Railroads Gave Editors and Officials Free Passes for Life. Congress Decided That Looked Too Much Like a Bribe.
American railroads spent the late nineteenth century handing out free annual passes as a routine industry courtesy — to their own workers, to employees of connecting lines, and, generously, to newspaper editors and public officials. Nobody was supposed to be for sale. By the 1890s, plenty of people were, and the railroad handing out the passes knew exactly what it was buying.
A Courtesy That Scaled Into a Currency
The free pass started as ordinary professional courtesy, the kind every industry extends to people who cover it or regulate it. Most recipients were exactly what the practice assumed: reporters and officials who took a free ride and wrote or voted however the facts told them to. The railroads, however, controlled distribution, and distribution is leverage — a lesson they learned quickly and never unlearned.
"Satchels Full of Passes," Nebraska, 1894
The clearest documented flashpoint came from Omaha Daily Bee editor Edward Rosewater, who in August 1894 accused the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad of sending agents with "satchels full of passes" to the Nebraska Republican gubernatorial convention, handing them to delegates "with a lavish hand" to swing the nomination toward Thomas Majors. Recipients, Rosewater wrote, "feel bound to reciprocate by casting their votes in accordance with the request of the pass distributor." He called it "the wholesale pass scatteration of the Burlington bosses, to whom alone Majors owes his bought nomination" — an accusation from a rival paper, worth reading with that in mind, but not an isolated one. The pass had become a standing bribe with a courtesy title.
No Way to Tell a Free Ride From a Favor Owed
There was no mechanism built into the system to separate an editor riding a train to cover a story from an editor riding it because the railroad wanted his coverage a certain way — the pass looked identical either way, and the railroad had every incentive to keep printing more of them. Reformers argued the only fix was banning acceptance outright, on the theory that "so long as railroad pass bribery is winked at there can be no free choice of candidates in political conventions."
The Hepburn Act Ended It for Every Editor Who Never Took a Bribe
They won the argument. The Hepburn Act of 1906 banned free railroad passes nationally, except for actual railroad employees — closing the door on the practice for the officials who had genuinely never let a pass touch a vote, right alongside the ones who had. There was no way to write a narrower law; the whole point of the pass was that nobody outside the transaction could tell which kind they were looking at. Congress didn't try to sort the honest recipients from the bought ones. It just took the passes away from everybody.
Filed from public reporting:
