Turning the Rascals Out
TURNING THE RASCALS OUT /CORRUPTION in government, an important issue ^-> in the New York campaign this year, was not made such by Mr. Tuttle, though he put it forward with force and ability. It...
...Philadelphia has been so slow as to provoke Lincoln Steffens's description of her as "corrupt and contented," but she has set her house in order twice in this young century...
...It is usual for easy-going thinkers to assume and say that the people rise in their might and "turn the rascals out" when such scandals are exposed, but it is not historical...
...Even allowing for that, the voters of Indiana were strangely slow in cleaning the house that had been dirtied by officials from governor down, under D. C. Stephenson's Ku Klux Klan autocracy of corruption...
...From this it is usual to draw easy morals, but incorrect ones...
...As Henry Minor says in his excellent Story of the Democratic Party, the corruption under Grant was "far worse than the scandals of the Harding administration, though involving smaller monetary values, because of the much larger number of officials convicted or besmirched...
...It is just as well to think straight in discussing politics, but in a political campaign straight thinking is not universal...
...The response in New York City has usually been remarkably prompt, as in 1871 after the Tweed exposures and in 1894 after the Lexow Committee disclosures...
...Let that business remain long enough in the control of a party, and those who are in politics for personal profit are likely to get the upper hand—a state of things not peculiar to politics but found in other walks of life too...
...They ranged downward from the Vice-President, the Cabinet, the President's secretary, the Senate, the House, the minister to England, and the federal bench...
...for who administer the business of government...
...one thinks of the legendary boss and his heelers, and of the comparatively infrequent grafter...
...In the case of local scandals they commonly do, but when it comes to scandals on a national scale they do not concentrate solely on the corruption issue...
...The politicians...
...Frequently, though not so often as it is the custom to believe, the people overthrow whichever party happens to be the guilty one because of that guilt, and, as Charles A. Dana used to put it, "turn the rascals out...
...There are some exceptions in history, in which long tenure does not explain the scandals, but they occurred in the general unsettling which accompanied or followed a war...
...Governmental crookedness is an issue ever recurring at what might almost be called stated intervals...
...In general, this is the history of the outbreaks of scandal...
...Chicago has been by no means always as apathetic under corruption as she is represented...
...The noun has an opprobrious sound...
...and that was a time which combined both elements—long tenure of office and the general national loosening of standards in all walks of life, consequent upon a war...
...The reason for the difference is, no doubt, that in a local election there is only one dominant issue...
...Then there ensue years of quiet and in fact of rectitude, and then comes another scandal and, often, another retribution...
...whereas, in deciding who is to run the United States for four years, a great many questions enter in...
...In state and city campaigns the issue is always simpler...
...In 1924 the voters decided to trust the honest Coolidge and his party rather than turn the government over, on one issue alone, to that pary which had just displayed, at Madison Square Garden, a rather dismaying condition of ineptitude, discord and futility...
...They turn out a Tweed or even a Quay, a city or state boss—if this assertion as to Quay is challenged it will only be by people with short memories—but in 1924 they did not rebuke the Republican party for the oil scandals and others...
...There was plenty of corruption, for instance, in the Harding administration...
...The easiest and most popular is that the slothful public is aroused from its slumbers only by some uncommonly insolent exhibition of depravity, and after a sudden burst of anger loses interest, while the grafters go on as before...
...The truth is that after "the rascals" have been turned out, there follows a long period in which there is nothing much for the public to get angry about, much less to "rebuke...
...After a party has been in power too long, the crooks in it make their way to the top again, and there is another scandal and another eruption of public indignation...
...Politics is the legislative and administrative conduct of the business of the United States, and politicians are those who make it their business to conduct it...
...But "the politicians" is a term which includes Abraham Lincoln and William M. Tweed, Thomas Jefferson and Matthew Quay...
...The worst scandals which ever afflicted the country, were in the Grant administration...
...Yet in its platform in 1876 the Democratic party did not ascribe this condition to innate Republican depravity, but called it "the product of sixteen years ascendancy of the Republican party...
...It would have been an issue without him, for the people make the issues, not the platforms, and this was a subject uppermost in the public mind...
...Even in 1876, with the record of that unprecedented orgy of crime before them, the vote was so close that probably (since there were ballot frauds on both sides) nobody will ever know whether Tilden or Hayes was really elected...
...but, though it is not fashionable to say so, politicians as a class are honest...
...The good ones outweigh the bad, If this were not so, this republic would long ago have gone to the dogs...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 26
