Corruption in American politics and lifeBrooks, Robert C. (Robert Clarkson)
History
Corruption in American politics and life
Brooks, Robert C. (Robert Clarkson)
Political corruption -- United States; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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