DeKalb County CEO Burrell Ellis has been charged with extortion, theft, and conspiracy. Among the charges: that he pressured companies that do business with the county to give him campaign funds. He denies the charges.
There was a time in American history when city politicians responded to allegations of corruption by admitting them.
George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall boss in New York City, told journalist William Riordan in 1905 that he accepted “gifts” that looked a lot like bribes, used insider tips on property deals, and gave jobs to relatives and friends. He said he would be a fool not to: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” But he drew a sharp distinction between what he called “honest graft and dishonest graft,” saying that he never used blackmail or violence.
Others were not so squeamish. Boss Frank Hague ran Jersey City, N.J. for 30 years, from 1917 to 1947, “beating suspects … taking kickbacks, doling out no-show jobs to political supporters, getting the votes of the dead and buried, demanding tribute money.” In her wonderful book about growing up in Jersey City, “The Five-Finger Discount,” Helene Stapinsky writes that Hague “raised corruption to an art form.”
Hague’s contemporary, Tom Pendergast, ran Kansas City in the same way, building a personal empire, demanding big contributions from anyone who looked for city contracts, and deciding who would and would not be elected to office. His most famous pick was Harry S Truman for U.S. Senator.
Bosses like Hague and Pendergast demanded absolute loyalty. By the time Pendergast died in 1945, Truman had made a spectacular ascent, all the way to the White House. His advisors told him not to go to the funeral of his old patron, who had been convicted of tax evasion, but Truman understood what old-style politics were all about, and showed up. “He was always my friend and I have always been his,” said Truman, the only elected official in attendance.
Recent cases in the metro Atlanta area have been modest by Hague’s and Pendergast’s standards. But they are far from unusual.
Former Georgia superintendent of schools Linda Schrenko embezzled federal funds earmarked for deaf and disabled kids. She served more than seven years in prison. Gwinnett County former commissioner Shirley Lasseter, and DeKalb County’s ex-Deputy Police Chief Donald Frank, are both serving prison terms for bribery. It seems a rare issue of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that carries no stories about shady political deals and elected officials under indictment.
In fact, political corruption is as American as apple pie. Some historians have even made the argument that it has a good side.
Ward heelers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like Plunkitt in New York, bought voters’ loyalty by finding them jobs, providing shelter and food when they were destitute, and re-housing those who were the victims of fire and eviction. Ethnic bosses helped get their immigrant countrymen’s feet onto the ladder of American opportunity, using the languages they had brought from Italy, Poland, Russia, and the Slavic lands. Votes for favors? Sure!
History shows that corrupt government can work, but it also shows that uncorrupted government works a whole lot better. Honesty is the best policy — it costs less, builds public trust rather than corroding it, and offers a good example to rising generations.
It takes a lot of self-discipline to run a successful political campaign. Decade after decade of experience suggests that it then takes a whole lot more self-discipline to resist the temptations that confront every elected official.
