Killed in Committee

A spider the size of a man squats at the center of its web, and the spider has the white-mustached head of Nelson Aldrich, the Rhode Island senator who ran the chamber for the trusts. The web is labeled "Senate Committee Room," and caught in its strands are fat flies marked with the reform measures of the day, rate regulation and railroad bills, one of them tagged "Standard Oil." The title delivers the verdict: "Killed in Committee." This is how popular legislation died in the Gilded Age Senate, quietly strangled in a room controlled by one man, and Puck names him. The insect metaphor is old; pinning Aldrich's actual face to the spider is what gives it teeth.