Scoundrels

J. Michael Martinez is the author or editor of 20 books on American history and law including the Rowman & Littlefield titles A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II (2016), Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present (2012), Coming for to Carry Me Home: Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow (2011), and Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux, Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire during Reconstruction (2007). He teaches political science at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.

• Introduction and AcknowledgmentsChapter 1: “The Day Will Come When Another and More Pure & Virtuous Legislature, Will Make Null & Void This Sale of Birthright”:The Yazoo Land FraudChapter 2: “If I Were to Name This, I Would Call It the Will o’ Wisp Treason”: The Aaron Burr ConspiracyChapter 3: “Mr. Sumner, I Have Read Your Speech Twice Over Carefully. It Is a Libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, Who is a Relative of Mine”: The Caning of Charles SumnerChapter 4: “Have Those Men Dismissed by 3 O’clock This Afternoon or Shut Down the Bureau”: Grant Administration Scandals of the 1870sChapter 5: “Do You Believe This Man is Crook? If He is a Crook, Convict Him”: The Teapot Dome ScandalChapter 6: “I Am the Only Candidate Inspected by the United States Government and Found to be 100 Percent Pure.”: William “Wild Bill” LangerChapter 7: “Nobody Sat Down in Front of Me with a Suitcase of Money”: Spiro AgnewChapter 8: “I Am Not a Crook”: The Watergate ScandalChapter 9: “Money Talks in This Business, and Bullshit Walks”: The Abscam ScandalChapter 10: “I Have Been in Government Long Enough to Know That You Don’t Have to Ask the Question Explicitly to Know What the Message Is”: The Savings & Loan ScandalChapter 11: “I Told the American People I Did Not Trade Arms for Hostages. My Heart and My Best Intentions Still Tell Me That’s True, but the Facts and the Evidence Tell Me It Is Not”: The Iran-Contra AffairChapter 12: “All He Was Worried About was Jack. Jack Has to Get His Next BigCheck”: Jack Abramoff and Influence PeddlingChapter 13: “Everybody’s Trying to Get Me. It’s Unfair. Now Everybody’s Saying I’mGoing to be Impeached”: 2016 Russian Election InterferenceAfterwordReferencesAbout the Author

Political scientist Martinez examines in this solid survey the long history of greed, corruption, and deceit in American politics. Ranging from the Yazoo Land Fraud of 1795, in which private land companies bribed a group of Georgia state legislators into enacting a law that allowed them to sell lands from the state’s western border for ‘scandalously attractive prices,’ to Donald Trump’s efforts to stymie investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Martinez offers brisk and insightful accounts of 13 different scandals. Some are well-known—Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, Abscam—while others are less familiar, including former vice president Aaron Burr’s 1805 scheme to ‘lead a private army into Spanish territory to grab as much land as he could’ and North Dakota governor William ‘Wild Bill’ Langer’s 1934 trial for soliciting political contributions from state and federal employees. Throughout, Martinez makes clear the lasting damage that even a whiff of scandal can do to citizens’ faith in democracy, analyzes the factors that allowed some politicians to withstand allegations of corruption while others didn’t, and sheds light on the ‘powerful, corrosive effect of money in American politics.’ American history buffs will savor this detailed yet accessible roundup of political imbroglios.