nalism had a large part in directing the American revival, and
private investigators furnished many of the facts. Public suits marked
an attempt to act upon the facts and remedy them. In Missouri Joseph W.
Folk conducted a series of prosecutions against grafters in St. Louis
that elevated him in a few months to the head of his party and the
governorship of his State. The Bureau of Corporations, attached to the
new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, made a series of reports
the most notable of which showed that the charges against the Standard
Oil Company for extorting rebates, and against the meat-packers for
unsanitary conditions, were founded upon fact.

The most notable public exposure of indiscretion and wrongdoing in high
finance occurred in New York. Here, during 1905, a quarrel over the
management of the Equitable Life Insurance Company led to a legislative
investigation by a so-called Armstrong Committee. One of the attorneys
employed by the committee, Charles E. Hughes, soon became the spirit of
the examination. One by one he called insurance officers to the witness
stand, and drew from their reluctant lips the story of their relation to
banking, to speculative finance, and to politics. He revealed the
existence of a group among the bankers not unlike a money trust. He
proved that for at least three national campaigns the insurance
companies, like other corporations, had given heavy subsidies to the
campaign funds, sometimes of both but always of the Republican party.

Whenever an investigator rose above the level and established his
reputation for honesty and competence, the aroused public seized upon
him for use in politics. In September, 1906, the Democrats of New York
nominated the most successful of the sensational journalists, Hearst,
for governor. On the same day the Republican Convention, in which no
delegate had been instructed for him, nominated Hughes as governor of
New York, because public opinion in the party would take no other
candidate. Hughes was elected in 1906 and again in 1908, in spite of the
hostility of Republican party leaders. His administrations were
prophetic of the new spirit that was entering politics.

Many of the problems raised by the investigations were old and presented
only a need for an honest enforcement of the law against law-breakers.
Others were simple and prescribed their own methods of treatment. The
evil of corporation contributions to campaign funds was met in