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SCIENCE, COMMODITIES, AND CORRUPTION IN THE GILDED AGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2016

David Roth Singerman
David Roth Singerman*
Affiliation:
Harvard Business School
*
david.singerman@gmail.com
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Abstract

This essay argues that categories of corruption and reform, so often used by historians to assess the Gilded Age, are themselves the ideological products of the period's struggles for political, economic, and social power. It does so by exploring fierce disputes over how to value sugar, a crucial commodity in the political economy of the late nineteenth-century United States. Confronted with evidence of massive fraud, the Treasury hoped that chemical techniques would rationalize the collection of sugar tariffs. Instead their introduction enabled the rise of the notorious Sugar Trust, by making it more difficult to distinguish corrupt influence from the legitimate exercise of expert judgment.

Sugar exemplifies how Gilded Age battles over corruption should be seen in the broader and longer context of the history of capitalism, in which self-proclaimed reformers have used charges of fraud and adulteration to discredit the knowledge of artisans and workers while mantling themselves in claims to objectivity and reason. Scientific knowledge, far from being the inevitable ally of accountability and good governance, could just as easily be deployed to obfuscate and confuse, and thereby to wrest control of social and economic power.

Type
Special Issue: The History of Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 278 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 “Ruffianism in Broadway,” New York Times, July 21, 1877; “A Custom House Fracas,” New York Tribune, July 21, 1877; “Four Months in Jail,” New York Times, Sept. 25, 1877.

2 “A Little Case Which Only Begins a Big One,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 25, 1877; “Four Months in Jail. Ex-Inspector Grace Convicted,” New York Times, Sept. 25, 1877.

3 “A Dismissed Officer's Revenge. Wm. H. Grace, a Brooklyn Politician, Assaults Lawyer Sharpe,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21, 1877; “A Sweet Fraud: The Alleged Rascalities in Sugar,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jan. 23, 1879.

4 “Four Months Imprisonment for Assaulting Gen. Sharpe,” New York Tribune, Sept. 25, 1877.

5 “The Schmidt Defalcation,” New York Times, Sept. 2, 1877; John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet: An Autobiography (Chicago: Werner, 1895), 680; “Grace's Vindication,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 18, 1877. Andrew Wender Cohen also describes the Grace incident; see Cohen, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 249.

6 American Sugar Industry: A Technical Journal Devoted to the Interests of Sugar Producers, Nov. 1912, 40; Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Gould, Lewis L., “Tariffs and Markets in the Gilded Age,” Reviews in American History 2:2 (June 1974): 266–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1879 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879), iii–iv; Henry A. Brown, Concise Resumé of Sugar Tariff Topics in Defence of American Sugar Industries and Consumers, Commercial, and Revenue Interests against Illicit Invasion, the Hawaii Treaty, etc. (Washington, D.C.: Judd & Detweiler, 1882), 37.

7 McCormick, Richard L., “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86:2 (Apr. 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1848–1861 (New York: Oxford, 1987); and The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford, 1993).

8 Richard John, “Who Were the Gilders? And Other Seldom-Asked Questions about Business, Technology, and Political Economy in the United States, 1877–1900,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Oct. 2009): 474–80.

9 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), xxxiii–xxxiv.

10 Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19–20; Novak, William J., “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113:3 (June 2008): 752–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Cohen, Contraband; Peter Andreas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Bruce E. Baker and Barbara Hahn, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

12 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Vintage, 1955), 155; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 146–47, 162–63. For perspectives on capture see Glaeser and Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform, and William J. Novak, “A Revisionist History of Regulatory Capture” in Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It, eds. David Moss and Daniel Carpenter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25–48.

13 White, Railroaded, 26.

14 Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 52. For the social construction of technology, see, for instance, Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). Gerald Berk noted of these same railroads that there was no “metarule of efficiency” to be uncontroversially or nonpolitically employed. Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), ch. 1.

15 Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Bouk, Dan, “Tocqueville's Ghost,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42:4 (Sept. 2012): 329–39Google Scholar.

16 Lissa Roberts and Simon Schaffer, “Preface” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, eds. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninkliijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), xiv.

17 Montgomery, 178–79.

18 Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 3, 200.

19 See, for instance, Specht, Joshua, “A Failure to Prohibit: New York City's Underground Bob Veal Trade,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 12:4 (Oct. 2013): 475–501 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Benjamin R., “Analysis as Border Patrol: Chemists along the Boundary between Pure Food and Real Adulteration,” Endeavour 35:2–3 (2011): 66–73 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Bee Wilson, Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

20 William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 141; Cindy Lobel, Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), ch. 3. For the social, cultural, and environmental history of adulteration in this period, see Benjamin R. Cohen, “Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food,” manuscript in preparation for University of Chicago Press.

21 Simon Schaffer, “Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade,” in Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, eds. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and Heinz Otto Sibum (London: Routledge, 2002); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Verso, 2003); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, The State, and American Labor Activism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

22 Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).

23 New York Sun, Nov. 20, 1878, reprinted in Charles [Carlos] Rebello, The Pith of the Sugar Question (New York: Macgowan and Slipper, 1879).

24 Testimony in Relation to the Sugar Frauds, Taken by the Subcommittee of the Committee of Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, New York, September, 1878 (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Daily Times Print, 1878), 52; Wender Cohen, Contraband, 137 and 249–50; Warner, Deborah Jean, “How Sweet It Is: Sugar, Science, and the State,” Annals of Science 64:2 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sternstein, Jerome L., “Corruption in the Gilded Age Senate: Nelson W. Aldrich and the Sugar Trust,” Capitol Studies 6:1 (Spring 1978): 13–37 Google Scholar.

25 For the technology of accountability, see Ted Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); for quantification and confusion, see Deringer, Will, “For What It's Worth: Historical Financial Bubbles and the Boundaries of Economic Rationality,” Isis 106:3 (Sept. 2015): 646–56CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

26 Gideon E. Moore, Statement Relative to the Artificial Coloring of Imported Sugars (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1881), 16.

27 F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States, Part I, 5th ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 142.

28 A Review of the Case of the United States vs. 712 Bags of Dark Demerara Centrifugal Sugars, A.W. Perot & Co., Claimants: Tried at the September Term of the District Court of the U.S. for the District of Maryland (Baltimore: Lucas Brothers, 1878), 1–4.

29 “Colored Imported Sugars,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 1878.

30 A Review of the Case of the United States vs. 712 Bags of Dark Demerara Centrifugal Sugars, A.W. Perot & Co., Claimants: Tried at the September Term of the District Court of the U.S. for the District of Maryland (Baltimore: Lucas Brothers, 1878), 1–2.

31 J. H Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6.

32 Report on the Methods of Manufacturing Sugars in West India Islands and British Guiana, United States Treasury Department (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880), 16.

33 Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1878 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878), xxviii.

34 “The Custom-House Inquiry: Further Evidence By Examiners,” New York Times, May 23, 1877; “Commissions to Examine Certain Customhouses of the United States,” House of Representatives Executive Document 8, 45th Congress, 1st session (Oct. 25, 1877), 7.

35 Testimony in Relation to the Sugar Frauds, 39.

36 “Commissions to Examine Certain Customhouses,” 70.

37 Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1877 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1877), xxvi; Review of the Efforts of the Forty-Fifth Congress of the United States for the Revision of the Sugar Tariff, together with Speeches Made by Members of the House of Representatives (New York: n.p., 1879), 3–4.

38 Moore, Statement, 7.

39 Charles A. Browne, “A History of the New York Sugar Trade Laboratory,” 3. Container 33, Charles Albert Browne Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

40 James A. Garfield, Sugar Tariff. Speech of Hon. James A. Garfield, of Ohio, delivered in the House of Representatives, Wednesday, Feb. 26, 1879 (Washington, D.C.: n.p. 1879), 14.

41 Review of the Efforts, 4–5.

42 Charles Chandler to Ceballos & Co., New York; Apr. 18, 1878; Charles F. Chandler Papers, Box 260, Folder 7, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

43 Moore, Statement, 4; Testimony in Relation to the Sugar Frauds, 44.

44 William Booth to Chandler; Jan. 16, 1878; Charles F. Chandler Papers, Box 260, Folder 7.

45 Memorial Presented to the Committee of Ways and Means on the Sugar Tariff, Advocating a Uniform Rate of Duty up to No. 13 Dutch Standard, with Arguments in Favor of Same by John E. Searles, Jr., and Edward P. Eastwick, Jan. 1880 (Washington, D.C.: T. McGill & Co., 1880), 16.

46 Testimony in Relation to the Sugar Frauds, 44.

47 Ibid.

48 “The Sugar Men's Quarrel,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 1879.

49 “The Sugar Tariff Ring,” New York Times, Apr. 14, 1880.

50 Eichner, Emergence of Oligopoly, 62–64; César J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 256 n. 28; “A Million-Dollar Fire: Havemeyer's Refinery a Huge Mass of Ruins,” New York Times, June 12, 1887.

51 “Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, Transmitting, in Response to Senate Resolution of Jan. 8, 1889, Information Relative to the Sugar Frauds,” United States Senate Executive Document 77, 50th Congress, 1st session, (Jan. 20, 1889), 2–3.

52 Senate Executive Document 77, 50th Congress, 1st session, (Jan. 20, 1889), 5.

53 Ibid.

54 “Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, transmitting in response to a Senate resolution, July 14, 1890, a report of special agents who were instructed to investigate the manner in which sugars are classified,” United States Senate Executive Document 190, 51st Congress, 1st session (July 18, 1890), 7.

55 “Crafty Plot,” Boston Daily Globe, Feb. 25, 1889.

56 Senate Executive Document 190, 51st Congress, 1st session (July 18, 1890), 8–9.

57 Ibid., 7.

58 Ibid., 10.

59 For the classic example of the attempt to quantify individual differences, see Schaffer, Simon, “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 115–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 “No Sand in This Sugar: How Uncle Sam Tests the Imported Article. The Functions of the Polariscope and the Nicety to Which It Determines the Grade of Sugar,” New York Times, July 27, 1890.

61 Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 33.

62 “Contemporary Humor,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 27, 1894.

63 “New York's Sugar Ring,” Boston Daily Globe, Mar. 30, 1888.

64 Henry Alvin Brown, Sugar Frauds and the Tariff: Their Relations to Home Product, Consumption, Industry, Imports, Duties and Revenue, Analyzed and Exhibited. Duty & Drawback, Sampling & Grading. Adulterations and the Polariscope. Official Statistics, Remedies, &c. (1879), 16.

65 Samuel Martin, An Essay upon Plantership, 7th ed. (Antigua: Robert Mearns, 1785); Portuondo, María M., “Plantation Factories: Science and Technology in Late Eighteenth-Century Cuba,” Technology and Culture 44:2 (2003): 231–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manuel Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).

66 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis; Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper, ch. 8; Woods, Rebecca J. H., “Breed, Culture, and Economy: The New Zealand Frozen Meat Trade, 1880–1914,” Agricultural History Review 60:II (2012): 288–308 Google Scholar.

67 David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1984), 59–63.

68 McCormick, Richard L., “Anti-Corruption in American History” (review of Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United), Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14:1 (Jan. 2015): 1–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 White, Railroaded, xxxiii.

70 José Azar, Martin C. Schmalz, and Isabel Tecu, “Anti-Competitive Effects of Common Ownership” Working Paper No. 1235, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan (April 21, 2015), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2427345.

71 Esther Kaplan, “The Spy Who Fired Me: The Human Costs of Workplace Monitoring,” Harper's Magazine (Mar. 2015).