KEISLING: Lancaster County newspaper publisher disbarred before becoming state attorney general

AG William Hensel caught Philly Inquirer bribing city treasurer

by Bill Keisling

 

Note to readers: The Pennsylvania Senate plans to invoke a little-known “Direct Address” clause to remove Attorney General Kathleen Kane from office. As a public service, newslanc.com is providing historical background to this provision and the Pennsylvanians who last invoked it.

 

Attorney General Kathleen Kane has a few things in common with the state attorney general who presided over the last Senate Direct Address removal attempt in 1891 — Pennsylvania Attorney General William Hensel, of Lancaster.

AG Hensel, before he became state attorney general in 1891, was himself disbarred from practicing law, in a celebrated case.

That’s disbarred, not merely temporarily suspended, like Kane.

The leadership of the Pennsylvania Senate hopes to invoke the obscure Direct Address clause to remove Kane came from office because, they say, she has a suspended law license.

But today’s Senate leadership hasn’t much bothered to study the rich and unsuccessful history of the Direct Address procedure.

As with Kane’s current troubles with the court, AG Hensel’s disbarment from the practice of law in 1880 had overtly political overtones.

Hensel, like AG Kane, claimed to have been unfairly victimized by a political judge.

William Uhler Hensel was a leading political figure of his time, not just in Lancaster County, his lifelong home, but in Pennsylvania, and nationally.

His disbarment from the practice of law, rather then destroying him, backfired, and made him famous.

AG Hensel’s celebrated run-in with the courts and his disbarment deserve careful consideration and remembrance today.

Hensel was born and raised in Quarryville, in southern Lancaster County. He became a lawyer in 1873, and built a successful law practice in Lancaster.

In 1874 Hensel bought half interest in the Lancaster Intelligencer, which he edited and published with Andrew Jackson Steinman, also a lawyer. (Hensel would sell his share of the newspaper in 1886; the Steinman family continues to own the Lancaster daily newspapers to this day.)

During the Civil War, the Democrat-leaning Intelligencer had fallen on hard times, its circulation at point declining to only several hundred readers.

But under Hensel’s editorship the newspaper became a feisty organ for local goings-on and reform.

The Intelligencer with Hensel at the helm “transformed itself from primarily a political organ into a conduit for local information and an advocate for reform,” reports the Library of Congress, which curates a significant collection of Intelligencer back issues. “A county history, published in 1883, described the Intelligencer as ‘having years ago taken and consistently maintained a position in favor of the limitation of corporate powers and privileges, against free passes, for municipal reform, and against all forms of political corruption,” the Library of Congress relates.

In January 1880, Hensel and Steinman’s Intelligencer published an article critical of a decision of Lancaster Judge David Patterson, a former state representative and county district attorney.

In their newspaper report of a liquor case before Judge Patterson, the Intelligencer “declared the acquittal of the defendant was accomplished by an imposition (i.e. improprieties) upon the Court, and that the judges took no cognizance of it because all the parties implicated, as well as the judges themselves, belonged to the Republican party,” relates the Biographical Annals of Lancaster County (J. H. Beers & Co., 1903).

As the publishers of the Intelligencer were also attorneys, Judge Patterson promptly charged Hensel and Steinman with contempt of court for their article, and began disbarment proceedings against them.

The Lancaster Intelligencer of January 30, 1880, reports, “At 10 o’clock this morning before Judges Patterson and Livingston was heard the case of Messrs Steinman and Hensel, editors of the Intelligencer and members of the Lancaster bar, upon whom Judge Patterson had served rules of answer for contempt of court, and to show cause why they should not be disbarred.

“The bar was densely packed with attorneys,” the Intelligencer continues, “every seat being occupied and large numbers being compelled to stand. The court room was filled with interested spectators.”

The Intelligencer reported this strange proceeding against its publishers across two inside pages, and editorialized, “The title of judge is not a guarantee that the man who wears it honors it.”

Editor Hensel also published snippets of supportive editorials from other newspapers across the state.

“Though they published the article as editors,” the Venango Spectator opined, “Judge Patterson wishes to hold them responsible as lawyers for an infraction of the dignity of the court. It strikes us that his honor has done more to impair respect for his court by his arbitrary proceedings than could be done by all the newspaper articles that ever were written.”

“If he has been slandered, let him sue for slander, just like other men,” the Kittaning Democratic Sentinel editorialized against Judge Patterson. “If he is simply mad, and wishes to vent his spleen upon the editors of the Intelligencer, he has ‘put his foot in it’ most effectively, and has evidently ‘awakened up the wrong passengers.'”

Representing Hensel and Steinman at this contempt hearing was prominent Philadelphia attorney Rufus Shapley.

“I claim that when I became a lawyer I did not lose a single right of citizenship,” Shapley told Judge Patterson. And neither did Hensel nor Steinman, he argued. They had a right to publish a newspaper and to not be punished as attorneys.

Shapely complained that “the proceedings are irregular,” and that to remove the publishers of the newspaper from their legal offices was a grave miscarriage of justice.

“An attorney’s office is his property,” Shapley told the judge, “of which he can be deprived only for legal causes and according to the well-established rules of law.”

But Judge Patterson remained unswayed. In April 1880 both Hensel and Steinman were disbarred from the practice of law (and not merely temporarily suspended, like Kathleen Kane today).

The case was appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and argued in the May term, 1880, under the court caption Ex parte Steinman.

“The arguments made by A. K. McClure and R. E. Shapley, the defendants’ counsel, were of a high order, and were widely copied,” reports the Biographical Annals of Lancaster County. “In October (1880), the ruling of the lower court was reversed, and Steinman and Hensel were re-instated, after having been six months debarred from practice.”

So it’s worth pointing out to readers today that AG Hensel was disbarred from the practice of law for a period of time longer than AG Kane has been suspended today.

In ruling for Hansel and Steinman, state Chief Justice George Sharswood wrote in his opinion, “It would be a clear infraction of the spirit, if not the letter, of this article to hold that an attorney can be summarily disbarred for the publication of a libel on a man in a public capacity, or where the matter was for public investigation or information; for a man certainly does not forfeit his rights as a freeman by becoming a lawyer,” reports the American Law Register of 1881.

William Hensel’s disbarment case made him famous.

The case propelled him to preeminence in both the legal and publishing professions in Pennsylvania, and nationally. In 1882 Hensel was elected president of the Pennsylvania State Editorial Association. Hensel befriended President Grover Cleveland, and wrote Cleveland’s official biography.

Hensel’s renown as a lawyer continued to grow as well.

“Suffice it to say that his reputation as a lawyer is second to none in the State,” summarized the Biographical Annals.

Though he refused to seek elective office for himself, by 1890 Hensel joined forces with young politician Robert Pattison, of Philadelphia, who was seeking his second, non-consecutive term as governor of Pennsylvania.

Hansel took to the campaign trial with Pattison. Together they loudly criticized public corruption in state government, and promised to do something about it.

When Pattison was reelected governor in November 1890, he appointed Hensel as attorney general.

In October 1891, Democrats Gov. Pattison and Attorney General Hensel called the state Senate into session by invoking the constitution’s Direct Address clause.

They demanded the Senate remove from office an entire network of allegedly corrupt public officials, including the Republican state treasurer and the auditor general, and nine magistrates or constables. Pattison and Hensel accused them all of running a deeply entrenched bribery scandal in Philadelphia, with enabling tentacles reaching all the way to the state treasury in Harrisburg.

AG Hensel personally prosecuted the 1891 Direct Address removal case in the state Senate. He also presided over, and prosecuted, a preliminary Joint Investigative Committee undertaken by both houses of the legislature to investigate the alleged network of corruption.

In Philadelphia, AG Hensel took testimony describing how the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers bribed the Philadelphia treasurer in exchange for legal display advertising.

“James Elverson, the proprietor of the Inquirer, was called to the stand and sworn,” reports the Pittsburg Dispatch, the leading newspaper of the day. “Although coached by Lawyer Halverson, he decided to tell the whole story, and in answer to the Attorney General stated that the advertising had been offered to him by ex-City Treasurer Frank F. Bell; that he paid him a commission of 40 per cent, and that he paid it in bank bills at his own office. The witness further stated that the lists (of names in the legal advertisements) were set up in the Inquirer office and stereotype plates were furnished to all the other papers, which explained how it came about that the German-Democrat published names in English instead of German.”

By this time Hensel was a seasoned newspaper writer and publisher himself. He certainly understood and probably found some amusement in what the Inquirer and the other newspapers were doing to sell advertising.

Doubts were also raised about the independence of those newspapers to report on those they had been bribing for profit.

AG Hensel’s 1891 Direct Address removal hearings ran for a full month, and put to shame the four or five days of limited hearings recently afforded Kathleen Kane.

In the end, in 1891, after a full month of raucous hearings, the Republican-controlled Senate balked and refused to remove the office holders.

The Senate sent a proclamation to Gov. Pattison and AG Hensel stating that it lacked jurisdiction to remove the office holders “and thereby to deprive said officers the right to trial by jury … or to a trial in regular proceedings by impeachment….”

This outcome was oddly reminiscent of William Hensel’s own celebrated disbarment case.

The same as Judge Patterson had a proper remedy other than disbarring his critic, so too did Gov. Pattison and AG Hensel, the Senate told them — impeachment or trial by jury.

What would AG William Hensel say about AG Kathleen Kane’s predicament today?

He’d certainly say, as in his own disbarment case, that Kane has a right to full due process, and that her summary suspension was political and unconstitutional.

What would Hensel and Gov. Pattison say about the broader scandal — the pornographic emails that Kane uncovered, and Kane’s criminal indictment for giving a news story to the Philadelphia Daily News, sister publication to the Inquirer?

Some things never change, Hensel would surely laugh.

Hensel and Pattison would certainly be shocked that today’s state Senate wasn’t holding hearings on the entire mess.

They’d certainly point out that the Senate isn’t getting to the bottom of the corruption in the courts and the newspapers by merely punishing Kane.

Hensel would certainly be interested that today’s senators know nothing of him or his disbarment, and he’d perhaps be concerned that today’s politicians and lawyers don’t seem to care about their state’s rich history.

AG William Hensel did get a little victory from his 1891 Direct Address removal crusade:

He got the Philadelphia Inquirer and the other newspapers to repay their bribed proceeds.