The story of the pollution of Flint, Michigan’s water supply continues its miserable slog towards being one of the gravest scandals involving official misconduct in American history. The Washington Post reports that four more officials face felony charges in the matter:
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette filed another round of criminal charges Tuesday in the ongoing water crisis in Flint, the latest action in a nearly year-long investigation to hold accountable those responsible for a disaster that exposed thousands of children to dangerously high lead levels.
Schuette announced felony charges against four people, including two former state-appointed emergency managers who oversaw a disastrous switch of the city’s drinking water source to the Flint River. Darnell Earley, whom Gov. Rick Snyder (R) put in charge of the city’s finances from late 2013 through early 2015, and Gerald Ambrose, who held the emergency manager position through April 2015, could face decades in prison.
Prosecutors allege that the emergency managers conspired with two Flint employees, public works Superintendent Howard Croft and utilities Administrator Daugherty Johnson, to enter into a contract under false pretenses that bound the city to use the river for its drinking water, even though the local water plant was in no condition to properly deliver safe water to residents.
As I began researching this post, I started looking into the history of American political scandals and was appalled at how many sex scandals of little actual lasting significance made the lists of major scandals. In addition to the Flint, Michigan affair here are some of the incidents that I consider the gravest examples of scandal and corruption in American history:
Teapot Dome
In the Teapot Dome bribery scandal which unfolded in 1921 and 1922 the Secretary of the Interior was convicted of taking a bribe relating to government leases in Wyoming.
Crédit Mobilier
A dozen or more Congressmen were implicated in this 1867 railroad bribery case.
Whiskey Ring
110 convictions were made in this case of diversion of tax revenues. That both the Crédit Mobilier and Whiskey Ring scandals took place during Grant’s term of office made his the most scandal-plagued in American history and that was not lost on people at the time.
Operation Greylord
93 people were indicted including 17 judges, 15 of whom were convicted, as a consequence of this investigation of official misconduct and bribery in the Cook County, Illinois judicial system in the 1980s.
Iran-Contra
More than a dozen top Reagan Administration officials were either indicted or received immunity for their testimony in this complicated case of official corruption involving sales of arms to Iran and shuffling the proceeds to aid the U. S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua.
I’m accepting nominations for the greatest examples of official misconduct in U. S. history. To qualify the nominees should not be offenses of a primarily political nature or be sex scandals unless they involved more than a handful of individuals. Things that come to mind include the findings of the Knapp Commission. The New Orleans Police Department, of course, is in a class of its own.
Bad as those are, this one is thoroughly wretched: Kids for Cash. IMO, there’s no dungeon dark enough for those bastards.
Yeah, that’s pretty bad. The Burge police torture scandal might be another.
Lets see, the whole state asylum – snake pit days, the eugenic laws mandating sterilization of the unfit, the ongoing problem of prison gangs and rape, surgery before the days of informed consent, the whatever happened to Indian tribal money kept in trust by the USG, dodgy contracts by the BLM and Forestry Service, and on and on. Some things we did make better others well, we’re trying, that counts don’t it?
Kids For Cash happened in our area. Was surprised you didn’t put the Chicago posy torturing on the list to begin with. I would add, not sure it meets your criteria, the systemic efforts to hide US deaths and exaggerate VC deaths, the lying to Congress about our involvement beyond Viet Nam and just about everything else in the Pentagon Papers.
Steve
Perhaps the most momentous sex scandal was the Petticoat affair. Peggy O’Neal tended her father’s bar at a well-known Washington inn, where she was either quite the flirt or bestowed her favors for tips and attention. She married a Navy purser who was often at sea, which raised gossip about the paternity of her children. At some point, she was believed to have become the mistress of young Senator John Eaton of Tennessee. The Senator would get her husband a lucrative appointment in the Mediterranean, which was thought to be a means of getting him out of the way. The husband subsequently committed suicide (whispers that he found about his wife’s infidelities), and in less than a year Peggy married John Eaton.
The political implications of all of this came when Eaton was appointed Secretary of War for Andrew Jackson. All of the cabinet wives, and the Washington society up to Dolly Madison herself, determined to shun Peggy, and instructed their husbands to do likewise. She was not to be received or called upon, invited or listened to. The controversy occupied most of Jackson’s first year in office, with at least one duel btw/ cabinet members averted. The matter was particularly painful to Jackson as it recalled the accusations of bigamy and adultery made against his beloved late wife. Jackson called the cabinet together to evaluate the sexual morality of Peggy (her husband was excused), where he concluded or instructed his cabinet to believe that “She is as chaste as a virgin.” The cabinet was expected to bring their wives into order and contemplate their future.
The fallout was the disappearance of the official cabinet as serving an important function in U.S. government, and the rise of the kitchen-cabinet, informal allies to the President who wielded the real power. Many cabinet members would eventually be forced to resign and retire in anonymity, while VP John C. Calhoun was blamed by Jackson as the ringleader, and the personal animosity between the two formed a cornerstone of the anti-Jackson faction in the second-party system. Most importantly, Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, a bachelor, understood the loyalty that was expected and Jackson’s sense of honor. He made a public showing of calling upon the Eatons and earned Jackson’s trust and esteem, such that Van Buren would forge Jackson’s raw instincts into political policies and the first viable political machine.
By the Civil War it could be said that “the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”
The Pentagon Papers is a good one. ABSCAM would be another.
One that isn’t but should be is how the sugar industry has owned the Florida congressional delegation for decades, and the environmental destruction that has wrought on the Everglades in particular.
The Pentagon Papers matter wasn’t an instance of official misconduct but one of official conduct. Sting operations are troubling. Do they reveal crime or create it?
Yeah, I’ve been kvetching about U. S. sugar subsidies for decades.