Editing Collis Potter Huntington (section)

==Politics==
In addition to his railroad building, Huntington is best known for his political activity in Washington, D.C., and California. At this stage he was based mostly in New York, and visited California about once a year. Stanford remained president, first of the Central Pacific and then of the Southern Pacific Company, until 1890. Huntington was agent and attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad, vice-president and general agent for the Central Pacific Railroad, first vice-president of the Southern Pacific Company, and a director of the two lines. His main duties were selling company stocks and bonds and acting as the chief lobbyist in Washington, where his two main challenges were to block federal support for a proposed rival transcontinental route, the [[Texas and Pacific Railway]] (in which he succeeded) and to postpone payment of the $28 million in cash loans the government had made to the Central Pacific (in which he did not). He first asked to delay payments for fifty years, then for a hundred years. His proposal to cancel the loans created a firestorm of opposition in California, covered colorfully in the newspapers by [[Ambrose Bierce]];<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Bierce|first1=Ambrose|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OCyjY1ijAbUC|title=A Clash of Titans: Ambrose Bierce, Collis Huntington, and the 1896 Fight to Refund the Central Pacific's Debt to the Federal Government with Accompanying Art Work by Homer Davenport & James Swinnerton|last2=Davenport|first2=Homer|last3=Swinnerton|first3=Jimmy|date=2010|publisher=Salvador A. Ramirez|isbn=978-0-615-38455-9|language=en}}</ref> when it was defeated in Congress in 1897, the governor of California celebrated by declaring a public holiday.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Impact of the Railroad: The Iron Horse and the Octopus |url=http://www.csun.edu/~sg4002/courses/417/readings/rail.pdf |access-date=October 20, 2020 |first=Steve |last=Graves |publisher=Department of Geography, California State University, Northridge}}</ref> Huntington lost the battle in Congress in 1899 and the Southern Pacific finally paid off the loans in 1909.<ref>{{cite journal |first=Ralph N. Jr |last=Traxler |title=Collis P. Huntington and the Texas and Pacific Railroad Land Grant |journal=New Mexico Historical Review |volume=34 |number=2 |date=April 1, 1959 |url=https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1885&context=nmhr |via=[[University of New Mexico]]}}</ref>

Huntington described his activities in a series of private letters to David D. Colton, a senior financial official of his railroads. After Colton's death, litigation opened his files in 1883 and Huntington's letters proved a huge embarrassment, with their detailed descriptions of lobbying, payoffs, and bribes to government officials. They showed Huntington to be an active, profane, and cynical promoter of his companies and display his eagerness to use money to bribe congressmen. The letters did not demonstrate that any cash actually changed hands with any official, but they revealed the tenor of Huntington's morals.<ref>{{cite book |first=Walton |last=Bean |title=California: An Interpretive History |edition=2nd |date=1973 |pages=298–311}}</ref>

His biographer says,
{{blockquote|he was vindictive, sometimes untruthful, interested in comparatively few things outside of business, and disposed to resist the idea that his railroad enterprises were to any degree burdened with public obligations. There is, on the other hand, no question with respect to his indomitable energy, his shrewdness in negotiation, his independence of thought and raciness of expression, and his grasp of large business problems. He was the dominant spirit among the small group of men who built up the Southern Pacific system, and that great organization remains his monument.<ref>{{cite book |first=Stuart |last=Daggett |chapter=Huntington, Collis Potter |title=Dictionary of American biography |date=1932 |volume=5}}</ref>}}

According to historian Richard J. Orsi,<blockquote> [Huntington] was an ardent opponent of racial prejudice and discrimination....Huntington had been an abolitionist before the Civil War, and he later donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support African American churches in California, and schools and colleges in the southern states....Though it was politically unwise, Huntington ordered his companies to give equal employment and pay to black workers, and he publicly opposed the exclusions of black and other non-white children from public schools, as well as other “Jim Crow” restrictions then being enacted in the South and elsewhere. In newspaper columns and public speeches in the West, Huntington praised the Chinese for their culture and industry, and condemned state and federal discrimination against American Indians and Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese immigrants. “If we deny to the individual, no matter what his creed, his color or his nationality, the right to justice which every man possesses,” he told a gathering of California civic and railway leaders in 1900, “there will be no enduring prosperity and [the nation’s] decline will surely follow.<ref>{{cite book |first1=Richard B. |last1=Rice |first2=Richard J. |last2=Orsi |display-authors=etal |title=The Elusive Eden: A New History of California |edition=5th |year=2020 |page=199 |publisher=Waveland Press |isbn=978-1478637547}}</ref></blockquote>