Reply #17: False Claims Act

[Hubert Flottz]

Snip...

In the early days of the Civil War, the corruption extended all the way up to the secretary of war, a pinched, tweedy, white-thatched Pennsylvanian named Simon Cameron. Known behind his back as the "Winnebago Chief" for his alleged bilking of an Indian tribe before he came to Washington, Cameron enfranchised two cronies, New York governor Edwin Morgan and a former legislative aide named Alexander Cummings, to disburse millions of dollars on military contracts. Both Morgan and Cummings were involved in the carbine fraud, and the latter's excesses included $140,000 in public funds for the rental of a yacht and the squandering of another quarter million for such personal perks as linen pantaloons, herring, pickles, ale, and porter. Other Cameron cohorts were awarded contracts for a thousand cavalry horses at double the going rate. When the animals were delivered to Louisville, Kentucky, nearly half were found to be "blind, spavined ... and with every disease horseflesh is heir to."

Six months into the war, and in only the eighth month of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln criticized Cameron as "utterly ignorant and regardless of the course of things." That may have sounded harsh to some, but to others who knew the secretary of war to be equally as generous with himself as with his cronies, it seemed too kind. Cameron was hardly ignorant, for example, in repeatedly favoring two railroads in which he had direct financial interests, the North Central and the Pennsylvania, for the routing of Union war materials and troops. By January, Congress tired of the blatant abuses and voted to censure the errant secretary. But Lincoln, aware of Cameron's continuing political clout in strategically critical Pennsylvania, settled for kicking him out of the cabinet and into an ambassadorship. The disgraced Cameron left Washington in the middle of that winter for far-off frozen Russia.

Many of the congressmen who voted for Cameron's censure were themselves guilty of the same type of offense. Several, for example, made a regular practice of charging government suppliers a $50,000 "broker's fee" on every million dollars in contracts let within their sphere of influence. Edwin Stanton replaced Cameron in the cabinet, but the corruption and incompetence continued unabated. Gen. George McClellan, Union commander of the Army of the Potomac, held shoddy goods and services partly responsible for the failure of the campaign to capture Richmond in the spring of 1862. For one example, defective artillery shells frequently failed to detonate on impact or blew up prematurely in the cannons, killing Union troops. For another, the army's mobility was impaired by the low quality of thousands of cavalry and draft horses used in that campaign. "Worse than traitors in arms" was how a March 3, 1863 report from the House Committee on Government Contracts described "men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the nation, while patriot blood is crimsoning the plains ... and bodies of their countrymen are moldering in the dust."

There was no Justice Department in those days, and no effective national law enforcement agency. But not all the nation's leaders were crooks or plunderers, and as the predatory few continued to feast and fatten, the incensed majority searched for ways to purge this enemy from within their ranks. A Republican senator from Michigan, Jacob Howard, emerged as the leader of this effort. The ideal solution, Howard reasoned, would be legislation offering financial incentives to private citizens who took action against individuals and companies they knew were stealing from the government, a law that would make integrity almost as profitable as theft. More...

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