1Dire Consequences
If I brought up repentance, the response would be, “What do I have to repent for?” Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice.
—Svetlana Alexievich1
While the rise of foreign lobbying and foreign agents is a relatively modern phenomenon, they both have their roots in the earliest days of the United States—and with the men who looked to take advantage of the new rights a new country promised to offer.
In late 1792, near the end of George Washington’s first term as the first president of the United States, a man named William Hull traveled from Virginia to the budding nation’s capital in Philadelphia. He had a plan: test the limits of the nascent U.S. Constitution, implemented just three years prior, and see how far the rights laid out in the First Amendment truly stretched. Specifically, Hull wanted to test the proposition that Americans had a right—a “freedom,” as the Constitution described it—to lobby, or to “petition,” any and all government officials. To pressure them, as a mere citizen, into passing the kinds of policies they wanted.
A vain man—a “proud-looking sort with luxuriant hair,” as one writer described him—Hull arrived in Philadelphia with an impressive pedigree. A former Revolutionary War officer, he reportedly “talked to President Washington as often as he liked.”2 And it was that relationship that Hull counted on. Because he hadn’t traveled to Philadelphia just for himself. Instead, he came at the behest of a group of Virginia military veterans who’d fought under Washington during the recent war for American independence. Years after thrashing the British, they were still waiting on compensation for their services. But the finances of the early American republic were in shambles, held together with little more than dreams and promises, with American veterans often going without pay while the country found its fiscal footing.
Hull wrote to other veterans groups, calling for “agents” to help him push for a wartime compensation bill to help these former soldiers.3 After arriving in Philadelphia, he buttonholed federal legislators, arguing his case, familiarizing himself with the workings of this new national government. And he highlighted the fact that, without those veterans, these legislators wouldn’t even have their jobs—and might well have been strung up by British authorities looking to decapitate this rebellious American nation.
Hull, though, couldn’t argue against the state of federal finances. The country remained effectively broke, and his compensation bill died. The Revolutionary War veterans lost out on the payment they demanded.
But in Hull’s failure, something else emerged. A new model for how Americans—regardless of profession, regardless of political persuasion—could try to reach their legislators. It was something untested in this new republic. It was something we would, in years to come, call “lobbying.” And like those clients of Hull, it was, in many ways, revolutionary.
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HULL, OF COURSE, was hardly the first person to try to influence policy. “For as long as empowered individuals and groups have been responsible for governing societies, others have sought to influence them and their decision-making,” scholar Tarun Krishnakumar wrote in his 2021 history of lobbying in America.4 But unlike European monarchies, the new American government was hardly some outpost of far-off elites, where distant politicians claimed to wield power through some kind of divine right. Access to officials in Philadelphia, or to any of those in the state capitals dotting the expanding country, was far easier than anything the Western world had seen to that point. (If anything, the American model of influencing politicians—of bending the ears of local leaders, pushing them to preferred policies—was far closer to the governance structures of the Indigenous nations the Americans would soon decimate.)
And even with Hull’s failures, it didn’t take long for Americans to recognize that difference—and to begin using it to their advantage. Soon, those looking to push and provoke legislators began scouring across the American capital. “In 1795, a Philadelphia newspaper described the way lobbyists waited outside Congress Hall to ‘give a hint to a Member, teaze or advise as may best suit,’” one synopsis found.5 And as the country’s finances began stabilizing, and as the country began surging westward during the early nineteenth century, those throngs looking to sway legislators began to find success. From tariffs to fiscal policy, from railroad construction to industrial development, America’s expansion in turn expanded the opportunities for these Americans to sway politicians.
Much of such lobbying focused initially on domestic affairs. But soon, these self-styled lobbyists began skirting into foreign policy, too. In 1798, amidst a fraught standoff with France, one senator welcomed “a large committee of Philadelphia citizens” into the halls of Congress to “present a petition” backing his colleagues’ position on the potential war with Paris. Another senator, however, objected to saturating the Senate floor with Americans clamoring for certain foreign policy positions, and “won passage of a resolution to prohibit individuals or delegations from presenting such petitions in such a way in the future.”6
Indeed, even with the allowances in the Constitution, that opposition to free-for-all lobbying was baked into this American experiment from the beginning. Even from these earliest days of the United States, there was concern that these freedoms to petition—these freedoms to lobby—were too broad. That they were too widely available, or that they were too open for potential abuse. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, considered one of the seminal documents of America’s founding. America’s openness, Hamilton worried, would provide avenues for foreign powers to meddle, to infiltrate, and to steer policy—without Americans ever being aware. History, as Hamilton added, “furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalenc[e] of foreign corruption in republican governments.”7
And Hamilton was right to worry—not least since the man who later killed him, Vice President Aaron Burr, ended up working alongside foreign agents to try to splinter the United States. (One of Burr’s secessionist allies was James Wilkinson, the commander of the U.S. Army, who secretly served as an agent of the Spanish monarchy.) Ironically, though, those “inlet[s] to foreign corruption” didn’t come via foreign lobbying during the early decades of the American republic. While there were instances—in 1796, in 1812—of attempted foreign interference in American elections, the first half of the nineteenth century saw surprisingly little in terms of threats of unchecked foreign lobbying in the United States. Americans freely lobbied, exercising their new rights—but almost always for domestic affairs rather than anything international.
But then the Civil War came, and everything changed.
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DURING THE CIVIL War—while the American government beat back a group of white supremacist traitors aimed at fracturing the country and expanding the enslavement of millions—foreign governments watched and waited. In Paris, French officials toyed with recognizing the Confederacy, which would have delivered a fatal blow to the Americans. In London, British officials flirted with arming the Confederates outright, all the better to gut their American rivals. In the end, though, the United States’ victory over the separatists ended any discussion of European interference. And it instantly opened a new era of foreign lobbying in the United States—and a scandal that, 160 years later, now looks oddly, unsettlingly familiar.
In the immediate aftermath of the American victory, U.S. officials looked for opportunities to patch the country together. One potential outlet: expansion. As some American officials thought, if the United States could conquer or seize new lands, perhaps it could patch over its domestic disputes, at least for a bit. And as Secretary of State William Seward saw it, one region provided the perfect opportunity not only to improve America’s global (and economic) standing but to further tether a fractured country together: Alaska.
At the time, the vast expanse we now know as Alaska was a colony of tsarist Russia. Indigenous Alaska Natives had suffered for generations at the hands of Russian settlers, with massacre after massacre aimed at cementing Russian rule in the province. By the mid-1860s, though, the province was little more than dead weight for the Russian regime. It was too far, with too little infrastructure, for Russia to keep pumping it with money and men. And with Russia’s own finances slowly imploding, tsarist officials began casting about for someone to take Alaska off their hands.
There were only so many options. Selling to the British, which still controlled the adjacent Canadian provinces, was a nonstarter; Britain was Russia’s primary colonial rival, and anything that could strengthen London’s hand was to be avoided. The Americans, though, presented an attractive alternative. Selling Alaska to the United States would allow Washington to act as a counterweight to British influence in the region. Plus, in Russia’s eyes, America appeared set to eventually conquer the entirety of North America—why not sell out early, and at least make a bit of money along the way?
There was only one problem. Few Americans outside of Seward saw any reason to purchase Alaska from the Russians. “American interest in Alaska wobbled between ho-hum interest and disinterest,” one scholar described it.8 To many Americans, Russian Alaska in the 1860s—in the years before the discovery of the gold and the oil that would eventually make Alaska one of the wealthiest American states—was little more than an empty tundra. It was an “icebox,” a “polar bear garden” that the United States didn’t need.9 Plus, Washington had more pressing issues, from the military occupation of the former Confederate states to the passage of basic civil rights protections for Black Americans. Alaska would have to wait.
But the Russians couldn’t. Selling the province—and convincing the Americans to spend a gargantuan sum on something almost no Americans wanted, just as the country was trying to get back on its feet—was one of the easiest ways to help stabilize Russian finances, if only Washington could be convinced. Something had to be done.
Fortunately for the Russian government, their ambassador in Washington, a man named Edouard de Stoeckl, had an idea for how to circumvent American opposition—without the American populace, or even much of the American government, realizing what was happening.
In 1867, Stoeckl—who’d somehow earned the nickname “The Baron,” despite lacking any kind of actual title—began working. Huddling with Seward, the two hammered out a tentative deal. For $7.2 million in gold, the United States would take Alaska off of Russia’s hands. But Seward would still need to overcome congressional opposition, as only Congress could appropriate the funds. Nor did the issues stop there. Seward’s primary ally, President Andrew Johnson, began facing a tornado of criticism for his racist policies—and suddenly saw himself the target of the country’s first impeachment crisis, which sucked up all of the energy, and all of the focus, in Washington.10
By early 1868, Seward’s deal appeared all but dead. Which is when Stoeckl stepped in, and set a playbook that would roar back to relevance in the mid-2010s, when Russia once more attempted to direct American policy while remaining completely out of the public eye.
First, Stoeckl hunted down an American who could help rally the congressional votes to actually fund the purchase. He targeted Robert J. Walker, a former Mississippi senator and treasury secretary, as someone who could help. To Stoeckl, Walker was someone who could pose as an independent voice to pressure American legislators to back the funding—without anyone realizing that Walker had become a secret mouthpiece for Russia. Bankrolling Walker with the modern equivalent of a half million dollars, the Russian official “paid Walker to use his influence wherever and however he could.”11
And Walker was happy to oblige. The former senator and White House official began planting anonymous articles with unsuspecting newspapers, including front-page columns denouncing opponents of the projected sale. (Walker, never known for his creativity, signed his anonymous articles as “Alaska.”) He also publicly defended both Stoeckl and the Alaska purchase, predicting “dire consequences” if the purchase fell through. He pushed for the purchase in Washington wherever and however he could—and when questioned, Walker denied that any of his efforts ever qualified as “lobbying.”12
With Stoeckl funding him behind the scenes, Walker’s effort appeared to succeed. By the middle of June 1868, enough congressional officials had changed their mind and tossed their support behind the appropriations. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the funding measures passed—and suddenly, and unexpectedly, the United States saw its second-largest expansion in the country’s entire history.
In fact, the move was so sudden, and so unexpected, that something seemed off. And soon, details began leaking out confirming opponents’ suspicions. One journalist, Uriah Painter, reported that thieves in New York had supposedly stolen thousands of dollars from Walker—but when authorities nabbed the thieves, Walker refused to press charges. (A handy move, Painter pointed out, to transfer money without anyone being able to track its ultimate destination.) Painter also reported that “large sums” from the purchase funds had disappeared months before the formal purchase.13
In sum: money was missing all over the place. Combined with new rumors of bribery swirling Congress, all of it pointed to the “biggest lobby swindle ever put up in Washington,” as Painter said.14
The accusations of financial malfeasance grew so pronounced that shortly thereafter Congress opened its first formal investigation into foreign lobbying. And it didn’t take long for congressional investigators to confirm that the entire affair was a swindle, and a scandal. As they found, millions of dollars (adjusted for inflation) was somehow unaccounted for, disappeared into the financial ether. And all signs pointed to one inescapable conclusion: bribery, combined with clandestine foreign lobbying, all on behalf of Russia.
There was, naturally, one person who could help reveal what happened to the missing money: Stoeckl. Yet by the time congressional investigators discovered the disappearance, the Baron himself had vanished, heading back to Russia. As Ronald Jensen, author of the most detailed analysis of the scandal, wrote, “The Russian minister was probably the only man who knew the destination of all the missing funds from the Alaska appropriation, and that secret apparently left with him.”15
To this day, questions remain about what happened to the missing millions. But as Jensen detailed, there seems one obvious answer. Tucked amidst President Johnson’s papers was a memo outlining a conversation the president had with Seward—the man who’d jump-started the Alaska purchase in the first place. As the two sat in a “shady grove,” Seward revealed to the president that Stoeckl himself had “bought the support” of one major American newspaper—and that Stoeckl had directly bribed congressional officials to flip their votes, with a total of ten total congressional officials taking Russian funds.16 Nor were these anonymous officials. Among those bribed to support the Alaska purchase were the “incorruptible” Thaddeus Stevens, best known as one of the era’s greatest proponents for civil rights protections for Black Americans.17
Unfortunately for investigators, even while the bribery became an open secret in Washington, no hard proof ever emerged. Seward denied any knowledge, and Johnson refused to comment publicly. The congressional investigation concluded in frustration. As the committee report found, the inquiry ended “barren of affirmative or satisfactorily negative results.”18
Still, even while no convictions ever emerged—and even as Alaska became part of America proper—investigators wanted to make a stand. Members of the investigative committee chastised Walker “for representing a foreign power without public knowledge,” calling the former senator and cabinet member out for working as an agent for a foreign government. And a few of the investigators even floated a potential solution: banning former American officials outright from ever working as lobbyists for foreign governments. As congressional investigators wrote: “Certainly no man whose former high public position has given him extraordinary influence in the community has the right to sell that influence, the trust and confidence of his fellow-citizens, to a foreign government, or in any case where his own is interested.”19
As these officials saw it, no American official, once out of office, should work as a foreign lobbyist or a foreign agent for any other government. It was, in many ways, a statement ahead of its time, pointing directly to the kinds of foreign lobbying practices that would emerge in the decades to come. But it was also a statement that gained little notice, and that went nowhere.
And that was it. In this first foreign lobbying scandal in American history—in which a Russian official had bribed American officials and journalists and hired a former high-level American official to act as his mouthpiece in Washington, all aimed at secretly directing U.S. policy—no one was found guilty. No one lost their job, or ended up in prison. No one, aside from the Russian official in question, even ended up having the full picture of the funding mechanisms, or where all the missing millions ended up.
To modern eyes, maybe that’s understandable. After all, the Alaska purchase is now recognized as one of the great successes of American foreign policy: as a pennies-on-the-dollar purchase of a territory that enhanced American power, American finances, and American influence in ways that are still paying off. But it was also something else: a story whose lessons, not least as they pertained to foreign lobbying (and bribery) of American officials, were promptly forgotten. And it was a formula that in coming years would only become more and more familiar—and that would, in the decades to come, reach directly from foreign governments into the White House itself.
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DESPITE THE MAGNITUDE of the scandal, Americans largely shrugged at the allegations and revelations surrounding the purchase of Alaska. And not without reason. Because by the early 1870s, a Russian agent secretly steering American foreign policy—and blanketing Washington with secret payments in the process—was simply one of a far broader range of lobbying scandals saturating Washington.
In fact, it was in the immediate aftermath of the Alaska scandal that the word “lobbying” came into existence in the first place. With President Ulysses S. Grant now in the White House, rising American industrial interests spied an opportunity. As these businessmen knew, Grant made a habit of taking presidential breaks to wander across the street from the White House to a new, sprawling building called the Willard Hotel. There, Grant would head through the hotel’s spacious, colonnaded lobby and sit at the hotel’s circular bar, enjoying a tipple. It’s unclear how many drinks Grant would down—his memoir unfortunately doesn’t discuss his presidential years—but, after he’d had his fill, Grant would wander back to the Oval Office, heading back to continue repairing a fractured country.
But on those walks, Grant wasn’t alone. As Zetter, the author of the best-known lobbying textbook, recounts, “Those seeking to influence [Grant] would congregate in the lobby of the Willard Hotel and try to attract the great man’s attention.” All the better, they thought, “to raise specific areas of concern.”20 Flagging down the president, bending his ear, these men could plead their clients’ case. Maybe it was the railroad concerns who needed a new route approved. Or the industrialists who needed a new tariff implemented. Or the banking conglomerates who needed federal policy on gold loosened, or restricted, or whatever the day demanded.
There was always something. And there was always something that Grant specifically could help with. And if the president had had a few drinks, well, all the better.
Copyright © 2024 by Casey Michel
