Careerism, Professional Politicians, and Conflict

Abstract

European visitors to the United States in the nineteenth century were distinctly unimpressed with the American politicians they encountered. In the early 1890s, for example, Rudyard Kipling was caustic about the ward politicians whose activities he witnessed. Half a century earlier Charles Dickens had depicted members of Congress in a similar light when reflecting on his visit to Washington, D.C.:

It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked. And thus this lowest of all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the farthest from that degradation.¹