The Birth of the Swamp

william bernsteinIn The Federalist Papers No. 21, Alexander Hamilton warned that “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.” Republics, he explained, were more vulnerable to foreign influence than monarchies, whose absolute rulers commanded so large a portion of national wealth that no foreign power could muster enough assets to subvert them. Ironically, Hamilton met his end at the hands of Aaron Burr, whose plot to hive off a large part of the western U.S. sought British cooperation.

Casey Michel’s Foreign Agents begins his history of the foreign corruption of American politics and policy, appropriately enough, with Russia … in 1867. The crumbling Tsarist empire, desperate for cash, looked to offload Alaska; offering it to England or France, who had defeated Russia in the Crimea, was a nonstarter. The U.S., its hands full with Reconstruction, railroad building, and a mountain of Civil War debt, was uninterested in a territory best known as an “icebox” and a “polar bear garden.”

Enter the Russian ambassador in Washington, Eduard de Stoeckl, who hired former Mississippi senator and treasury secretary Robert J. Walker to spread around largesse to legislators and newspaper publishers. Within several months, congress appropriated the necessary funds, some of which de Stoeckl absconded with.

Lobbyist origins

From its first pages, Michel’s book fairly bursts with narratives unfamiliar to even the most ardent history buffs. Ulysses Grant, for example, enjoyed the odd drink, especially at the bar at the Willard Hotel (which more recently figured in the planning for the events of January 6, 2021). To get there he had to run a gauntlet of gentlemen representing the railroads and other commercial concerns who hung out in the lobby. He detested them, and called them “lobbyists.”

In the 1880s, King Leopold of Belgium coveted the riches of a huge swath of central Africa – the Congo – as his private preserve. The British and French had outgunned Leopold in the ongoing rush to colonize Africa, so the Belgian king deployed a more subtle approach. He employed the services of a former U.S. ambassador to Brussels, Henry Shelton Sanford, who befriended president Chester Arthur, a mediocre New York pol who had ascended the presidency just six months after the assassination of James Garfield.