A Distant Mirror - New York Times
The New York Times

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August 15, 2006
Guest Columnist
A Distant Mirror
By THOMAS FRANK

By now, even the most dedicated "values voter" is aware that an orgy of
plunder and predation grinds merrily on in the capital, yet if polls are to
be believed,
the Democrats can persuade almost nobody to switch their vote on that basis.
That's because, while they have many nice slogans on the subject, Democrats
offer no larger theory of corruption, no way to help voters understand what
is essentially Republican about the pillage currently being visited on our
national government.

I suggest the Democrats turn their eyes to the conservatives' beloved 19th
century, an era that is relevant again in all sorts of startling ways. The
reigning
economic faith of our time, they will find, is merely a souped-up version of
the Victorians' understanding of the market-as-nature. Again Americans
thrill
to the exploits of the great tycoons, and gradually we are becoming
reacquainted with pervasive inequality, the wrenching "social issue" of our
great-grandparents'
time.

This is why I nominate Matthew Josephson's 1938 masterpiece, "The Politicos:
1865-1896," as the volume of history with the most to teach us about the
present.
The book is valuable for its surface qualities alone - its painstaking
reconstruction of forgotten scandals, its glimpses of antique slang and
high-flown
oratory, its remarkable cast of politicians, like the "Easy Boss" Tom Platt
and the "Plumed Knight" James G. Blaine, all of them household names once
but
today as obscure as Ozymandias.

Still, contemporary readers will feel the sharp poke of recognition with
nearly every chapter. Then, as now, empty accusations of treason were
standard
rhetoric. Reformers were routinely taunted as effeminate - in the manner
that conservatives today bandy about terms like "effete," "French-looking,"
and
"girly man." Roscoe Conkling, the sarcastic voice of New York finance,
famously laughed off a crusading editor as a "man milliner."

And, of course, there was corruption, the unending outrage of money-
in-politics. Both parties bid for the favor of big business, and both did a
considerable
amount of business themselves, as the roll call of forgotten scandals
attests: the Whiskey Ring, the Post Office Ring, the Credit Mobilier scheme,
and
the Grant administration's ceaseless "saturnalia of plunder." But "The
Politicos" is not merely a catalog of money-in-politics, it is a study of
the logic
and development of money-in-politics, from the crude grasping of the
"spoilsmen" in the 1860's to the final union of politics with business in
the 1890's,
when industries and even individual corporations effectively sent their own
representatives to the United States Senate.

Matthew Josephson was a man of the left, but "The Politicos" is not a
reassuring tale of liberal triumph. The figure who towers over this
dialectic of graft
as it roars to its consummation is the greatest of 19th-century political
commanders, the industrialist Mark Hanna, who managed the 1896 presidential
campaign
of William McKinley. Hanna was famously quoted as saying openly what his
contemporaries would say only privately: that we were ruled by "a business
state,"
and that "all questions of government in a democracy were questions of
money."

When confronted by a groundswell for the earnest reformer William Jennings
Bryan, Hanna used every weapon available to make an example of the upstart.
While
his lieutenants portrayed Bryan as an anarchist, Hanna enlisted the
financial support of industry for McKinley, going so far as to levy an
assessment on
the capital of large corporations. He may not have rewarded his supporters
with honorifics like "Pioneer" and "Ranger," as did his modern disciple Karl
Rove, but by the end of the contest Hanna had outspent Bryan by 10 to 1,
much of it on "floaters" compensated for their votes.

Hanna's methods were corrupt, yes. "But his corruption was rational,"
Josephson tells us. "It flowed from the very nature of our society and its
laws."

And as we scratch our heads over all the shocking stories of the last six
years we would do well to keep Josephson's dictum in mind. These are not
tales
of individual venality, separate one from the other. They are expressions of
the age. The issue is not merely corruption; it is what old Will Bryan would
have called plutocracy.

Thomas Frank is the author, most recently, of "What's the Matter with
Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.'' He is a guest
columnist during
August.

Posted by Miriam V.