As judged by our three proxy measures of corruption, the fifty states vary greatly in terms of the pervasiveness and types they experience. We analyze those contrasts employing a range of empirical measures and find the political, economic, and institutional factors matter greatly. Particularly intriguing are the ways contrasts in corruption relate to Daniel Elazar’s three major political subcultures – Moralistic, Individualistic, and Traditionalistic – and to the ways they differ and mingle state by state. Contrasts in our corruption measures are linked to a range of explanatory variables in ways consistent with theory. Such links to fundamental influences not only point to the systemic nature of corruption, its causes, and consequences, but also help explain its tenacity and the difficulties we face when we attempt to implement reforms.

Can citizens check corruption through political participation policies? What the latter might mean can be a hotly contested question: smaller government, decentralization, deregulation, and term limits for elected officials are all significant reform ideas, but none qualifies as a silver bullet and all have their potential negative consequences. Factors such as representation of women in public office, news media coverage, and levels of education can have more influence on states’ levels of corruption. Political competition and lobbying regulations are also significant influences. Controlling campaign financing is a widely supported idea, but contributions, like lobbying, enjoy First Amendment protection, and the full consequences of various contribution limits, matching funds, and candidate-subsidy schemes are difficult to anticipate. Good politics might conceivably make for better government, but what those ideas might mean in practice and how to get there are controversial issues.

The question of how corrupt the United States is has no single answer. After all, we lack an accepted definition of corruption and cannot directly measure what is usually a clandestine or contested kind of activity. Some corruption is clearly illegal, but other activities widely seen as corrupt, or corrupting, are legal – in some cases, constitutionally protected. There are different categories of corruption – at a minimum, it is important to distinguish between illegal and legal corruption – and the country is comprised of fifty different states, each (as Daniel Elazar has argued) a civil society in its own right, and each with multiple institutions where corruption might take root. Finally, the causes and consequences of corruption can differ significantly from one policy area or economic sector to the next. In this chapter, we lay out our agenda for analyzing American corruption, with an emphasis on the diversity of the federal system and the importance of looking carefully at different aspects of policy and politics.

Police killings of Black Americans are influenced not only by specific law enforcement situations but also by corruption – where corruption in a state is more extensive, police killings are more frequent. State-level factors may seem remote from local policing, but in fact the constitutional and political connections are strong and deep-rooted. Police killings of Black Americans also reflect contrasts in the states’ political cultures and aspects of communities’ racial composition. Median income levels and the economic gaps between Black and White populations also influence the patterns of police killings. Lobbying activities, political party competition, and police unionism contribute to overall levels of accountability. These diverse and often deep-rooted influences, many of them linked to the expectations communities have of their police and the attitudes of police toward their work and the surrounding communities, show that dealing with the problem of police killings of Black Americans will require fundamental changes of many sorts.

While we cannot measure corruption directly, it is possible to employ a number of proxy variables. We describe three useful approaches, all contributing to our understanding of corruption in practice. The Corruption Convictions Index (CCI) employs US Department of Justice data on corruption convictions aggregated by state. The news-based Corruption Reflections Index (CRI) compares the states in terms of the number of stories mentioning corruption. While both the CCI and CRI are proxy measures of illegal corruption, our Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), derived from surveys of statehouse news reporters, compares the states in terms of both legal and illegal corruption broken down by branch of government. While each index has its limitations, the three collectively yield suggestive rankings of the fifty states, not only by indirectly estimating the overall scale of the problem in each state but also, with the CPI, contrasting illegal and legal varieties and perceived corruption by branches of government.

This Introduction distinguishes three approaches to studying politics: political science, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. It identifies the last of these as the focus of the chapters in the collection. It then uses an example from Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Illinois US Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas to characterize literature’s relationship to politics. Finally, it distinguishes three approaches to literary history, which it labels poststructuralist discourse analysis, standpoint epistemology, and pragmatism. It treats pragmatism as the most suitable description of the mode of literary history practiced in the chapters in the collection.

The 1820s and 1830s have received less attention than the 1840s and 1850s in histories of US abolition. Attending to African American antislavery activism of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that these were transformative decades, particularly regarding the issues of colonization, immediate abolition, and kidnapping. These specific political concerns of an often-overshadowed constituency, African Americans themselves, shaped the literary conventions of slave narratives published in these earlier two decades. Fugitive slave narratives of the 1820s and 1830s feature an active practice of vigilant watchfulness that anticipates and counters the threat of surveillance through sousveillance (watching from below). Sousveillance is thus a specific narrative manifestation of the vigilance urged by black political activists. Later slave narratives, shaped by the priorities of white-dominated institutional abolition, downplay the agency of African American sousveillants in favor of a more passive story of victimization.

Nineteenth-century women gained limited property and voting rights by embracing naturalized gender roles, including motherhood, as famously described in Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home (1869). Such normative appeals to a feminized domestic sphere appear to contradict a first-wave nineteenth-century feminism that, through efforts like Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments (1848), sought political gains for women in the form of property and voting rights equivalent to those of men, but second-wave feminist historians from the 1960s through the 1980s have shown how similar ends were advanced by less radical means: embracing the middle-class mother’s normative gendered role as natural nurturer enabled women to leverage their credibility within the domestic sphere in order to advance political projects both within and beyond it. In addition to resisting traditional restrictions on their rights, women embraced their gendered role as natural mothers to pursue political activism on behalf of impoverished women in urban areas. Third-wave feminism has challenged the normative roles at the core of this gendered separation of spheres, roles that at once restricted nineteenth-century women’s political activity but also authorized them to mobilize, as natural women and mothers, in political resistance to economic oppression.

How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

This chapter is a brief history of the nineteenth-century efforts to expand voting and other political rights, interspersed with analysis of key literary texts in which the question of voting rights is a palpable concern, even though it is sometimes not overtly addressed. It takes as its starting point an early nineteenth-century shift in ideas about qualifications for suffrage, during which the prerequisite of land ownership was replaced by the qualities of “virtue and intelligence.” While this shift ensured almost universal white male suffrage by the 1840s, it also provided an opening – albeit a problematic one – for white women and some African American men and women to agitate for enfranchisement. This chapter demonstrates that literature from the 1830s until the early twentieth century reflected and often intervened in the conversation about the “nature” of women and black men, and whether or not they were suited for integration into the public sphere and specifically into the political realm through voting. Authors such as Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Charles Chesnutt (among many others) represented the women’s suffrage and black suffrage movements in ways designed to change readers’ ideas about the “virtue and intelligence” of the disenfranchised.

Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

Although racial segregation was a social and literary reality throughout the nineteenth century, it would not come to define political, social, and literary practice until the fin de siècle. The defeat of Populism and the wave of disfranchisement across the South in the 1890s enabled the rise of the segregationist order of Jim Crow. Within this order, black writers incubated the idea that the political fate of black Americans required establishing an African American literature. From the 1890s forward, a variety of black writers, including Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sutton E. Griggs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and J. McHenry Jones, sought in their fictional representations of segregation to determine whether these strictures reflected the political will of white southern elites or the animus of lower-class whites. With no social or political basis for political participation by the southern working classes, the form of black politics that came to predominate in the South was what the historian Judith Stein has called “appeals to the ruling elements of society” for justice and redress, with correlate appeals to black elites to speak for the race. It was also this politics of appeal that structured the rise of African American literature.