On 11 July 1912 Robert W. Archbald, a circuit judge assigned to the U.S. Commerce Court, was impeached for using his position to advance personal business interests. The sixty-three-year-old judge was accused of making, often under a fictitious name, contracts at advantageous prices for the purchase of coal deposits owned by railroad companies that were litigants before the Commerce Court. The House Judiciary Committee had originally determined that Archbald had developed an improper degree of intimacy with railroad officials and had accepted financial favors from them. The Senate agreed, at least with respect to his conduct as a Commerce Court circuit judge, and removed him from office.

In 1918 Victor Berger, a former mayor of Milwaukee, founder of the Socialist Party, and, as an editor of the Milwaukee Leader, an opponent of America's involvement in the war in Europe, was indicted for conspiring to...