Bliss, Cornelius Newton, 1833-1911

President Roosevelt responds to Treasurer of the Republican National Committee George Rumsey Sheldon’s recent letter stating that the contribution from Standard Oil Company in 1904 was authorized by the executive committee. Roosevelt was told by Secretary of the Treasury George B. Cortelyou that no money was contributed by Standard Oil, and only after the campaign was he informed that in fact individuals associated with the company had contributed.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-09-25

President Roosevelt writes to Republican National Committee Treasurer George Rumsey Sheldon regarding campaign funds solicited from John D. Archbold and Edward Henry Harriman. As the head of the Republican Administration, Roosevelt expresses his disagreement with collecting money from anyone currently being prosecuted. He sends two letters that he wrote four years ago to Secretary of the Treasury George B. Cortelyou, who was then chairman of the Republican National Committee, when money was contributed by Standard Oil. The first outlines the reasons that no contributions should be accepted which could be viewed as creating obligation to corporations. The second reiterates that the money should be returned especially in light of the public statements from Standard Oil about the company’s “political attitude.”

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-09-21

President Roosevelt informs Edwin Emerson that Guatemalan president Manuel Estrada Cabrera never donated any money to his campaign and says he was assured of this fact by George B. Cortelyou and Cornelius Newton Bliss, the campaign treasurer.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-08-13

President Roosevelt explains to Lawrence F. Abbott why he does not want public use made of the letters and telegrams he sent to Abbott. The president will explain more in detail when he sees Abbott or his father, Lyman Abbott, about the conversations Roosevelt had with Cornelius Newton Bliss and Senator Philander C. Knox regarding campaign donations from corporations or individuals connected with corporations.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-09-17

Lawrence F. Abbott thanks President Roosevelt for his letter and the copies of correspondence between Roosevelt and Secretary of the Treasury George B. Cortelyou about campaign contributions. Abbott believes that he now understands the Great White Fleet enough to make a statement about it and asks Roosevelt what is proper to say about the Standard Oil Company.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-09-16

Nevada N. Stranahan responds to President Roosevelt’s request for more information about William D. Murphy.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-01-31

F. Norton Goddard took President Roosevelt’s advice to collect endorsements for Marcus M. Marks’s candidacy for the Postmastership of New York, and has collected over 2000 endorsements from businesses. Goddard attests that these endorsements are from major businesses and believes he will have quite a few more by the time he visits Roosevelt. New York state senator Nathan Elsberg and prominent Republican Cornelius Newton Bliss have also endorsed Marks. Goddard admires a recent statement by Roosevelt.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1904-11-05

President Roosevelt drags a Republican elephant, to which Chair of the Republican National Committee George B. Cortelyou and Cornelius Newton Bliss and bags of money are chained, toward “Wall Street.” A “yellow dog fund” follows behind. Several lambs look out a window and point at the sight.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-09-25

Article discusses the Roosevelt-Harriman controversy in which Theodore Roosevelt was said to ask for campaign funds from certain donors while running for his second term as president. With quotes from George B. Cortelyou and George Rumsey Sheldon, it concludes there was no impropriety on behalf of Roosevelt.

Collection

Sagamore Hill National Historic Site

Creation Date

1911-12-24

George von Lengerke Meyer informs President Roosevelt there is opposition to Secretary of Commerce and Labor George B. Cortelyou becoming the chairman of the Republican National Committee at the Republican National Convention. Meyer insists that Cornelius Newton Bliss arrive before Monday with word from Roosevelt that he supports Cortelyou.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1904-06-17

Thomas Collier Platt and Cornelius Newton Bliss, as police officers, receive “Hush Money” at the door of an “Insurance Co.” from Richard A. McCurdy. Standing in the window of the building are James H. Hyde, Francis Hendricks, and John A. McCall, among others. An insert labeled “Tenderloin Dive” shows police officers accepting a bribe.

comments and context

Comments and Context

In the Muckraking Era, the public became aware of the odious similarities, first exposed in critiques during the Gilded Age of the 1870s and subsequently, between street crime of the “Other Half” and corruption among the cream of society. Keppler’s cartoon depicts that situation with almost textbook clarity.

At center, Uncle Sam looks into a mirror while descending a stairway in a hall. “Swallow” and “Watson” are standing in the hall, holding candles. In the vignette at lower left, the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Roosevelt, Fairbanks, Parker, and Davis, arrive in costume. On the lower right they are unmasked and engaged in a game with Columbia. On the middle left is “Bryan” as “An Old Timer,” and on the middle right “Taggart” and “Belmont” play a prank on an elderly woman with a “Bogie Man” labeled “Militarism.” At top left, bobbing for “Campaign Funds” are “Taggart, Bliss, Cortelyou, [and] Belmont,” and at top right “Odell, Shaw, [and] Hill” are “Jumping the Issues.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

Puck, a major Democratic publication, seems extremely unconcerned with the outcome of the imminent presidential election: little more than a week before balloting, its center-spread cartoon — traditionally a forum for powerful, persuasive political cartoons — instead published genre cartoons on a Halloween theme. Yes, with politicians as the characters, but more humorous than partisan. It possibly saw the writing on the wall, a massive Democratic defeat.

In a battle scene, President Roosevelt is about to make a final charge on “Fort Democracy” labeled “Peace, Constitution, [and] Prosperity.” Performing various functions in Roosevelt’s camp are “Foraker,” “Morton” spying from a balloon, “Allison” raising a flag labeled “Up with the Trusts,” “Woodruff” attending to wounded T.C. “Platt,” “Higgins” and “Odell” with cans of money from a box labeled “Groceries N.Y. State,” “Cortelyou” sharpening a sword, “Shaw” with binoculars, “Bliss” and “Fairbanks” loading a small cannon labeled “National Committee Gun,” and “Rockefeller” with a hod full of money bags labeled “Standard Shot.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

This cartoon by J. S. Pughe was the closing salvo, so to speak, in the campaign of Puck, a leading Democrat publication, in the 1904 presidential campaign. As such, it is surprisingly mild and generic. President Roosevelt is the only figure denigrated by caricature, and the cartoon shows neither the Democratic candidate, Judge Alton Brooks Parker, nor any real representation of his party’s substantive platform positions. Beyond the assertion that the Republican Party contained rich men devoted to using their wealth in an election, the crowded cartoon diverted its focus to smaller issues and controversies.

Special Easter edition centerfold shows President William McKinley as a rooster standing next to a broken egg labeled “Vice-Presidential Aspirations” from which several chicks have emerged, identified as: Lodge, Black, Bliss, Teddy, Root, Beveridge, and Timmy Woodruff.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Less than five months before this cartoon was published, Vice President Garret A. Hobart died in office. Especially given President McKinley’s popularity, the speculation about his running mate, later that year, was rife. Of the “chicks” depicted by cartoonist Louis Dalrymple and viewed approvingly by McKinley is, most prominently, Theodore Roosevelt.  He was then Governor of New York and a popular war hero and famed as a cowboy, drawn with a Western hat. Interestingly, other Vice Presidential possibilities seen here were also New Yorkers: former Governor Frank S. Black, Secretary of War Elihu Root, Lieutenant Governor Timothy L. Woodruff; and former Secretary of Interior Cornelius N. Bliss. Roosevelt’s friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge is pictured, as is Indiana Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, later a strong ally of Roosevelt in the Progressive party campaign.

As the Senate committee was unable to see him, Theodore Roosevelt offers his testimony in writing. He denies knowledge of requests for campaign funds directed at the Standard Oil Company for his presidential campaign of 1904. These requests supposedly promised lenient treatment and favors in exchange for large contributions. Roosevelt offers documentary evidence that in 1904 he instructed any money received from Standard Oil to be returned. Furthermore, according to campaign records, no funds were ever received from Standard Oil.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1912-08-28

President Roosevelt has asked George B. Cortelyou about a donation to his 1904 presidential campaign from the President of Guatemala, who said he had never heard of such a contribution but would ask Cornelius Newton Bliss about it. Roosevelt seems to remember a man named Hunter in the diplomatic service in Central America who resigned or was removed from office, but does not have any more details about him.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-08-06

President Roosevelt sends William H. Taft an editorial from the New York Times that he thinks is very good. Roosevelt also approves of the selection of George Rumsey Sheldon as treasurer of the National Republican Committee. Sheldon helped both Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes during political campaigns, and was recommended by Cornelius Newton Bliss, a former treasurer of the National Republican Committee. Appointing someone from Wall Street would have been a mistake.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-07-10

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-04-08

Creator(s)

Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919

Recipient

Patterson, Thomas MacDonald, 1839-1916

President Roosevelt makes an addendum to his previous letter to Representative Sherman stating that Chairman of the Republican National Committee George B. Cortelyou and Cornelius Newton Bliss believe that James H. Hyde should not be appointed ambassador. 

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906-10-12

After talking with George Horace Lorimer, President Roosevelt went back and read The Plum Tree through all the way, after previously having read only half of it. The ending of the book reconciles Roosevelt to many of the problems he had with it throughout, but he still holds many issues with the book which he lays out for Lorimer. The author, David Graham Phillips, falls into the trap of overstating the sort of corruption that is present in politics, and while Roosevelt freely admits that corruption is present–which, he points out, he is working against–there are also many good people working in politics as well. In a postscript of several days later, Roosevelt comments on several of Phillips’s articles on the Senate, in which he acts similarly by taking “certain facts that are true in themselves, and […] ignoring utterly a very much large mass of facts that are just as true and just as important.” Roosevelt criticizes Phillips for working with William Randolph Hearst to achieve notoriety.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906-05-12