Washington, D.C., November 1902.

Senator Joseph Ralph Burton of Kansas walked a stranger into the office of the chief post office inspector,

introduced him as a business associate, and asked the inspector a simple question.

Had the post office department issued

a fraud order against the Rialto Grain and Securities Company of St. Louis? The inspector said it had not,

not yet. Burton nodded, set his peace and walked back out with the stranger. The investigation into

Rialto quietly disappeared. And for the next five

months, checks for $500 arrived at the Riggs Bank in Washington, each one made out to the

Honorable Senator from Kansas. That was the transaction. $2,500 paid in installments for the use

of a United States Senate seat as a shield for a mail fraud operation.

Burton was the first sitting senator in American history to be convicted of a felony.

The price he put on the office was an embarrassment even by the standards of the gilded age.

He came from decent stock, which makes it worse.

Born in 1852, on a farm outside Mitchell, Indiana,

Burton was the kind of boy the frontier rewarded,

smart, restless, ambitious.

He tried for the Naval Academy at Annapolis at 16

and failed the physical.

So he taught school, put himself through three years

at Franklin College, spent a year at DePaul University, and read law at a respected Indianapolis firm.

By 23, he had passed the bar. By 24, he was stumping for the Republican ticket as a presidential elector, giving speeches across Indiana with the fluency of a man who had discovered his only real talent.

The talent was his mouth.

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