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The Crédit Mobilier manipulation was a spectacular scandal. Directors of the Union Pacific Railroad had organized their own construction company and had awarded themselves contracts to build the transcontinental line. Although historians have long debated whether this arrangement yielded participants an exorbitant rate of return, 1 there is no doubt contemporaries thought it did. Even so, what made headlines was less this siphoning off of profits than the involvement of the federal government, which had granted the Union Pacific extensive tracts of public lands and also loans to finance construction. According to charges in the newspapers, the “railroad ring” had handed out shares in Crédit Mobilier to influential congressmen, buying political influence in order to forestall inconvenient scrutiny as well as to secure additional federal largesse (Josephson 1934; Bain 1999). 2

The hoopla that surrounded these revelations of bribery has obscured for modern observers the extent to which conflicts of interest, like those at the heart of the Crédit Mobilier scandal, were endemic to corporations at the time. Although cases rarely made headlines unless they involved companies, such as major railroad or telegraph lines, that were important to the public welfare, 3 the legal record from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that directors of corporations large and small frequently negotiated contracts with other companies in which they had a financial interest, 4 elected themselves to corporate offices at lucrative salaries that they themselves set, 5 arranged mergers that earned themselves