CORRUPTION: Missouri Waltz

Last week the press and one lawyer put the State of Missouri to shame. When the Legislature finally adjourned, they made it plain that the last legislative session was the worst, dirtiest, most brazenly corrupt in Missouri history.

The session was also the longest on record, 186 days. Little constructive legislation was passed, but more money was appropriated than ever before—$250,000,000. The public and the press were disgusted. So was Charles Martin Hay of St. Louis, a big, easygoing, full-time lawyer and part-time reformer.

Known as one of St. Louis’ ablest attorneys, Hay is a big, heavy-set man with a black mustache, a good showman who loves “fightin’ and speakin’,” a classic corn-country orator who began making speeches at the age of eleven on the Ozark farm where he was born.

Charley Hay got mad. One evening he hired a truck, drove to the Capitol steps at Jefferson City, mounted the truck and began making a speech. When he was through, the reputation of the Legislature as a whole was shattered and that of certain legislators was in ruins. He named names, produced documentary evidence, told stories. In the crowd were several of the men he named, some cynically amused, some grimly serious.

Hay made a simple challenge: let the Legislature investigate itself. He would appear, testify under oath, bring witnesses, produce evidence. Hay, reading his notes by a flashlight held by his niece, Mary Hay, attacked “sandbag” bills.

He cited the “crematory” bill—a perfect “sandbagger.” This measure would have required that no person in Missouri be cremated for 48 hours after death. Reason given: possible traces of murder, such as poison, could not thus be destroyed. Kicker in the bill: everybody to be cremated must first be inspected by the local coroner. Fee: $10. Natural effect of such a bill was to arouse high hopes in Missouri coroners; to arouse opposition among cemetery operators. Hay charged: “My conclusion was that they [certain legislators] conspired to frame a plan through which they would receive money.”*

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch named other “sandbag” operations:

> Distributors and operators of jukeboxes raised a fund of $14,000 to insure defeat of bills outlawing such artistic instruments in saloons or taverns.

> The State Chiropractors’ Control Board voted $2,500 to insure the defeat of legislation inimical to chiropractors.

> St. Louis firemen, members of an A.F. of L. union, voted $5,000 out of their treasury “for legislative purposes”: to promote a bill providing firemen’s pensions.

> Etc., ad nauseam.

Hay spoke from his own experience. Under the Missouri psychology of paying for favorable legislation, St. Louis teachers had chipped in $10,000 to pay Lawyer Hay to see a teachers’ retirement bill get through. Lawyer Hay regarded this sum as a legitimate lobbying fee. He refused to pay a nickel to the legislators who swarmed around him, attracted by the smell of cash. The $1-a-day legislators were incensed. One Senator told him (said Hay): “I’ll bet you money your damned bill doesn’t pass. I’d like to get some money out of you on a bet; I can’t get it any other way.” The same Senator, complaining to a teacher that Hay would not shake down, grumbled: “Well, tell him at least to give me the butt end of a cigar.”

The men named by Hay denied all charges, even as repeated and enlarged by Hay in their presence at a session of a Republican-headed investigating committee a week later. Lies, all lies, they insisted. Red-faced, bulb-nosed, balding Senator Otto Lietchen, of St. Louis, dismissed the whole affair as a joke, slapping Hay on the back, roaring jovially: “Charley, old boy!”

The investigating committee proposed a complete investigation. Problem then became to get the legislators to vote to investigate themselves. By a series of stalling moves, consideration of the resolution was postponed until the last minute of the session’s last day. Then both houses quickly adjourned without action.

The Post-Dispatch described the lawmakers’ days. Senator Lietchen’s office, it said, was known as Lietchen’s Night Club, “from which on many days from noontime until late at night came the odors of beef roasting, onions frying, shrimp sizzling. . . . There was music and at times dancing, the Senator entertaining large parties of men and women.” On the House side, gaiety was also the rule, and many of the offices were equipped with pianos, refrigerators and stoves. It was not an uncommon sight to see janitors pushing hand-truckloads of beer and cases of whiskey along the corridors. A poker game went on almost continuously in the large Appropriations committee room, and in Rooms 304-5, dice games, at which attendance was so great that the Speaker of the House had to send couriers to beg members to make a quorum to vote on a bill. “It appeared to be a rule that the dice must be thrown against a door and bounce back. As a result the varnish on the lower panels of closet doors in each of the offices is practically gone and the doors are scarred.”

This week, Missouri hoped Charley Hay would stay mad. If he and the press stayed angry long enough, there might be some new faces in Missouri’s prisons, and a lot of new faces in the Legislature.

* If the bill’s proponents had no serious intention of passing it, but wanted to use it as a club to shake down both hopeful coroners and fearful mausoleum men, they were following a very old U.S. tactic of corruption.