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ANTI-CORRUPTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Richard L. McCormick
Richard L. McCormick*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
*
email: [email protected]
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Extract

What will it take to get Americans to do something about political corruption? I mean the deep corruption of politics and policy now caused by massive campaign contributions, by lobbyists who bundle those contributions for political candidates and then influence the policy decisions of elected officials, by the revolving door between public office and lucrative private employment, and—through all these instruments and more—by the influence of wealthy individuals and interests over the agencies and institutions of government. Some people say this is just American politics as usual: money is inevitable in public life, and anyway it's all perfectly legal. Sadly, those who say this are, at this moment, winning the argument. Writing for the Supreme Court majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), Justice Anthony Kennedy opined, “It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.” Cementing the case, says the Court, is the First Amendment, which protects political speech and political dollars.

Type
Public Engagement
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 441 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Kennedy quoted in Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 233.

2 Outstanding examples include Larry J. Sabato and Glenn R. Simpson, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics (New York: Times Books, 1996); Elizabeth Drew, The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why (Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press, 1999); Martin Tolchin and Susan J. Tolchin, Pinstripe Patronage: Political Favoritism from the Clubhouse to the White House and Beyond (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2011); Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012); Lynda W. Powell, The Influence of Campaign Contributions in State Legislatures: The Effects of Institutions and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Timothy K. Kuhner, Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law; The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; The Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School; The Center for Responsive Politics; The Center for Public Integrity; Transparency International: The Global Coalition Against Corruption; and Common Cause.

3 Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (New York: Hatchett Book Group, 2011).

4 Many organizations regularly poll citizens about their attitudes toward corruption and publish the findings online; these include, among others, Gallup, Rasmussen Reports, Democracy Corps, and the Pew Research Center.

5 Lessig characterized Teachout's book in that way during the course of a panel discussion in which they both participated; “Curbing Corruption,” New America NYC, December 9, 2014.

6 Teachout, Corruption in America, 2.

7 Teachout, Corruption in America, 2, 3.

8 Teachout, Corruption in America, 14, 48.

9 Teachout, Corruption in America, 9, 39.

10 On dependency and corruption, see Teachout, Corruption in America, 53–55; and Lessig, Republic, Lost, 15–20, 230–46.

11 Teachout, Corruption in America, 5, 38, 57.

12 The phrase “all shared a general obsession with corruption” appears in Teachout, Zephyr, “The Anti-Corruption Principle,” Cornell Law Review 94 (2009): 347Google Scholar. For challenges to her perspective, see Seth Tillman, Barrett, “Citizens United and the Scope of Professor Teachout's Anti-Corruption Principle,” Northwestern University Law Review 107 (2012)Google Scholar; and Scott McLemee, “Corruption, Continued,” Inside Higher Ed (October 1, 2014). In the book under review, Teachout maintains her point that constraining corruption was central to the vision of the men who wrote the Constitution, but she does not employ the words “obsess” or “obsession” to characterize their anti-corruption convictions; Corruption in America, 56–80. On the Founders and corruption, see also Savage, James D., “Corruption and Virtue at the Constitutional Convention,” The Journal of Politics 56 (February 1994): 174–86Google Scholar.

13 Teachout, Corruption in America, 307–10. Curiously Corruption in America does not discuss the Constitution's provisions for the election of the president, although in her earlier article Teachout analyzed the anti-corruption intentions behind the Electoral College; see “The Anti-Corruption Principle,” 367–68.

14 Teachout, Corruption in America, 62.

15 Teachout, Corruption in America, 13.

16 Teachout, Corruption in America, 85, 87–88, 94, 101.

17 Teachout, Corruption in America, 114, 116, 117, 130.

18 Teachout, Corruption in America, 148, 149, 155, 159, 169. An indispensable treatment of these subjects may be found in John T. Noonan, Jr., Bribes (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984), 427–620.

19 Teachout, Corruption in America, 189, 199, 203.

20 Teachout, Corruption in America, 209, 212.

21 Teachout, Corruption in America, 232, 234, 245. Justice John Paul Stevens (joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor) powerfully dissented from the majority's decision in Citizens United and from the majority's “crabbed” definition of corruption; Teachout, Corruption in America, 234, 259.

22 Teachout, Corruption in America, 302–3. For Teachout's compelling critique of “the quid pro quo mistake,” see 234–45.

23 Teachout, Corruption in America, 256. Lessig, Republic, Lost elegantly describes and explains the characteristics of the contemporary political system that are summarized in this paragraph.

24 Teachout, Corruption in America, 276.

25 Teachout, Corruption in America, 278–80.

26 Teachout, Corruption in America, 298, 304–5.

27 Teachout, Corruption in America, 5.

28 Richard Bushman, “Corruption and Power in Colonial America” in The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002), 62–91; Franklin quoted in Bushman, 81. See also Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 77–98; and Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 73, 103.

29 Robert V. Remini, “The Era of Corruption” in Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 12–38.

30 The historical literature on nineteenth-century political corruption and accusations of corruption is vast; a sampling of some of the more interesting and important works includes Howard Bodenhorn, “Bank Chartering and Political Corruption in Antebellum New York: Free Banking as Reform” in Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 231–57; Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael F. Holt, “The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know Nothingism” in Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 265–90; Michael Thomas Smith, The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); and Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). Notable, as well, is Noonan, Bribes; see especially 447–563.

31 Raymond A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860–1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1985), 83–137; “People's [Party] Platform of 1892” in Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson, eds., National Party Platforms, 1840–1956 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 89; Burl Noggle, Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962).

32 Walter Lippmann, “A Theory about Corruption” in Arnold J. Heidenheimer, ed., Political Corruption: Readings in Comparative Analysis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1970), 294.

33 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 506–52; John M. Murrin, “Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America” in Richard K. Matthews, ed., Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994), 103–47; Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

34 The Letters of Wyoming, To the People of the United States, on the Presidential Election, and in Favour of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia: S. Simpson & J. Conrad, 1824), 12, 18, 29; Watson, Liberty and Power, 73–95, 132–71; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 88; Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 29–30. Andrew Jackson goes almost unmentioned in Teachout's narrative, but in an endnote she provides an insightful two-page discussion of the Jacksonians' anti-corruption rhetoric and policies; Corruption in America, 337–39.

35 On northern and southern anti-corruption passions during the 1850s, see Summers, Plundering Generation, 215–304; and Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), 183–259. During the era of Reconstruction, corruption flourished practically everywhere in the United States, but the opponents of Reconstruction succeeded in portraying Republican-led southern governments as unusually, even uniquely, corrupt; see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), especially 384–90, 525–26.

36 McCormick, Richard L., “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86 (April 1981): 247–74Google Scholar.

37 This brief characterization of the political and governmental changes of the early twentieth century owes a great deal to several outstanding works of history, including Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

38 Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 357–627; McCormick, “Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics.”

39 On the use of allegations of electoral fraud and corruption to justify measures disenfranchising blacks, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 326–27; Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Second Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 82–83; Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876–1925 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 122–35; and Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 157–58.

40 Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 579, 610. Kutler's penultimate chapter, titled “In the Shadow of Watergate,” provides an admirably balanced account of the scandal's impacts upon politics and government; Wars of Watergate, 574–611.

41 Jill Lepore, “The Crooked and the Dead,” The New Yorker (August 25, 2014): 27.

42 For a persuasive account of how deep corruption currently influences federal government policies in a wide range of areas, see Lessig, Republic, Lost, 41–225.