Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ben Heintz, who teaches social studies and is the adviser for The Chronicle at U-32 High School in East Montpelier.
The title isn’t true, like a lot about Horace Graham’s story. He was never impeached. But a century ago, on Feb. 5, 1920, our former governor was convicted of grand larceny from the state of Vermont.
Vermonters have long preferred to forget Gov. Horace Graham. One hundred years after his trial and conviction, he is largely absent from our popular history. His case remains unsolved.
The details are shadowy, but the outlines are clear:
It appears Graham did in fact commit his crimes, while serving as Vermont’s state auditor, from 1902 to 1916. Over those 14 years, even as he earned his nickname, “Honest Horace,” he skimmed something like $25,000 (around $600,000 today) from the state treasury.
He became governor just as the United States entered World War I, in 1917, and served more than a year before his crimes were exposed, at the height of his popularity, in the summer of 1918.
Initially a group of Graham’s powerful allies conspired to “restore” the missing money to the treasury, in a failed effort to forestall prosecution, but once the scandal broke in the papers, leaders of his own Republican Party pushed him to resign.
Graham was too popular for serious talk of impeachment (read here), and even after a grand jury charged him with 152 counts of larceny and 10 counts of embezzlement, he held on as governor, successfully delaying his trial until almost a year after he left office.
He benefited at every turn from public distraction. At the moment his crimes came to light, in August of 1918, allied armies were finally breaking through the German lines at the Battle of Amiens. The Spanish influenza, which had crippled the German army, would ravage Vermont that fall, prompting a statewide ban on public meetings just as Graham was stiff-arming the press and defying calls for his resignation.
When he finally came to trial, in January of 1920, it was not in the Legislature, facing impeachment, but in the Washington County courthouse, tried by a jury of ordinary Vermonters.
The 12 jurors make a snapshot of Vermont at the dawn of the “Jazz Age”: seven farmers, a blacksmith, a railroad clerk, a lumberman, a carpenter and an undertaker.
We can’t know what they thought of the defendant, their former governor. He was 57 years old, a lifelong bachelor, bald, with wire rimmed glasses and a neat moustache. He was a lawyer by training, born in Brooklyn and educated at NYU and Columbia. The man, and the story exposed at his trial — a web of sketchy accounting practices and backroom dealing among the state’s elite — were from another Vermont.
Over his dozen years of embezzlement, Graham had stolen around $25,000. In 1920, the average Vermont farm was worth about $5,000 and carried more than $2,000 in debt.
Whatever the jurors might have believed at the start of the trial, after two weeks of testimony they were of one mind. They deliberated for just an hour, then, at 3:25 p.m. on Feb. 5, 1920, they found Horace Graham guilty.
This verdict was far from the end of the story. Events take strange turns from there.
Last year’s VTDigger series, The Trials of Honest Horace, outlines the basic plot. But Graham himself remains an enigma, and his story sprawls in too many directions to contain.
The trial suggested a conspiracy among Vermont’s most powerful men, yet to be fully uncovered. Clues to the larger mystery may lie in its many subplots, like the trial of Bank Commissioner Frank C. Williams, who was convicted for turning a blind eye to Graham’s crimes.
Those interested to fill in the missing pieces should begin with the public story, as told in the newspapers, available on the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America.
The pages of these old newspapers, with their dozens of juxtaposed stories, are a humbling reminder of the complex, layered context for any historical event.
In 1920, as in our own time, a lot was going on at once. In the same week Horace Graham appeared before the Vermont Supreme Court, for example, in November 1920, American women voted in their first national election and the first commercial radio station started broadcasting.
A century ago, in January of 1920, as prosecutors tried to expose Horace Graham’s crimes in court, national prohibition went into effect, and Americans still didn’t know that several months earlier, in September 1919, President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, that he was paralyzed on one side, and that his wife Edith was effectively running the country.
We aren’t the first Americans to be overwhelmed by the pace of history.
