If Electric Boat could only return to the skulduggery of its founders in the early 1900s, it wouldn’t have to worry about having submarines cut from the federal budget, as recently was proposed in the president’s budget.

Elihu B. Frost, first with the Holland Torpedo Boat Company and then as vice president of EB after its takeover of Holland in 1899, took lobbying to new depths, openly buying needed votes to secure submarine appropriations and protect EB’s monopoly on government contracts.

With Washington awash in dirty money, EB’s watertight monopoly forced American submarine builder Simon Lake, owner of the Lake Torpedo Boat Company in Bridgeport, to sell his boats overseas, even though some naval officials considered Lake submarines to be superior.

For purely financial reasons, Lake took his patents and designs to Russia and Germany, where he personally oversaw the development of those formidable submarine forces.

In “Submarine: The Autobiography of Simon Lake” (1938), Lake said Washington lobbying at the time was “neither subtle nor surreptitious and lobbyists were about as clandestine as bull elephants.”

In 1903, EB’s tactics began to surface when Philip Doblin, a staff member on New York Representative Montague Lessler’s campaign for reelection, was found guilty of bribery and perjury for attempting to secure an Electric Boat contract for $5,000.

According to online inflation calculators, $5,000 in 1903 would be worth $146,574 today.

Simon Lake complained to any who would listen, yet the shenanigans continued until 1908, when Congress and the Navy had finally had enough. A House select committee began hearings to investigate corruption in the awarding of submarine contracts.

Congressman George Lilly, future governor of Connecticut, opened the proceedings with a complete dressing down of EB, declaring “This Electric Boat Company has been a stench in the nostrils of the country for years, and, in my opinion it has done more to corrupt legislation than all the other corporations on earth.”

He then alleged that Electric Boat improperly influenced legislative appropriations, kept high officials on an annual retainer to secure votes, spent thousands of dollars entertaining members of Congress, and that a 1907 Senate amendment was drafted by EB’s own attorney to eliminate competition.

Lilly added that large sums of money had been spent to defeat members of the Naval Committee who did not favor Electric Boat, that lobbying by EB representatives was “so persistent and notorious as to call forth the condemnation and criticism of high officials of the Navy department,” and that since 1893, Electric Boat has “suppressed any possibility of competition in submarine construction.”

The congressman also charged that EB paid off journalists for favorable articles.

Since all’s fair in love and lobbying, EB’s coup de gras may have been the yacht Josephine, which it anchored in plain sight on the Potomac River near the Capitol. Onboard, friendly ladies did their best to encourage congressmen to keep submarine contracts going only to Electric Boat. Needless to say, the Josephine strategy kept the monopoly quite secure.

Lake lamented: “Wives of many a prairie Congressman cried their eyes out while their husbands whooped it up on the Josephine.”

Although Lilly was unable to provide the proof necessary to support his allegations (probably due to ongoing backroom payoffs), the cat was out of the bag and Congress finally ended Electric Boat’s monopoly on submarine contracts.

However, EB wouldn’t go quietly and used its fading influence to take a parting shot at Simon Lake.

Navy submarines, all built by Electric Boat to that time, were designated SS-1 through SS-19. Lake’s first government sub was assigned the official naval designation of “SS-19-1/2,” the first time a fractional label had ever been assigned to an American submarine, an obvious attempt to insult.

Finally victorious, Simon Lake chuckled at the slight. He eventually sold 33 Bridgeport-built submarines to the U.S. government.

John Steward lives in Waterford. He can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com.