Corruption–or Confusion? Lobbying and Congressional Government in the Early Gilded Age

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson declared the early Gilded Age to be a time of Congressional Government, when the legislature “reigned supreme” and was the federal polity's “motivating force.” Yet that same Congress, and era, have been immortalized pejoratively as bastions of corruption; of politicos, spoils–and, most especially, of omnipotently evil lobbyists. This essay argues that both lobbying and the notoriety it aroused in the Grant years were essentially by-products of systemic change. Corruption did exist, but much of what contemporaries saw as illicit was merely new; neither Washington nor the polity as a whole had yet devised mechanisms, or even language, appropriate to emerging conditions. In fact, lobbying was a necessary and even beneficial force in post-Civil War America, one that actually helped officials and citizens to function as the scope, procedures, and agenda of governance underwent dramatic transformation.