Bureaucrats on the Bounty

PETER: We’re back with BackStory, the show that looks to the past to understand the America of today. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, On The Take– a history of political corruption in America.

PETER: In 1824, four candidates duked it out for the presidency of the United States, but it was clear this was really a contest between two men, Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. Jackson, widely known as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, won the popular vote. But even though Jackson won more votes than the other candidates, he fell short of the number of Electoral College votes needed to assume the presidency.

ED: And so the decision was thrown to the House of Representatives. And this is where things got interesting. It turns out that the guy who came in fourth place– dead last– was also the Speaker of the House, Kentucky’s Henry Clay. And since he wielded so much power in Congress, Clay was now in a position to effectively choose the next commander in chief.

DANIEL FELLER: Clay announced that he would support Adams, even though the two had had, politically and personally, almost nothing in common before this.

ED: This is historian Daniel Feller.

DANIEL FELLER: That made him president, and then he immediately turned around and appointed Henry Clay Secretary of State. The last three secretaries of state in a row, including Adams, had become president, so it looked like a simple quid pro quo. I’m Henry Clay, I make you president, you make me president next.

ED: I sat down with Feller to discuss this episode, one that would go down in history as the Corrupt Bargain of 1824. He told me that many Americans were outraged, and no one more so than Andrew Jackson himself.

DANIEL FELLER: Jackson, as soon as he learned not that Adams had been elected, he actually took that with some good grace, but as soon as Adams then announced Clay as Secretary of State, Jackson just exploded. Jackson certainly believed that, as the other Westerner in the campaign, that Clay should have thrown his support to him. And in a famous letter, he said– and now I am quoting him– so you see, the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the 30 pieces of silver. Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before.

ED: So how does the so-called Corrupt Bargain of 1824 compare to or relate to what we think of corruption today?

DANIEL FELLER: The word corruption today we normally associate with mere monetary or financial gain. You know, graft.

ED: Right.

DANIEL FELLER: When Jackson talked about bare-faced corruption, he was not talking about money. What he was really talking about– and this idea goes back to earlier American history, and before that to English history, the idea that government is not serving the purposes for which it’s intended, that it’s not serving the people’s will, that it is instead dealing favors out.

ED: So Dan, I hear several elements here that makes this sound corrupt, is that Jackson got more than anybody else, right, so it kind of feels like he should be able to be president, and I also hear that the fourth place guy just sort of comes in and gets this plum job. So I would say, on the surface of it, it looks corrupt to me.

DANIEL FELLER: It looked corrupt to a lot of people. It certainly looked corrupt to Andrew Jackson. Now, the other side of that, if you look at it from Clay and Adams’ point of view, Clay actually announced publicly before the election in the House that he was going to support Adams. And he did so on transparent grounds. He said, like him or not, John Quincy Adams is an accomplished statesman. There’s no doubt that he is qualified for the job, whereas Andrew Jackson is a mere– and these were Clay’s words– military chieftain.

The American republic was still young at the time. People were very aware of the fragility and the failure of past republics. And one thing that had done republics in, from ancient Greece and ancient Rome down to recent France, was the man on horseback, the military hero who comes in and rides roughshod over the republic and the liberties of the people. And Andrew Jackson, throughout his career, had shown a remarkable ability to ignore or override civilian authority, to take the law into his own hands.

ED: Not to mention all those people he killed in duels and things, right?

DANIEL FELLER: Well, he actually only killed one in a duel, but–

ED: Oh, OK.

DANIEL FELLER: –there were others he would have liked to have killed. So there’s no reason– let me put it differently. There is, from Clay’s point of view, every good reason why, despite their political differences, he should support Adams. And then who is Adams going to appoint Secretary of State? In fact, there was nobody in the country who, by dint of inclination and interest and qualifications, was better suited to the job than Clay. Clay had wanted to be Secretary of State for years. It’s kind of like if I do something for good reason and you do something for good reason, and in both cases we do it independently of each other for good reasons, why is there a bargain if my action happens to help you and your action happens to help me.

ED: So what we need to figure out is how this really pretty elaborate dance, it sounds, between the two politicians– nobody is not being honest about what it is they want and need, but on the other hand, there’s no quid pro quo about a position, right– so how does it become known then as the Corrupt Bargain?

DANIEL FELLER: By 1824, there was a groundswell building up in the States– and this was even before the so-called Corrupt Bargain– demanding that the people be heard, that the people get to choose the president, that the will of the people out in the hinterlands should be observed. In light of that kind of groundswell of demand for, in a word, democracy, to have this election at this particular moment apparently decided by a handful of guys in a back room, in a Congressional cloakroom, stank.

ED: Right.

DANIEL FELLER: And one of the many ironies of this election is that Henry Clay had to do penance for the rest of his life for what he had done here. The cloud of making a corrupt bargain really tainted his entire public career after this. Possibly, that was the thing that kept him from becoming president. And yet, Clay had every good reason to think that this was the most self-sacrificing, patriotic statesman-like thing he ever did.

ED: So if we were to pull the camera back and look at this from the broad view of American history, why does this episode of the Corrupt Bargain and its aftermath really matter?

DANIEL FELLER: Well, I think it matters because of the lesson that it sent, which is politicians– today we would call them perhaps inside the beltway politicians–

ED: Right.

DANIEL FELLER: –do not represent the people. They will deal away your interests, they will thwart your will if given a chance. It’s the prototypical story of the backroom deal that deprives the people of their choice. And the election of 1824 left us with the idea that any such kind of arrangement, what you might call normal political horse trading, is actually corruption.

I think every time a candidate today runs against Washington, every time a candidate says not vote for me because I know my way around the United States Senate, but instead vote for me because I don’t know my way around the United States Senate, vote for me because I have not been polluted and corrupted and compromised by what’s going on in Washington, that is an echo of 1824.

ED: Dan, thanks so much for unraveling this remarkable episode.

DANIEL FELLER: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

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ED: Daniel Feller is a history professor and director of the papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee.

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BRIAN: Ed, it seems so ironic that, right after this corrupt bargain, we get the origins of a system that is also associated with corruption. That’s the spoils system that comes in with Andrew Jackson in 1828.

ED: It just sounds corrupt, doesn’t it? Spoils, right?

BRIAN: Exactly.

ED: You know, the spoils of war, but it also sounds like it spoils American politics.

BRIAN: Yeah.

ED: And the idea is, hey, listen, Brian. OK, I’m Andrew Jackson. You saw the big problem was that it was these guys cutting the deal in the dark. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell everybody you support me, I’ll support you. If you’re a newspaper editor or a modern office holder anywhere in the country, and you support the great democratic upsurge of Andrew Jackson, hey, there will be something in it for you, because this is the way democracy work.

BRIAN: And what’s in it is a contract or a position, right?

ED: Yeah.

BRIAN: That’s not corrupt?

ED: Well, no, rather than– because it’s going to be right out in the open. Everybody’s going to know why you got it. You got it because you supported the winner.

PETER: And the government is supposed to be for the people, so what’s corrupt about the people being their own governors? That’s what the whole principle of democracy is about, isn’t it? The people spoke. And corruption has absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s way out in the open, as Ed says. It’s transparent. This is the people acting.

BRIAN: So Peter, it sounds like it got Jackson off the hook. Clear sailing, right? Transparency for all.

PETER: No. Unfortunately for him, Brian, the Whigs mobilized against Jackson because they think he wants to be king. That is the organizing metaphor for American politics. There’s somebody in there who wants to take the government away from us and make himself king. And by pandering to the people, the populist Jackson in fact is making a move toward monarchical power.

In other words, they’re turning the same charge against Jackson that Jackson–

BRIAN: I see.

PETER: –had turned against Adams.

ED: Yeah, Peter, but it’s amazing how much the Whigs actually adopt the Democratic ideals of the spoils system, right?

PETER: Right.

ED: Because you can’t govern a place the size of the United States without actually distributing political power, without having agents, basically editors– and that was the critical element in Jackson’s–

PETER: Yes, indeed.

ED: –spoils system. Unless you have editors advocating for you in virtually every county in America, you can’t possibly put together a winning coalition.

PETER: And what did editors get out of elections? Did they get printing contracts?

ED: Yeah, which are basically what allows the newspapers to exist, right?

PETER: Right.

ED: And they’re very explicit about it. So picking up on your theme, Peter, the editors put on the masthead, we are a Democrat, a Whig, a Republican, a Know-Nothing, whatever. And so then when the Republicans come along in the late 1850s, they know how to do it. And they build something that Jackson would have said, yes, this is exactly what I was talking about, right?

And then they use that to win the Civil War. Then they use that to build reconstruction. Then they use it to create the economic machine that creates Gilded Age America. So the transparency, Brian, that Andrew Jackson wanted ends up becoming clear to everybody. And the result? Voter turnout that is off the charts, party identification that is off the charts. And that system actually flourishes so well that then it becomes the object of reformers who kind of want to get back to the John Quincy Adams idea of who you need running things are people who actually know stuff, and not just know people, but know things.

BRIAN: That’s right. And if you want to know whether somebody knows something or not, you give them a test. That was called a civil service test. And that came in, for some people, with the Pendleton Act in 1883. But I think as important as the Civil Service Act and the test was what was happening in corporations at the time, what was happening in other large organizations.

They were trying to manage really large, national operations. And so was the government. A big pension system, a set of forests that stretched across the country. And so they needed to find people who could be trusted to manage these resources, regardless of party. You needed people who actually knew how to build dams. You needed people who actually knew how to build roads, and do it in the most efficient way. At least that’s what the voters were beginning to say.

PETER: So there’s a broad recognition that there are limits to what democratic politics can do efficiently.

BRIAN: That’s right. And perhaps the biggest change, Peter and Ed, is that, you know, Feller referred to politicians inside the beltway. At the end of the 19th century is when politicians began to hand things over to bureaucrats, experts, quote objective people, and blaming them for anything that went wrong.

PETER: Right.

BRIAN: And certainly once we got these experts increasingly involved in things and making decisions, very far away from political parties or the voter booths, we had a precipitous dropoff in the number of people who actually turned out and vote. It’s almost as if they said, we don’t matter anymore, and they knew it.

ED: It’s almost as if they said, there’s no spoils, what’s the point.

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