Recently, former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell (R.) and his wife were convicted on federal charges for accepting over $100,000 worth of shoes, watches, and golf clubs from a political donor. That’s small potatoes compared with what some of the heavy hitters of the Gilded Age could rake in: In one year alone, Joseph Foraker (Ohio’s U.S. senator from 1897 to 1909) took in nearly $1.2 million in today’s dollars. And Foraker was hardly the worst offender. Matthew Quay, boss of the Pennsylvania political machine, apparently demanded so much money that deep-pocketed Standard Oil had to pay him in installments.
Following closely in the tradition of Theodore Lowi’s classic The End of Liberalism, Jay Cost’s A Republic No More is less about the distinguished history of corruption he chronicles than about how our ways of governing have changed, and how the maldistribution of federal powers feeds corruption and is destroying our constitutional republic.
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