Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949
Scandal
No scandal ever stuck to Eisenhower personally, although Vice President Nixon had his scandals. There was no clear policy about gifts at the time, and eyebrows were raised about the machinery, livestock, and horticultural goods dropped off at Ike's Gettysburg farm. Read more >>
President Cleveland had a reputation for honesty, but when his Department of Justice brought suit to nullify the Bell telephone patents, it was discovered that the action could have made his attorney general a multi-millionaire. Read more >>
Buchanan tolerated widespread corruption during his term. Did he know that his Secretary of War, the Virginian and future Confederate general John B. Floyd, sent 110,000 muskets to armories in the South in 1860? Read more >>
President Monroe twice diverted public funds for private use (probably for travel to try to reunite the country after the War of 1812.) He refused to attend Congressional hearings into the matter and repaid the advances. Read more >>
Historians have long regarded Warren G. Harding’s administration as the most corrupt in the twentieth century. Ultimately, three of the President’s appointees, including a cabinet officer, went to jail. Read more >>
His first Secretary of War amassed a fortune at the start of the Civil War before President Lincoln discovered the irregularities. Read more >>
Overrated For a hundred years the armor-plate scandal of the 1890s has been offered up as a definitive example of corporate greed. In fact it’s a better example of government incompetence. Read more >>
And how history shows it’s actually good for us
THERE’S AN OLD JOKE ABOUT A COMPANY’S NEEDING TO hire a new accounting firm. The chief executive invites the heads of eight firms to come in for interviews and he hires one right away. A friend asks him how he did it. “Simple,” the chief executive replies. Read more >>
It has been with us since Plymouth Colony. But that’s not why it’s an American institution.
On September evening in 1918, while unpacking an overseas bag for her husband, who had returned from a fact-finding tour of war-torn Europe with double pneumonia, Eleanor Roosevelt came upon a cache of love letters from her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Read more >>
You've always heard Harding was the worst President. Sex in the White House. Bribes on Capitol Hill. Was he really that bad?
The Beecher-Tilton Scandal
Among the entrants in the presidential election of 1872 was Victoria Woodhull, the most flamboyant, outspoken, and uncompromising feminist of her day. Read more >>
AN ANNIVERSARY LOOK BACK AT THE BIGGEST PRESIDENTIAL SCANDAL EVER, THROUGH THE CHANGES IT WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE
“I will repeat again today that no one presently employed at the White House had any involvement, awareness or association with the Watergate case.” Just twenty-five years ago this month, with national elections less than three weeks away, President Richard M. Read more >>
When the government manipulated and misused the robber barons
Economists from Adam Smith on have written about the evils and dislocations that monopolies bring to an economy. What has been much less written about over the years, however, are the evils of monopsony. Read more >>
A nineteenth-century blueprint for the savings-and-loan scandal
It was a banking system. The act that made it possible slipped through Congress with hardly any debate and little attention to economic reality. Many of its highestranking officials knew little or nothing about the peculiar nature of the banking business. Read more >>
An extraordinary new historical novel begins with the great political scandal of the 1970s, then visits the great political scandal of the 1820s
In a classic model of government corruption, the promoters placed shares of the company's stock “where it will do most good"—in the pockets of key Congressmen
Corruption must be fought in ways that preserve fairness and freedom. Otherwise the reformers can be as bad as the rascals.
One balmy summer morning this year the headlines sang a song of scandal. GINGRICH’S PAY TO AIDES IN 2 RACES RAISES QUESTION OF RULE BREAKING, said one. That’s the Republican whip of the House of Representatives they were talking about. Read more >>
Stempel’s winning technique was simplicity itself: He got all the questions in advance.
In October 1956 the twenty-nine-year-old scion of an illustrious American literary family took up a suggestion that countless Americans were then making to their more erudite friends and relations. Read more >>
An old, familiar show is back in Washington. There’s a new cast, of course, but the script is pretty much the same as ever. Here’s the program.
WHEN THE IRAN-CONTRA STORY BROKE LAST NOVEMBER, A NUMBER OF public figures as well as news commentators put the revelations in a historical context. Read more >>
Until July 2, 1986, I felt comfortably detached from the current insider-trading scandal on Wall Street. Read more >>
A Scottish émigré became the most powerful man in the French government, and sold hundreds of thousands of shares in land holdings in the Mississippi Valley
The curious table shown opposite, with its montage of hand-painted scenes, commemorates a grand financial debacle in eighteenth-century France that was commonly known as the Mississippi Bubble. Read more >>
Between its grim beginning on a Virginia plantation and its surprising end at a great New York estate, the career of Nancy Randolph involved many of the famous figures of the post-Revolutionary era. The lovers, the scorned ex-suitor, the cheated wife, all four were cousins in a great southern dynasty. This tale of hate and “honor” is recounted by a descendant of Edmund Randolph, the first Attorney General of the United States
The spinster thought she’d been proposed to; the young minister thought not. Their courtship and quarrel rocked devout New Haven
Foul was fair, and fair foul, when eight players of the championship White Sox conspired with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series