The Railway Capture of the Public Domain
A scathing look at how land office officials transitioned into high-paying railroad positions after engineering favorable rulings for the corporate giants of the West.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It is generally believed by those who have studied the public land question that the great mistake of all the administrations of the past has been in giving large grants to various enterprises under the specious plea of opening and developing the country. Railroad companies, since the land grant system was adopted by Congress, have taken every possible advantage of the laws. They have had provisions incorporated in the acts which have given them extraordinary privileges. There is not a single railroad that has not obtained a much larger number of acres than Congress originally intended to give it. The Land Office has been controlled by the railroads to such an extent that officials have been promoted from time to time into the open service of the railroads. This list comprises a few of the prominent officials who have been transferred: Henry Heard, Chief of the Central Railroad Division; John H. Klimm, Clerk in charge of railroad matters; W. K. Mendenhall, Chief of the railroad division, who became land attorney for the Northern Pacific; and many others. This list might be stretched out indefinitely. There is no doubt that nearly every official who has been in the Land Office who has been of the slightest use to a railroad has been paid afterward by employment.
“What would be thought of a Judge in a high court of appeal passing directly into the employment of a railroad company in whose favor he had made repeatedly unfair decisions?”
This 1885 report on the 'revolving door' between public regulators and private corporate interests highlights a persistent tension in American governance. Just as critics then felt the Land Office was merely a branch of the railroads, modern debates about regulatory capture in industries like tech and finance continue to resonate with these same suspicions of institutional corruption.
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