CORRUPTION
American political corruption—the betrayal of an office or duty for some consideration—may seem to be a subject uniquely blessed with opportunities for historical research and controversy. Yet it has never commanded significant scholarly attention, thanks chiefly to several vexing problems of definition and interpretation. First, corruption is simply a catchall for specific abuses—bribery, graft, extortion, nepotism, ticket-fixing—each of which, arguably, has a distinct history. Second, given the decentralization of American political institutions, it is also arguable that the history of corruption on the national level would differ appreciably from that on the state or municipal level, and which of these histories would throw more light on the political system is open to question: a scandal in Washington may matter less than chronic payoffs to city health inspectors. Finally, as Walter Lippmann once remarked, the history of corruption is really the history of reform—of those occasions when corruption is alleged, discovered, and attacked. Working with evidence almost always supplied by hostile sources is a daunting challenge to historical objectivity.
These caveats notwithstanding, a case can be made for dividing the history of American corruption into three broad periods. The first extends from the beginning of European settlement in North America through the American Revolution, the second from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, and the last from roughly the Great Depression to the present.
Prior to the American Revolution, the most spectacular examples of corruption center on the colonial governors—a dreary succession of royal and corporate placemen whose chief concern was grabbing as much as they could before returning home. Most assumed they had every right to do so. Capt. Samuel Argall, deputy governor of Virginia from 1617 to 1619, boasted openly of his intention to "make hay whilst the sunne doth shine, however it may fare with the generality." No less audacious was Governor Benjamin Fletcher of New York (1692-1698), who took protection money from pirates, shook down Indian traders, bilked the customs, padded military payrolls, and stole funds raised to pay the provincial debt. "To recount all his arts of squeezing money both out of the publick and private purses would make a volume instead of a letter," grumbled one of Fletcher's contemporaries.
Advancing hand in glove with proconsular venality was the willingness of colonial merchants and customs officials to work around the Acts of Trade and Navigation by which Britain regulated imperial commerce. For importers and exporters in every coastal city, the difference between success and failure often came down to whether they could evade this or that duty, get a better price for their wheat in, say, the French West Indies, or produce a manifest for twenty barrels of molasses when there were thirty below deck. By 1765, according to one estimate, systematic smuggling, graft, extortion, and bribery in the colonies cost the British Treasury £700,000 a year. Attempts were made from time to time to clean things up, but defiant juries and mercenary judges—one of whom remarked "that in his opinion the Nicetyes of the Law ought not to be observed"—invariably got in the way.
Still another source of political corruption in the colonies was the profitability of land speculation. Angling for a share of the apparently endless supply of American land, investors and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic left a trail of chicanery, inside dealing, favoritism, and outright theft that even now staggers the imagination. The "Walking Purchase" of 1737, by which Pennsylvania authorities tricked native peoples out of most of their lands west of the Delaware River, is only one of many scandalous examples. For suitable considerations, George Cornbury, sometime governor of New York, handed out grants the size of entire English counties; his Hardenburgh Patent ran to an amazing 2 million acres, larger than Connecticut.
The banality of this corruption mocked a widespread belief that the New World had once afforded pristine sanctuary from the evils of the Old. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, restoring this American purity in fact became an issue of major religious and political significance in the colonies. Its growth fed, and in turn fed upon, charges by politicians and pamphleteers of the British opposition that corrupt ministerial "influence"—patronage, bribery, and graft—had neutralized Parliament as a bulwark of English liberty.
Barricading the new nation against corruption thus proved one of the revolutionary generation's most critical tasks. The institutional solution, elaborated in the 1787 federal Constitution, linked the preservation of liberty to a system of checks and balances that limited executive power and buttressed legislative autonomy. If the corrupt influence that destroyed Parliament could never be eradicated, in other words, at least its career might be obstructed and its effects blunted. But so great a task demanded more than constitutional tinkering. Ultimately, the only enduring safeguard against political corruption in a republic was the personal "virtue" of its citizens—not just honesty, but a willingness to sacrifice selfish interests for the good of the whole.
This way of defining and dealing with corruption gradually lost its edge, however. The early Republic proved comparatively free of the systematic corruption that had so distressed Americans earlier, but rampant factionalism in state and national affairs during the 1780s and 1790s punctured the hope of rallying virtuous citizens around a single definition of the public good. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Albert Gallatin, among others, predicted that Federalist financial policies would cause massive corruption. But after his election in 1800, Jefferson's conciliatory policies appeared to confirm that the old ways of thinking about corruption no longer applied.
Beginning around the 1820s, a new chapter opened in the history of American political corruption. Rapid westward expansion, urbanization, and the advent of industrialization vastly increased the importance of government at all levels—not merely as a short-run source of lucrative contracts, franchises, and licenses but also as the source of the laws of property and exchange that would promote the accumulation of capital. Liberal economic and social thought, riding the crest of a new spirit of competitive individualism, obliterated the old republican ideal of self-sacrifice for the common good. Concurrently, political parties, once taken as evidence of corrupt executive influence, gained acceptance as the means to manage elections, negotiate conflicts of interest and opinion, mark the boundaries of legitimate dissent, and regulate access to power.
Corruption nourished by these changes permeated the executive and legislative branches of the federal government throughout the nineteenth century, peaking in the scandals that rocked the Grant administration in the mid-1870s. What most aroused concern, though, was corruption identified with municipal and state governments—focal points of business pressure for concessions and privileges, and nurseries of the great nineteenth-century political machines. Its characteristic form, pioneered by New York's Tammany Hall, was a web of understandings between party leaders, officeholders, and businessmen willing to cut corners. In return for getting out the vote, the machine received exclusive control of government appointments and programs—the spoils of office. Its placemen returned a fixed percentage of their salaries to the organization, along with a cut of whatever bribes, kickbacks, and the like they could devise. The resulting stream of "boodle" (a lush new vocabulary of corruption was being created, too) then passed down to county and district leaders, ward heelers, and precinct captains. They completed the cycle by distributing the gifts and favors that ensured voter loyalty to the organization on election day.
Responding to this epidemic of graft, bribery, extortion, and electoral fraud, reformers again took up the cudgels against corruption. Some, like E. L. Godkin, Charles Eliot Norton, and Henry Adams in the 1870s and 1880s, expressed upper-class outrage; others, above all the progressives of the pre-World War I era, spoke to the worries of the middle classes. Both agreed on the fundamentals. Unlike their eighteenth-century predecessors, who had associated corruption with undue executive "influence" over legislative bodies, they affirmed the beneficial role of political parties and did not question the capitalist system. The remedies they instituted were correspondingly moderate: civil service legislation to place government jobs beyond the reach of spoilsmen; immigration restrictions to curb the power of big-city bosses; federal and state laws mandating direct primaries and restricting or regulating corporate campaign contributions; and, overall, a trend toward government by nonpartisan professionals sitting on commissions, bureaus, boards, and agencies that could not be controlled by party bosses.
After World War I, and most noticeably after World War II, patterns of corruption and reform in the United States shifted yet again. One change was the demise of the political machines. What happened is a subject of controversy, although the prevailing wisdom emphasizes the advent of the "welfare state" under the New Deal, which deprived the machines of popular support and made them easy pickings for organized crime. Another change was the apparent decline of federal-level bribery, graft, extortion, and the like between the 1920s and the 1960s. Warren G. Harding's administration suffered from Teapot Dome and other depredations of the "Ohio Gang." Revelations of corruption likewise embarrassed Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. From time to time members of Congress, too, have run afoul of the law. But Franklin D. Roosevelt's twelve years in the White House were untroubled by major scandals. So were the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
More to the point, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a legislative offensive against corruption that is virtually without parallel in American history. Prompted by a 1964 probe into the activities of Robert G. ("Bobby") Baker, secretary to the Senate majority, both houses of Congress created Select Committees on Standards and Conduct to prepare codes of ethics for their members. Limitations on campaign contributions by individuals and corporations were established by the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act (feca). When the Watergate scandal of 1972-1974 revealed massive illegal corporate and personal contributions to President Richard M. Nixon's 1972 campaign, Congress responded by tightening feca and creating the Federal Elections Commission. In 1977, moreover, both the Senate and House acted to close loopholes in their own codes of ethics and passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, prohibiting gifts or payments to foreign officials by American companies. The 1978 Ethics in Government Act imposed stringent financial disclosure requirements on federal officeholders and authorized special prosecutors (now referred to as "independent counsel") to investigate all charges of corruption against them. By 1987 it had been used eight times, twice to consider charges against President Ronald Reagan's attorney general Edwin Meese.
Nationwide, there was a striking increase in the number of state and local officials charged under federal law with corrupt practices of one kind or another—from two hundred or so every year in the middle 1970s to nearly five hundred in 1986 alone, according to Justice Department figures. Prosecutors found corruption particularly widespread in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston.
There are indications, on the other hand, that congressional codes of conduct have done little to alter patterns of corruption on Capitol Hill. The "Koreagate" scandal of 1976-1978 revealed dozens of congressmen who had taken money or gifts from agents of the South Korean government; the House managed to reprimand only three of its members, and the Senate took no action at all. In the "Abscam" scandal of 1978-1980, fbi agents posing as Arab sheiks found numerous public officials willing to accept money for help with immigration authorities; six representatives and one senator were convicted of bribery. In the "Wedtech" scandal of 1986-1989, payoffs by a military contractor led to the conviction of two representatives and dozens of other figures on charges of racketeering, tax evasion, bribery, fraud, grand larceny, and perjury. All told, no fewer than twenty members of the One Hundredth Congress have been accused of misconduct, ranging from sexual harassment to misuse of campaign contributions, bribery, and tax evasion. Corruption also made new inroads into the White House during Reagan's presidency. Between 1981 and 1989, dozens of high-ranking Reagan appointees were charged with wrongdoing. They included, besides Attorney General Meese, Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan, the first member of a president's cabinet to be indicted while in office, and Franklyn ("Lyn") Nofziger, one of Reagan's key advisers. Donovan was subsequently acquitted; Nofziger was convicted of illegally lobbying the executive branch on behalf of private clients, among them the Wedtech Corporation, but his conviction was reversed on appeal.
The Supreme Court meanwhile placed new impediments in the way of prevention and prosecution of corruption. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), the Court struck down certain long-established state restrictions on individual and corporate campaign contributions on the grounds that they violated First Amendment guarantees to free speech. In Federal Election Commission v. National Conservative Political Action Committee (1985), the Court likewise voided limitations on campaign spending by political action committees (pacs). Perhaps more important, its decision in the 1987 case of McNally v. United States blunted the use of mail-fraud statutes to prosecute state and local officials for corruption. Dozens of prior convictions and ongoing prosecutions were said to have been jeopardized as a result.
Another, contemporary trend, altogether new in its scope and magnitude, is the spread of corruption financed by the stupendous resources of the illegal drug "industry"—gross sales of which neared the $120 billion mark in 1988, far exceeding the combined profits of the nation's five hundred largest industrial corporations. According to some authorities, payoffs to police, judges, and other officials have brought about the effective disintegration of law enforcement in many parts of the United States. If that is so, then this constitutes corruption of a kind and on a scale for which there are simply no precedents in American historical experience.
Edwin G. Burrows
See also City Government; Civil Service Reform; Crédit Mobilier of America; Hatch Act; Iran-Contra Affair; Police Forces; Progressivism; Republicanism; Spoils System; Tammany Hall; Teapot Dome Affair; Tweed Ring; Urban Bosses and Machine Politics; Watergate Scandal.
