Dreams of Avarice
From RICHARD H. ROVERE NEW YORK
rro judge by the newspapers, corruption is 1 epidemic, and for once it cannot be said that the press is merely sensation-mongering in order to win new readers or hold old ones. There is not even much evidence that the publishers have enjoyed the discomfiture of their competitors, the television magnates. The scandals, in and out of television, have been uncovered mostly by government agencies, federal or municipal, and the newspaper coverage has been more or less routine. Some of it has had to deal with rather squalid doings by journalists themselves. On the heels of the disclosure that some television people had been paid to `plug'=–i.e., give favourable mention to—certain commercial interests came the revelation that certain newspaper columnists, all of the more tawdry variety, had accepted money from the same sources for the same pur- pose.
Then there was a television programme on the very subject of corruption which led, a day or two later, to the discovery that a newspaper reporter zealous for civic virtue had made out of whole cloth a story of attempted bribery by a public official of New York City. The reporter, a scourge of slum-building owners who pay in- spectors to overlook violations of building codes, had said that a city official had offered him con- siderable sums of money not to publish the truth. The reporter was invited to the District Attorney's office to give the details of the offer. There he confessed that there had never been any such offer—that he had made up the story merely to dramatise an evil he knew existed.
For the most part, though, there has been little irony and little novelty in all the news of wrong- doing. The fraud in the television quiz shows in- volved people of whom one would have expected sounder judgment as well as higher morality, but in the main crookedness has been found where one woulct, be surprised not to find a certain amount of it. In New York, butchers in large numbers have been selling their customers less meat than the customers have been paying for. Some have weighed their thumbs along with the beef or lamb; some have tampered with their scales; some have let the scales alone but hidden them from the customer's view. Butchers have behaved this way in the east, and for the public's
protection there are Bureaux of Weights and Measures. Their existence always raises the ques- tion of who watch the watchers, inspect the in- spectors, police the police. In New York City, no one was doing it until a couple of weeks ago, when it was discovered that some of the money the butchers were making by short-weighing was going to the Weights and Measures people, in- cluding the head of the bureau, who now lacks employment.
And so things have been going. Bakers and candlestick makers may be next, sharing news- paper space and television news time with teamsters, truckers, boxing promoters, phono- graph-record sellers and the like, and perhaps the newspapers will develop a zest for turning up corruption news they have not yet shown. If so, they will be stimulated not alone by base commercial motives but by the concern of the righteous to get at the roots of unrighteousness and have a close look at what are generally de- scribed as the 'broader implications.' A number of estimable people are already convinced that
what has been revealed are only a few of the symptoms of a morally-ill nation, and A.mericans —whether more or less than other people I do not know—are given to quick generalisations about their own society; they are almost always ready to believe that moral standards are in decline from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Perhaps this is so. The difficulty one has in trying to judge the answer is that one never can be sure of where we were when the alleged de- cline began—of what we have declined from. And even if it is possible to find an ethical norm for a society of this size and diversity, one would have to find honest scales on which to weigh new elements in the situation. The butcher situation had no new elements, but the television situation had quite a few. Before, for example, it had been impossible to see how much moral stress and strain could be borne by authorities on Dickens, marine biology, Greek history or base- ball statistics when tempted by sums of money that were, for most of them, beyond all previous dreams of avarice.
My own tentative view is that man for man, child for child, Americans are easier to corrupt, at least in matters involving money, than they were a few decades ago. I do not think, however, that this is established by very much of the evi- dence that has lately come to public attention. The places where corruption has been revealed are, for the most part, those where rectitude has never had much standing. Television is half advertising, half country carnival, and the prudent have always had to be wary in dealing with such institutions. Butchers are butchers. Municipal government is probably a bit straighter in 1959 than it has been at most times in the past (because more and better means have been devised keep- ing it on the up and up), but that isn't saying a great deal.
It has been, as it almost always is, in the citadels of wrongdoing that wrongdoing has been found. A few years ago, when various institutions were behaving in a most cowardly fashion in the face of McCarthyism, a good many people con- cluded that Americans had lost their heart and
'Can't think what's got into this feller Chataway. Some of me best friends are South Africans.'
their guts; they overlooked, I think, the fact that those institutions that capitulated—again mass entertainment and advertising, as well as vote- seeking politicians and newspapers that had never been known to show independence—were richly experienced in capitulation and had never been looked upon by any sane man as triumphs of the American experiment. It may be that the cor- ruptible are relatively more numerous today than in the past, but this can't be proved by what is being revealed about butchers, boxing promoters, or patent-medicine hawkers.
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