Historicizing "Corruption"

“Corruption, however, is not always the same; it has a history.”

-Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” (Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June, 2003), 19.

For a while I’ve been thinking about a project that historicizes corruption. A main argument of my book National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) was that the centralization of federal authority over officeholders (what we would call administrative law today) necessitated criminalizing the venality through which officeholding had functioned in the preceding decades (and back to early modern Europe). In the “Age of Jackson,” Congress and the federal judiciary emphasized the need to draw a line that demarcated where the confines of the state came to an end, and where the marketplace began. Thus was popularized a new species of “corruption”: the use of office for private gain.

That definition of corruption had been kicking around for a while already, perhaps most famously (or infamously) in the United States’ Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.

My take on the history of this clause is pretty well-known! I have worked with ace legal historians Jed Shugerman, John Mikhail, Simon Stern, and Jack Rakove on an amicus brief for emoluments clause litigation pertaining to President Trump’s business dealings. John’s work has been particularly pathbreaking on the philological history of the word “emolument(s).” Jed was the lead author of a piece that also lays out the argument pretty concisely.

But it is important to remember that this concept of corruption was actually less salient than a more abstract concept of corruption, borrowed from the English Whigs of the early eighteenth-century, that emphasized the individual’s abdication of duty and morality in the face of cosmopolitan temptation. In the 1980s, intellectual historians interested in establishing the primacy of republicanism in the American political tradition (against those who asserted the primacy of liberalism) keyed in on this idea of corruption as the driving form that led to the American Revolution. Again, the individual’s ability to police their own instincts and morality was more important to this concept of morality than formal legal definitions. Here is a classic reading of this concept of corruption by Robert E. Shalhope in “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 2 (April, 1982):

Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic (1969) and Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) were the most important book-length explorations of this concept of corruption.

(OK BOOMER ASIDE: I’ve been involved in conversations on social media where I have been chided for continuing to assign these weighty tomes. To be sure, Wood and others—all white, mostly male—have armored up and become culture warriors. My good pal and fellow long-suffering Mets fan Andy Schocket’s Fighting Over the Founders (2015) is very helpful to trace the culture war takeover of the history of the revolution. See also Eric Segall’s Originalism as Faith (2018) for the originalism side of the story. But I profoundly disagree. There is a great deal to be learned from this older literature, even if there is decidedly less to be learn from Wood’s perspective on the 1619 Project. But I’ll save these thoughts for a different post.)

Over the course of the early republic, this eighteenth-century concept of corruption gradually co-existed with and was eventually superseded by the more strictly legally defined concept of corruption as unduly profiting from office.

But that was not the end of the story. “Corruption” would continue to change over time due to powerful atmospheric forces connected to social and cultural upheaval, global capitalism, and political economic transformations.

One shift that has been largely overlooked by historians (in the broader history of corruption) is the concept of corruption that came to exist in the slave states. This was a variant of the legal definition of corruption as profiting from office, but it was centered upon a type of time theft: enslavers who were public officers used enslaved persons to do their work for the public good and pocketed the fees or wages. A particular type of masculinity and a gendered critique of idleness was at the heart of this idea of corruption—work by Amy Greenberg and essays in this volume edited by Lorri Glover and Craig Friend are perceptive dives into this world. I have not combed through records of Southern justices of the peace, sheriffs, coroners, and others in great detail, but I suspect I’d find something like the story of James Dell of Florida. Dell was the federal customs man in Jacksonville, and stood accused of having “ordered his slaves from the field and required them” to do his official work. As one critic charged, “they are slaves, Negro slaves of the Collector who toil in the corn field & raise the bread that is consumed by an indolent & intemperate master who are compelled by making their cross to execute these vouchers to the Government.” (J.P. Mason, Jacksonville, to Andrew Jackson, President of the United States, December 11, 1834, Charges Against Customs Officers, vol. 1, 1833-1861, National Archives-College Park.) In the South, the slaveholding public official who did not do use his own labor on his own time for the public good was corrupt.

Political and ideological contest during the 1830s and 40s was very much a referendum on the state itself in which the word “corruption” was the key term. J.G.A. Pocock famously argued that this moment with the moment was the final unfurling of the epochal critique of the fiscal-military state that had emerged since early modernity (Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 506-552. Yet for all his nuance Pocock’s concept of corruption ended up being so broad that it became a grab-bag for all manner of controversial political behavior and dialogue (see the excellent critique by Robert Sparling, “The Concept of Corruption in J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment,” History of European Ideas 43, no. 2 (2017), 156-70. But Jackson inspired a politics that focused the idea of corruption on the interconnected web between political economy, officeholders, and political parties that supposedly made unfree—enslaved?—democracy and at the simplest level, elections: elites monitored caucuses and secured their preferred candidate; patronage appointments brought Quincy Adams blocs of votes; stump speeches and barnstorming unfairly prejudiced voters minds (see Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1833 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 12-38).

The antebellum years saw corruption talk proliferate. The abolitionist critique of slavery and “the slave power” was powered by a durable concept of corruption. This was particularly true of Garrisonian abolitionism. As W. Caleb McDaniel shows in his magisterial Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, since slavery was immoral, it naturally corroded everything it touched; and since it exerted such a powerful grasp on politics and political economy, it corrupted the nation itself. (See also, Donald G. Matthews, “The Abolitionists on Slavery: The Critique Behind the Social Movement,” Journal of Southern History 33, no. 2 (May, 1967), 163-82.). Southern politicians were quick to throw back accusations of corruption at abolitionists, especially in connection with abolitionist lobbying efforts aimed at local and state governments. Meanwhile, as Ariel Ron demonstrates in his (brilliant and) forthcoming book, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020—due out in November!), middle-class farmers and their allies in the North developed powerful lobbying capabilities and built some of the infrastructure of the Republican Party (on the agricultural critique of governmental corruption, see also Jonathan Ira Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 150-90).

Emancipation and Reconstruction wrought a far more familiar concept of corruption as white supremacists charged Black Republican politicians and officials with using their positions to punish the white race and to redistribute wealth from white families to the recently emancipated. The white supremacist argument was caught in a classic conspiratorial contradiction: supposedly feeble-minded and corruptible African-Americans elected other African-Americans who then masterminded an assault on the white man. Contradiction aside, the white supremacist critique of emancipated African-Americans supposed corruption would then underscore the brutality of the Jim Crow state (see, Justin Behrend, “Facts and Memories: John R. Lynch and the Revising of Reconstruction History in the Era of Jim Crow,” Journal of African American History 97, no. 4 (Fall, 2012), 427-48). Here’s Hannah Rosen’s brilliant interpretation (Hannah Rosen, “Teaching Race and Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (March, 2017), 84):

This criticism of “black criminality and corruption” became woven into the way Americans understood Reconstruction due to the white supremacist historiography produced by William Dunning and his flock. As the informative essays in John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, ed., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013) explain, the historians who came to compose the “Dunning School” had pretty different and sometimes competing understandings of African-American corruption. Nonetheless, they all generally agreed on the general principle.

The national political economy established by the Republican Party, and made infamous by the image of the ‘robber baron,’ established another competing concept of corruption from the 1860s through the end of the century. This corruption was basically pay-to-play on a massive scale—so massive that it was inexorable. And for some, it seemed, the ends of national infrastructural improvement, while not justifying the means, made them somewhat understandable. Richard White’s study of the railroad industry in the nineteenth century is driven by interlocking political and economic monopolies. The robber baron, like the speculator and slave trader before them, became synonymous with a type of ravenous greed capable of gobbling up any and all legal barriers before them (White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011; Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)). White’s 2003 article “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” (Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June, 2003), 19-43), puts the matter even more squarely: “the rich, who now controlled corporations, used them to infiltrate the state and to turn parts of it to their own purposes” and also took “control of the mass circulation of financial information in order to manipulate financial markets” (19). A similar story unfolded in the associated story of the telegraph (see Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)).

That’s about as far as I can take this for now. As always the literature on the 20th century is so voluminous as to be intimidating: war contracts, profiteering, the Hoover commission, lobbying, deregulation, campaign finance, and more. One day I’ll get there! In the meantime I know that the project of historicizing corruption will never go out of style. At least that’s how it feels these days…