Corruption in American politics and life

by Robert C. Brooks

[51] “Mass and Class,” pp. 14, 82, 83, 105, 243.

[52] Bookman, p. 652, August, 1906.

CORRUPTION IN BUSINESS AND POLITICS

V
CORRUPTION IN BUSINESS AND POLITICS

No form of corruption can exist without reacting upon the life of the state. Pollution of the sources of public instruction defiles individuals and all the manifold non-sovereign social organisations, but it culminates in an infection of public opinion which directly contaminates the body politic. Even more immediately corrupt business practices lead to corrupt political practices. This is so conspicuously the case that separate discussion of the two subjects is virtually impossible. It is feasible, however, and should prove profitable, to distinguish the various subdivisions of economic and political corruption and to point out certain lines of the development which have bound the two so closely together in our modern life.

Pre-eminent among the forms of business corruption are the vicious practices which have grown up in the general relation of buyer and seller. Purveyors of adulterated, infected, or diseased consumption goods, such as food stuffs, and particularly meat and milk; dealers in sweatshop clothing; vendors of patent medicines; owners and builders of unsanitary tenement houses, of unsafe theatres, and excursion steamers; managers of railroad and trolley companies who neglect to install devices to protect their passengers may serve as illustrations. A further branch of this form of corruption, the importance of which would perhaps justify separate classification, occurs in connection with the dealers in vice,—the dive keepers, policy kings, gamblers, and procurers. The relation of master and servant furnishes a second subdivision of the primarily economic forms of corruption. Transportation companies, mine owners, manufacturers, and others who neglect the installation of safety devices to protect labourers; the employers of child labour; the labour leaders who extort blackmail by threatening strikes are cases in point. Still another subdivision of economic corruption centres about the fiduciary business relations such as occur particularly in connection with savings banks, trust companies, corporate directorships in general, and with the work of the promoter. Underlying nearly all these kinds of economic corruption, and emerging in the corruption of public instruction and political corruption as well, is competition,—itself a force or
method rather than a form. Some species of corruption belonging logically under one or another of the preceding heads exhibit the effects of competition more plainly than others. Thus many practices common to those periods of forced competition which so frequently precede the formation of trusts have come to be looked upon as essentially corrupt and deserving of legal restraint. Corruption does not disappear when competition is practically eliminated, however. Some of the most difficult problems involved in dealing with it notoriously result from the existence of monopolies which have outstripped if they have not exterminated their rivals.

To attempt the adequate discussion of all the forms of economic corruption would require extended treatises on the labour problem, the trust problem, banking, transportation, insurance, and many other special subjects. The limitations of the present study exclude anything beyond a few general observations. It may first be noted that many of the abuses which are now undergoing the process of sanitation were the result not so much of corrupt intention as of ignorance and the relatively unlimited character of the competitive struggle to which reference has already been made. They emerged long before the era of consolidation, and are therefore not to be attributed solely to big business. For many years prior to the Chicago slaughter house exposures of 1906, for example, unclean meat was sold both by large packers and by country butchers. Small producers were and are largely responsible for impure milk and sweatshop clothing. Petty landlords as well as extensive holders of real estate have built unsanitary tenement houses and overcrowded them with renters. The neglect of transportation companies to install safety devices for the protection of passengers and employees has in the very nature of the case been a corporation offence. On the other hand small as well as large mining operators have sinned in this way, and small as well as large manufacturers have exploited child labour. Betrayal of fiduciary relationships has naturally occurred most frequently and most disastrously in enterprises of large capital, although by no means confined exclusively to them. Indeed there would seem to be reason for believing that in certain ways consolidation has aided in bringing about the correction of some of these evils. It centres them in a few large establishments, often in a single district of no great size, where by their very magnitude abuses force themselves upon a sluggish public attention. Consolidation also makes it appear that the interests of a few selfish owners are being pursued at the cost of the general welfare. This at once enlists popular support for attacks upon abuses, and is a factor well worth comparison with the defensive strength of massed capital. For these reasons the cleaning up of the meat industry probably proceeded far more rapidly after the Chicago exposures than would have been the case if the effort had been made some years earlier during the period of many scattered local abattoirs.

So many factors co-operated in bringing about the business evils under consideration that the quality of corruption cannot always be ascribed to them directly. Under a policy of laisser faire, of unlimited competition, of public indifference and apathy, it is not easy to fix moral responsibility. Even the twentieth mean man at any given time may be only a little meaner than several of his nineteen competitors. His offences are dictated by self-interest, of course, but they are offences against a vague set of business customs or moral principles. Public interest suffers, it is true, but the public is apathetic; it has not laid down definite norms of business conduct. On the part of the offender there is often lacking that conscious and purposeful subordination of public to private interest which constitutes full fledged corruption. Whatever degree of extenuation is afforded by these considerations vanishes, however, when definite regulation is undertaken by the state. Now that we are fairly launched upon an era of legislative and administrative control, business offences of the kind under consideration are frankly corrupt. Public apathy has vanished, the interest of the public has been sharply defined, and he who in contravention of these norms places his private gain above the general welfare does so with full intent, and cannot evade or shift the accusation of corruption.

A further consequence of the effort to regulate business practice by law is not only intrinsically important but also serves as the great connecting link between primarily economic and political corruption proper. As soon as regulation is undertaken by the state a motive is supplied to the still unterrified twentieth mean man to break the law or to bribe its executors. In either case, by the way, the profits are directly conditioned by the thoroughness with which his competitors are restrained from following his own malpractices. The scales employed by tariff officials may be tampered with in the interests of large importers whose profits are thereby enormously increased. Or inspectors may be bribed to pass infected carcasses, to approve impure milk, to permit get-rich-quick concerns to use the mails, to wink at lead weighted life preservers, to ignore the fact that the exits of a theatre are entirely inadequate. With cases where state regulation supplied the motive for the direct commission of fraud we are not directly concerned here, but in all the cases where the collusion of inspectors is involved we have to note that government regulation of business has made easy the transmutation of what before was merely corrupt and morally offensive into direct bribery. And from the point of view of a venal official or political machine the extension of state control means the widening of the opportunities for levying tribute. Thus a form of corruption which began among, and for a time was limited to, business relations becomes under regulation a menace to political integrity. In other words, it takes on the form of political corruption as well, and must, therefore, become the subject of discussion in that connection.

However disheartening in other ways, a consideration of the forms of business corruption yields the comforting reflection that all the major forms of evil in this field are clearly recognised and severely criticised. One must guard oneself against too cheerful optimism in the premises, however. Reform forces armed cap-a-pie do not spring like unheralded knight errants of old into every breach at which social integrity is being assailed. Instead they can be developed only by persistent individual and associated effort and sacrifice. Moreover the problem of corruption, as we have seen, is a persistent one, the forms of which are ever changing and ever requiring new ingenuity and resourcefulness in the methods of social sanitation. Back of reform effort, also, there remains much that the individual can affect simply by clearer habits of moral reflection and action even in the small affairs of life. Public sentiment is built of such individual fragments. Low opinion, low action in everyday affairs become a part of the psychological atmosphere befogged by which the outlines even of the larger evils of the present régime grow indistinct. Professor Ross has performed a valuable service by exposing the fallacy that “sinners should be chastised only by their betters.”[53] Social life, indeed, would be inconceivable if the judgment of disinterested parties were not superior to that of parties in interest. This is true even if the former are themselves far from moral perfection. But it is further true that the judgment of the disinterested will be more worthy and helpful if in the conduct of their own affairs the disinterested have habituated themselves to scrupulous honesty of thought and action. Till this is more generally the case social ostracism, public contempt, and loathing of the corruptionist, regardless of his looted wealth, will not prove such effective measures of restraint as one might hope. “The simplest reform,” said Mr. James B. Dill, “the hardest, but it must be the first, is to make up our minds not to do those things which the other man may be doing, but which we know to be wrong.”[54] Of course the universal acceptance of such higher individual standards would solve not only the problems of corruption but all our other social and moral difficulties. We may not hope for the early arrival of the millennium in this way, but neither may we hope for any large movement toward better conditions without improvement of personal character. Under our present circumstances much may be accomplished by institutional reform, by legislation and the application of the power of the state, although none of these is possible without the application of the good will, the clearer intelligence and honesty of individuals. If not the first or only reform, then, still it is clear that no movement against corruption is complete which does not demand frank recognition by the individual that he must deliberately choose to get along less rapidly at times when the cost of advancement is personal dishonour.