 1 / 1 / auto / span 1;"><section class="l-articlesection s-cms-content" itemprop="articleBody" id="article-section-1" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: 64px; line-height: 1.4;">The head lawyer representing Southern Pacific was a man named Roscoe Conkling. A leader of the Republican Party for more than a decade, Conkling had even been nominated to the Supreme Court twice. He begged off both times, the second time after the Senate had confirmed him. (He remains the last person to turn down a Supreme Court seat after winning confirmation). More than most lawyers, Conkling was seen by the justices as a peer.<div data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-mobile.html" data-native="standard,gift" data-pos="boxinjector-m" class=" ad-boxinjector-m-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 16px; margin-top: 0px;">It was a trust Conkling would betray. As he spoke before the Court on Southern Pacific’s behalf, Conkling recounted an astonishing tale. In the 1860s, when he was a young congressman, Conkling had served on the drafting committee that was responsible for writing the Fourteenth Amendment. Then the last member of the committee still living, Conkling told the justices that the drafters had changed the wording of the amendment, replacing “citizens” with “persons” in order to cover corporations too. Laws referring to “persons,” he said, have “by long and constant acceptance … been held to embrace artificial persons as well as natural persons.” Conkling buttressed his account with a surprising piece of evidence: a musty old journal he claimed was a previously unpublished record of the deliberations of the drafting committee.Years later, historians would discover that Conkling’s journal was real but his story was a fraud. The journal was in fact a record of the congressional committee’s deliberations, but, upon close examination, it offered no evidence that the drafters intended to protect corporations. It showed, in fact, that the language of the equal-protection clause was never changed from “citizen” to “person.” So far as anyone can tell, the rights of corporations were not raised in the public debates over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment or in any of the states’ ratifying conventions. And prior to Conkling’s appearance on behalf of Southern Pacific, no member of the drafting committee had ever suggested that corporations were covered.<div data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-mobile.html" data-native="standard,gift" data-pos="boxinjector-m" class=" ad-boxinjector-m-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 16px; margin-top: 0px;">There’s reason to suspect that Conkling’s deception was uncovered back in his time too. The justices held onto the case for three years without ever issuing a decision, until Southern Pacific unexpectedly settled the case. Then, shortly after, another case from Southern Pacific reached the Supreme Court, raising the exact same legal question. The company had the same team of lawyers, with the exception of Conkling. Tellingly, Southern Pacific’s lawyers omitted any mention of Conkling’s drafting history or his journal. Had those lawyers believed Conkling, it would have been malpractice to leave out his story.When the Court issued its decision on this second case, the justices expressly declined to decide if corporations were people. The dispute could be, and was, resolved on other grounds, prompting an angry rebuke from one justice, Stephen J. Field, who castigated his colleagues for failing to address “the important constitutional questions involved.” “At the present day, nearly all great enterprises are conducted by corporations,” he wrote, and they deserved to know if they had equal rights too.</div></div></section></div><aside class="l-rail l-rail--right l-rail--2" role="complementary" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: flex; flex-basis: 300px; flex-shrink: 0; min-width: 300px; grid-area: 1 / 2 / span 1 / auto; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-box-direction: normal; flex-direction: column; -webkit-box-pack: center; justify-content: center;"><div data-section="side" data-pos="native-rr" data-template="hippo/components/ads/rail.html" data-native="standard,gift" class=" ad-native-rr-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></aside></div><div data-section="full" data-pos="boxinjector-d" data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-desktop.html" data-native="standard,gift" class=" ad-boxinjector-d-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div class="blah" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; display: grid; grid-template-areas: " a="a" b="b" grid-template-columns="grid-template-columns" fr="fr" px="px" margin-top="margin-top" em="em"><div class="l-articlecontainercontainer" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: none; width: 736px; -webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1; align-self: start; grid-area: 1 / 1 / auto / span 1;"><section class="l-article__section s-cms-content" itemprop="articleBody" id="article-section-2" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: 64px; line-height: 1.4;"><div data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-mobile.html" data-native="standard,gift" data-pos="boxinjector-m" class=" ad-boxinjector-m-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 16px; margin-top: 0px;">Rumored to carry a gun with him at all times, the colorful Field was the only sitting justice ever arrested—and the charge was murder. He was innocent, but nonetheless guilty of serious ethical violations in the Southern Pacific cases, at least by modern standards: A confidant of Leland Stanford, Field had advised the company on which lawyers to hire for this very series of cases and thus should have recused himself from them. He refused to—and, worse, while the first case was pending, covertly shared internal memoranda of the justices with Southern Pacific’s legal team.The rules of judicial ethics were not well developed in the Gilded Age, however, and the self-assured Field, who feared the forces of socialism, did not hesitate to weigh in. Taxing the property of railroads differently, he said, was like allowing deductions for property “owned by white men or by old men, and not deducted if owned by black men or young men.”So, with Field on the Court, still more twists were yet to come. The Supreme Court’s opinions are officially published in volumes edited by an administrator called the reporter of decisions. By tradition, the reporter writes up a summary of the Court’s opinion and includes it at the beginning of the opinion. The reporter in the 1880s was J. C. Bancroft Davis, whose wildly inaccurate summary of the Southern Pacific case said that the Court had ruled that “corporations are persons within … the Fourteenth Amendment.” Whether his summary was an error or something more nefarious—Davis had once been the president of the Newburgh and New York Railway company—will likely never be known.<div data-template="hippo/components/ads/article-mobile.html" data-native="standard,gift" data-pos="boxinjector-m" class=" ad-boxinjector-m-wrapper" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 16px; margin-top: 0px;">Field nonetheless saw Davis’s erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.His gambit worked. In the following years, the case would be cited over and over by courts across the nation, including the Supreme Court, for deciding that corporations had rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.Indeed, the faux precedent in the Southern Pacific case would go on to be used by a Supreme Court that in the early 20th century became famous for striking down numerous economic regulations, including federal child-labor laws, zoning laws, and wage-and-hour laws. Meanwhile, in cases like the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), those same justices refused to read the Constitution as protecting the rights of African Americans, the real intended beneficiaries of the Fourteenth Amendment. Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court would rule on 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations.The day back in 1882 when the Supreme Court first heard Roscoe Conkling’s argument, the New-York Daily Tribune featured a story on the case with a headline that would turn out to be prophetic: “Civil Rights of Corporations.” Indeed, in a feat of deceitful legal alchemy, Southern Pacific and its wily legal team had, with the help of an audacious Supreme Court justice, set up the Fourteenth Amendment to be more of a bulwark for the rights of businesses than the rights of minorities.</div></div></section></div></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">---</div>nom scotus 2x? last guy to turn down after confirm b/c making too much $ as lawyer for RR (he said explicitly)
adam winkler <a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-3-2018/">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-3-2018/</a>28 14th AA mostly lost, v 311sprr 2nd 1corp pers case?!corps use personhood to override legislation
apple v fbi iphone
hwy thru ggl cam[us w/ compensation
but corps do not need ALL rights of ppl ([where to draw line? they have lots of lawyers ad lobbyists]
huey long LA put advert tax on newspapers (on lies) so newspapers sued (corps) pentagon paPERS,, V BALDWIN TO CrIT GOvT OFFICIALS
1st AMend expand NaDer consumer pharmacy advertize drug prices land mark case, consumer have 1st amebnd listener's right jiu jitsu to CU
4th, PAC etc co-opt left/progressive to expand corp power (nader Va case led to many uses to DISadvantage consumer?

thom hartmannShe said, 'Headnotes are not precedential,' confirming what Jim Ritvo had told me. They are not the precedent. They are not the law. They're just a comment, with no legal status.So how did it come that Court Reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote that corporations are persons in his headnotes? And why have a hundred years of American - and, now, worldwide - law been based on them?Here are the main theories that have been advanced regarding what happened:The Republican conspiracy theory that empowered FDR In the early 1930s, the stock market had collapsed and the world was beginning a long and dark slide into the Great Depression and eventually to World War II. Millions were out of work in the United States, and the questions on many people's mind were, 'Why did this happen? Who is responsible?'The teetering towers of wealth created by American industrialists during the late 1800s and early 1900s were largely thought to have contributed to or caused the stock market crash and ensuing Depression. In less than a hundred years, corporations had gone from being an obscure legal fiction used to establish colleges and trading companies, to standing as the single most powerful force in American politics.Many working people felt that corporations had seized control of the political agenda, capturing Senators, Congressmen, the Supreme Court, and even recent Presidents in the magnetic force of their great wealth. Proof of this takeover could be found in the Supreme Court decisions of the 1908-1914 era, when the Supreme Court, often citing corporate personhood, struck down minimum wage laws, workmen's compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labor laws - every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its citizenry from abuses.Unions and union members were the victims of violence from private corporate armies and had been declared 'criminal conspiracies' by both business leaders and politicians. It seemed that corporations had staged a coup, seizing the lives of American workers - the majority of voters - as well as the elected officials who were supposed to represent them. And this was in direct contradiction of the spirit expressed by the founders of the country.It was in this milieu that an American history book first published in 1927, but largely ignored, suddenly became a hot topic. In The Rise of American Civilization, Columbia history professor Charles Beard and woman's suffrage movement activist Mary Beard suggested that the rise of corporations on the American landscape was the result of a grand conspiracy that reached from the boardrooms of the nation's railroads all the way to the Supreme Court.They fingered two Republicans: former Senator (and railroad lawyer) Roscoe Conkling; and former Congressman (and railroad lawyer) John A. Bingham. The theory, in short form, was that Conkling, when he was part of the Senate committee that wrote the Fourteenth Amendment back in 1868, had intentionally inserted the word 'person' instead of the correct legal phrase 'natural person' to describe who would get the protections of the Amendment. Bingham similarly worked in the House of Representatives to get the language passed.Once that time bomb was put into place, Conkling and Bingham left elective office to join in litigating on behalf of the railroads, with the goal of exploding their carefully worded amendment in the face of the Supreme Court.Thus 'Republican lawmakers,' the Beards said, conspired in advance to give full human constitutional rights to corporate legal fictions. 'By a few words skillfully chosen,' they wrote, 'every act of every state and local government which touched adversely the rights of [corporate] persons and property was made subject to review and liable to annulment by the Supreme Court at Washington.'Oddly, this conspiracy theory was widely accepted because the supposed conspirators themselves had said, very publicly, 'We did it!'Earlier, in an 1882 case pitting the railroads against San Mateo County, Conkling testified (as a paid witness for the railroads) that he'd slipped the 'person' language into the amendment to ensure that corporations would one day receive the same civil rights Congress was giving to freed slaves. Bingham made similar assertions when appropriate during his turns as a paid witness for the railroads. As a result of these assertions, through the late years of the 1800s both were the well-off darlings of the railroads, basking in the light of their successful appropriation of human rights for corporations.When the Beards' book was widely read in the early 1930s, it gave names and faces to the villains who had turned control of America over to what were then called the 'Robber Barons' of industry.Conkling, Bingham, and Justice Waite were all dead by the time of the Great Depression, and all judged guilty by the American public of pulling off the biggest con in the history of the new republic.The firestorm of indignation that swept the country helped set the stage for Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, using legislative means and packing the Supreme Court to turn back the corporate takeover - at least in part - and returning to average working citizens some of the rights and benefits they felt had been stolen from them in 1886.It was widely accepted that Conkling and Bingham had pulled off this trick successfully, purposefully saying 'person' instead of 'natural person' or 'citizen' when they helped write the Fourteenth Amendment, and corporate personhood was a fait accompli. It was done, and couldn't be undone. The Supreme Court, confronted with the reality of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, had been forced to recognize that corporations were persons under the US Constitution because of the precedent of the 1886 Santa Clara case.Senator Henry Cabot Lodge apparently ratified the coup on January 8, 1915, when he unwittingly promulgated Conkling's myth in a speech to the Senate about the 1882 San Mateo case cited above.'In the case of San Mateo County against Southern Pacific Railroad,' Lodge said, 'Mr. Conkling introduced in his arguments excerpts from the Journal [of the Senate committee writing the Fourteenth Amendment], then unprinted, to show that the fourteenth amendment did not apply solely to Negroes, but applied to persons, real and artificial of any kind. It was owing to this, undoubtedly, that the [Supreme] Court extended it to corporations.'The journal Lodge referenced is the secret journal that never existed.Nonetheless, it was a done deal, conventional wisdom suggested, and the Supreme Court had been forced to acknowledge the reality of corporate personhood - or, some suggested, had gone along with it because Waite and the other justices were corrupt stooges of the railroads but wielded the majority vote.

In either case, it had been the intent of at least some of the legislators (Conkling and Bingham) who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment that corporations should have the constitutional rights of natural persons.Or maybe not?The Republican conspiracy theory collapses In the 1960s, author, attorney, and legal historian Howard Jay Graham came across a previously unexamined treasure in the personal papers of Chief Justice Waite, which had been gathering dust among the J. C. Bancroft Davis Papers on file with the Library of Congress.In Waite's private correspondences with Davis (his former Recorder of the Court's Decisions), Graham made a startling discovery: the entire thing had been a mistake.What had vexed legal authorities for nearly eighty years was why Waite would say 'The Court does not wish to hear argument'' when the arguments were already finished. Further, why wasn't there any discussion of this explosive new doctrine of corporate personhood in the Court's ruling or in dissents? It was as if they said it, and then forgot they'd mentioned it. And complicating the situation further, if the Court had arrived at a huge Constitutional decision with sweeping implications, why did the decision say it was based on a technicality about fences?It just didn't seem to add up.Looking over Waite's personal papers, Graham found a note from J. C. Bancroft Davis, the Supreme Court's Reporter, to Waite. At one point in the arguments, Waite had apparently told Sanderson to get beyond his arguments that corporations are persons and get to the point of the Santa Clara County tax case. Court reporter Davis, apparently seeking to clarify that, wrote to Waite:In opening the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of opinion that it does.Please let me know whether I correctly caught your words and oblige.Waite wrote back:I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision. (Emphasis added.)Graham notes in an article first published in the Vanderbilt Law Review that Waite explicitly pointed out to court reporter Davis that the constitutional question of corporate personhood was not included in their decision.According to Graham, Waite was instead saying 'something to the effect of, 'The Court does not wish to hear further argument on whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to these corporations. That point was elaborately covered in 1882 [in the San Mateo case], and has been re-covered in your briefs. We all presently are clear enough there. Our doubts run rather to the substance [of the case ... the fence issue]. Assume accordingly, as we do, that your clients are persons under the Equal Protection Clause. Take the cases on from there, clarifying the California statutes, the application thereof, and the merits.''In my opinion, Waite was saying something to the effect of, 'Every judge and lawyer knows that corporations are persons of the artificial sort - corporations have historically been referred to as 'artificial persons,' and so to the extent that the Fourteenth Amendment covers them it does so on a corporation-to-corporation basis. But we didn't rule on the railroad's claim that corporations should have rights equal to human persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, so I leave it up to you if you're going to mention the debates or not.'Another legal scholar and author, C. Peter Magrath, was going through Waite's papers at the same time as Graham for the biography he published in 1963 titled Morrison R. Waite: Triumph of Character. In his book, he notes the above exchange and then says, 'In other words, to the Reporter fell the decision which enshrined the declaration in the United States Reports. Had Davis left it out, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pac. R. Co. would have been lost to history among thousands of uninteresting tax cases.'It was all, at the very best, a mistake by a court reporter. There never was a decision on corporate personhood.'So here at last,' writes Graham, ''now for then,' is that long-delayed birth certificate, the reason this seemingly momentous step never was justified by formal opinion.' He adds, in a wry note for a legal scholar, 'Think, in this instance too, what the United States might have been spared had events taken a slightly different turn.'Graham's conspiracy theory In Everyman's Constitution, Howard Jay Graham suggests that if there was an error made on the part of the court Reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis - as the record seems to show was clear - it was probably the result of efforts by Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field.Field was very much an outsider on the court, and despised by Waite. As Graham notes, 'Field had repeatedly embarrassed Waite and the Court by close association with the Southern Pacific proprietors and by zeal and bias in their behalf. He had thought nothing of pressuring Waite for assignment of opinions in various railroad cases, of placing his friends as counsel for the road in upcoming cases, of hinting at times he and they should take, even of passing on to such counsel in the undecided San Mateo case 'certain memoranda which had been handed me by two of the Judges.''Field had presidential ambitions, and was relying on the railroads to back him. He'd publicly announced on several occasions that if he were elected President he'd enlarge the size of the Supreme Court to 22 so he could pack it with 'able and conservative men.'Field also thought poorly of Waite, calling him upon his appointment 'His Accidency' and 'that experiment' of Ulysses Grant. Waite didn't have the social graces of Fields, who was often described as a 'popinjay,' and even though he'd been a lawyer for the railroads and others, the record appears to show that Waite did his best to be a truly impartial Chief Justice during his tenure, eventually literally working himself to death. But Field was a grandstander, who served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals of California at the same time he was a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was often his 'corporations are a person' decisions in California cases that led them to reappear before the U.S. Supreme Court - no accident on Field's part - including the San Mateo case in 1882 and the Santa Clara County case in 1886.And when the justices did not decide (contrary to what Court Reporter Davis published months after the decision) that constitutional issues were involved in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, Justice Field was incensed. In his concurring opinion to the Santa Clara case, even though he's agreeing with the finding that fence posts should have a different tax rate than railroad land, he's clearly upset that the issue of corporate personhood was not addressed or answered in the case. He wrote:[The court had failed in] its duty to decide the important constitution questions involved, and particularly the one which was so fully considered in the Circuit Court [where Field was also the judge], and elaborately argued here, that in the assessment, upon which the taxes claimed were levied, an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made'and to that extent depriving it [the railroad 'person'] of the equal protection of the laws. At the present day nearly all great enterprises are conducted by corporations' [a] vast portion of the wealth 'is in their hands. It is, therefore, of the greatest interest to them whether their property is subject to the same rules of assessment and taxation as like property of natural persons'whether the State'may prescribe rules for the valuation of property for taxation which will vary according as it is held by individuals or by corporations. The question is of transcendent importance, and it will come here and continue to come until it is authoritatively decided in harmony with the great constitutional amendment (Fourteenth) which insures to every person, whatever his position or association, the equal protection of the laws; and that necessarily implies freedom from the imposition of unequal burdens under the same conditions.In Everyman's Constitution, Graham documents scores of additional attempts by Supreme Court Justice Field to influence or even suborn the legal process to the benefit of his open patrons, the railroad corporations. Field's personal letters, revealed nearly a century after his death, show that his motivations, in addition to wealth and fame, were Presidential aspirations - he wrote about his hopes that in 1880 and 1884 the railroads would finance his rise to the Presidency, which may explain his zeal to please his potential financiers in 1882 in the San Mateo case and the 1886 Santa Clara case.SANTA CLARA"After the Civil War the Fourteenth Amendment, passed to guarantee full andequal citizenship to all Americans, used language entirely consonant with Earle. Asthe amendment applied to “All persons born or naturalized in the UnitedStates . . . ,” it plainly denied its protection to corporations, which can be neitherborn nor naturalized." (Allison) "Railroad lawyers pulled some stunning shenanigans in their pursuit of corporatepersonhood. Most bizarre was the example of Roscoe Conkling--lawyer,Congressman, Senator, two-time Supreme Court nominee, Republican party leader,member of a scandalous marital triangle. Nace (2003) contends that it wasConkling’s argument in 1882, in a case similar to Santa Clara (San Mateo County v.Southern Pacific Railroad Company), that turned the Court in favor of corporatepersonhood. Conkling was a surviving member of the Congressional committee that haddrafted the Fourteenth Amendment. In the pay of Southern Pacific Railroad, heparlayed that status into the role of an authority on Congressional intent. During hisargument he flourished what he called a journal of the drafting committee andclaimed that the committee had wavered, draft after draft, between “person” and“citizen,” finally choosing “’person” as the word more inclusive of corporations.Conkling’s story was plausible, but seemed to go for naught: The Court made nodecision, as the case was rendered moot when the railroad paid some of the taxesclaimed by San Mateo County. The flourished journal disappeared after Conkling’s Court appearance. Itturned up in 1914, but was not closely examined until Howard Jay Graham, aStanford law librarian, took a look at it twenty years later (Graham, 1968). What hediscovered was that Conkling’s plausible argument was a complete fabrication. Therehad been no switching back and forth between “person” and “citizen.” All drafts ofthe amendment had used the word “person.” The Joint Committee onReconstruction had never meant to protect corporations under the FourteenthAmendment. But Conkling had certainly earned his $10,000 retainer if, as Nacecontends, Conkling’s false argument had a residual effect that appeared four yearslater in the Santa Clara headnotes. (In Conkling’s day the annual wage of anaverage worker was about $500.)" Allison 1877 "By then the Supreme Court was under the supervision of Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite, himself a former railroad attorney. Associate Justice Stephen J. Field, who was so openly on the side of the railroads in case after case that he annoyed his colleagues, also heavily influenced the Court. "(Also on 9th Circuit)After the Civil War the railroads had cash reserves and were keen to expand, as were a number of industries that needed capital, so the pressure to increase corporate power and freedom were enormous, although the courts routinely rebuffed attempts of corporations to get the rights on citizens, they kept trying to pick the lock, as a virus does a cell, by inserting boilerplate language into all legal documents.... corphistlon=Roscoe Conkling (October 30, 1829 – April 18, 1888) was a politician from New York who served both as a member of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate. He was the leader of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party, the first Republican senator from New York to be elected for three terms, and the last person to refuse a U.S. Supreme Court appointment after he had already been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. While in the House, Representative Conkling served as body guard for Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a sharp-tongued anti slavery representative, and fully supported the Republican War effort.[1] Conkling, who was temperate and detested tobacco, was known for being a body builder through regularly exercising and boxing.[1] Conkling was elected to the Senate in 1867 as a leading Radical, who supported the rights of African Americans during Reconstruction.[1]As leader of the Stalwarts, Conkling controlled patronage at the New York Customs House. Although Senator Conkling was supported by President Ulysses S. Grant, Conkling did not support Grant's Civil Service Commission reform initiative. Conkling also defeated Grant's nomineeA.T. Stewart as Secretary of the Treasury. 
Additionally Conkling refused to accept Grant's nomination of him as Chief Justice of the United States, believing his talents belonged in the Senate.[1] The control over patronage led to a bitter conflict between Senator Conkling and President Rutherford B. Hayes.[1] Conkling also opposed Hayes' appointment of William M. Evarts as Secretary of State.[1] Conkling publicly led opposition to President Hayes' attempt to administer Civil Service Reform at the New York Customs House. In 1880, Conkling supported Ulysses S. Grant for President; however, James A. Garfield was nominated and elected President. Conkling's conflict with President Garfield over New York Customs House patronage led to his resignation from the Senate in May 1881. After Garfield's assassination in 1881, Vice President Chester A. Arthurbecame President. When President Arthur offered his friend Conkling an associate justiceship on the Supreme Court, Conkling accepted the offer and was approved by the Senate. Conkling, however, changed his mind and refused to serve.[2] He practiced law in New York until his death in 1888.[2]Contents  [hide] 1 Early life2 Elected office holder3 Actions in the House and the Senate4 Relationship with Chester Arthur5 Conkling's economic policy6 Personal life7 Death8 References8.1 Notes8.2 Bibliography8.3 Encyclopedias8.4 Primary sources9 External linksEarly life[edit]Conkling was born on October 30, 1829 in Albany, New York to Alfred Conkling, a U.S. Representative and federal judge and his wife Eliza Cockburn (cousin of the late Lord Chief-Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn of England).[3] Raised in an atmosphere of law and politics, early associations with notable figures of the day (including former presidents Martin Van Buren and John Quincy Adams) left an impression on young Roscoe. However, described by his father as "utterly untutored" and a "romping boy," Roscoe (age thirteen at the time) was left in the care of Professor George W. Clarke at the Mount Washington Collegiate Institute in New York City so that he may "be trained to studious habits." [4] While constantly referring to a 1787 British textbook titled "The Art of Speaking," which emphasized the importance of facial action and gesture, Roscoe and his older brother took lessons in diction from an English professor named Harvey and delivered speeches to each other for practice's sake. Roscoe then entered the Auburn Academy in 1843, where he remained for three years.[5]Even as a schoolboy, Roscoe's intimidating appearance and intellect demanded attention. As a childhood friend describes him, young Roscoe was "as large and massive in his mind as he was in his frame, and accomplished in his studies precisely what he did in his social life — a mastery and command which his companions yielded to him as due."[6] At the age of seventeen, Roscoe opted to forego a college education in favor of studying law under Joshua A. Spencer andKernan in Utica, New York. Roscoe immediately made an impression upon his preceptors. When asked to supply a Whig orator who could stand up to Democratic bullies at a local village meeting, Spencer's response was "I shall send Mr. Conkling; I think he will make himself heard." [7] Quickly integrating himself into the "society" in Utica, Roscoe certainly made himself heard on a variety of issues, especially those concerning human rights. For example, though only eighteen at the time, Roscoe's deep sympathy for the sufferers of the Great Famine in Ireland led him to speak on behalf of victims of starvation at various venues in Central New York. Additionally, as Theodore M. Pomeroy recalls, even fifteen years before the Civil War Roscoe displayed a deep abhorrence for slavery, or as he described it, "man's inhumanity to man." [8] He married Julia Catherine Seymour, sister of the Democratic politician and Governor of New York Horatio Seymour. His first political endeavor came in 1848, when he made campaign speeches in behalf of Taylor and Fillmore. He was admitted to the bar in 1850, and in the same year became district attorney of Oneida County by appointment of Governor Fish. [9]In 1852 he returned to Utica, where in the next few years he established a reputation as a lawyer of ability. Up to 1852, in which year he stumped New York State for General Winfield Scott, the Whig candidate for the presidency, Conkling was identified with the Whig Party, but in the movement that resulted in the organization of the Republican Party he took an active part, and his work, both as a political manager and an orator, contributed largely toward carrying New York in 1856 for Frémont and Dayton, the Republican nominees.Elected office holder[edit]Conkling was elected Mayor of Utica in 1858, and then elected as a Republican to the 36th and 37th United States Congresses, holding office from March 4, 1859, to March 4, 1863. He was Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on the District of Columbia (37th Congress). He refused to follow the financial policy of his party in 1862, and delivered a notable speech against the passage of the Legal Tender Act, which made a certain class of treasury notes receivable for all public and private debts. In this opposition he was joined by his brother, Frederick Augustus Conkling, at that time also a Republican member of Congress. That year he was defeated for re-election by Democrat Francis Kernan.From 1863 to 1865, he acted as a judge advocate of the War Department, investigating alleged frauds in the recruiting service in western New York. In 1864, two years after his defeat by Kernan, Conkling defeated Kernan for re-election, and served in the 39th and 40th United States Congresses from March 4, 1865, to March 4, 1867. As a congressman, he served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Conkling had been re-elected to the 41st United States Congress in November 1866, but did not take his seat, instead entering the U.S. Senate. Conkling was entirely out of sympathy with the reform element in the Republican Party. His first break with the Hayes administration occurred in April 1877 when the Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman appointed a commission to investigate the affairs of the New York Custom House. The investigation brought to light extensive irregularities in the service, showing in particular that the federal office holders in New York constituted a large army of political workers, and that their positions were secured by and dependent upon their faithful service in behalf of the men holding the principal government offices in the city.Conkling was elected in January 1867 a U.S. Senator from New York, and re-elected in 1873 and 1879, served from March 4, 1867 to May 16, 1881. Through the eight years of President Grant's administration, he stood out as the spokesman of the President and one of the principal leaders of the Republican Party in the Senate. In 1873, Grant urged him to accept an appointment as Chief Justice of the United States, but Conkling declined.[10]Conkling was active in framing and pushing through Congress the reconstruction legislation, and was instrumental in the passage of the second Civil Rights Act of 1875, and of the act for the resumption of specie payments, in the same year. He was Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Revision of the Laws of the United States (40th - 43rd Congresses), of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce (44th, 45th and 47th Congresses), of the U.S. Senate Committee on Engrossed Bills (46th and 47th Congresses).President Hayes decided upon the removal of Chester A. Arthur, the Collector, General George H. Sharpe, the Surveyor, and A.B. Cornell, the Naval Officer of the Port, and in October 1877, sent nominations of their successors to the Senate. Senator Conkling defended the displaced officials, and, through his influence in the Senate, secured the rejection of the new nominations. He succeeded in blocking all the efforts of President Hayes and Secretary Sherman until January 1879, when, a new lot of nominations having been made, they were confirmed in spite of Conkling's continued opposition. An 1880 political cartoon shows Conkling working at a "Presidential puzzle" of heads of possible candidates.Early in 1880, Senator Conkling became the leader of the movement for the nomination of General Grant for a third term in the Presidency. He had a strong regard for Grant, and was hostile to the other two leading Republican candidates, Sherman, with whom he had come into conflict during Hayes' administration, and James G. Blaine, whose bitter political and personal enemy he had been for 24 years. The convention, by a combination of the Blaine and Sherman interests, nominated James A. Garfield. Conkling and the other faithful Grant Stalwarts were allowed to name the candidate for vice presidency, Chester A. Arthur.Immediately after Garfield's inauguration, Conkling presented to the President a list of men whom he desired to have appointed to the federal offices in New York. Garfield's appointment of Blaine as Secretary of State, and of William Windom as Secretary of the Treasury, instead of Levi P. Morton, whose appointment Conkling had urged, angered Conkling and made him unwilling to agree to any sort of compromise with Garfield on the New York appointments. Without consulting him, the President nominated for Collector of the Port of New York William H. Robertson, the leader of the opposingHalf-Breed faction. Robertson's nomination was confirmed by the Senate, in spite of the opposition of Conkling, who claimed the right of Senators to control federal patronage in their home states.In protest, Conkling resigned with his fellow Senator Thomas C. Platt, confident that he would be re-elected by the New York legislature (at the time, senators were chosen by their states' legislatures). However, he was defeated in the resulting special election after an almost two-month-long struggle between the opposing factions of the Republican Party. Madison Square ParkAfterwards he resumed the practice of law in New York City. He declined a nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1882.Actions in the House and the Senate

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