The Era of Good Stealings (review)

book reviews337 Parmalee Smith's life, there is a persistent need for broader context, for fitting Smith into the larger developments of the time. For instance, Armstrong recounts that Smith taught school as a young man in Mobile, Alabama, before attending seminary. Although the period in question (1849-52) included some of the most emotional debates on the slavery issue, and although Smith's later career would be absorbed in work among the soldiers fighting to free the slaves and then among the freed slaves themselves, the author gives no evaluation of how Smith was affected by his sojourn in the slave South. There are also several places in the text that invited comparison on the similarities and differences between the motivations and efforts of Northerners among the freedpeople of the South and the Indians ofthe West. Armstrong, himselfa former Peace Corps director in Africa and a minister in the United Church of Christ, today's version of Congregationalism, avoids the biographer's trap of making a complete hero of his subject. The author recognizes that Smith shared his contemporaries' misguided and stinted vision ofthe capabilities oftheir missionary charges who were not like themselves. But he seems reluctant to make judgments and draw conclusions, a reluctance that ultimately frustrates his reader. Judith A. Hunter State University of New York at Geneseo The Era ofGood Stealings. By Mark Wahlgren Summers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 390. $49.95.) It now appears safe to say that Mark Summers is the foremost authority on all varieties of political corruption in the Middle Period. His Railroads, Reconstruction , and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, /865-/877 (1984) prominently featured the corruption issue, and it became the center of attention in The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (1988). In some ways a sequel to the latter, The Era of Good Stealings carries his analysis through Reconstruction. Although Summers claims that this "is not a comprehensive guide to who stole what in the dozen years after the Civil War" (viii), in three hundred densely packed pages, and another seventy of documentation, he scarcely leaves a stone unturned. Defining corruption as "the illegal and generally unacceptable use of public position for private advantage or exceptional party profit, and the subversion of the political process for personal ends beyond those of ambition" (ix), Summers begins with wartime profiteering and then catalogs real and alleged corruption at the municipal, state, and national levels of government during the Johnson and Grant years. He contends that postwar corruption was no worse than it had been during the 1 850s; that many "scandals " were due to simple negligence, incompetence, or extravagance rather than true corruption; and that most corruption was scattered and individual rather than systematic. 338CIVIL WAR history This exposition, however, provides the grist for his primary argument that the corruption issue was far more historically significant than the actual corruption . He is especially interested in the ways the press and partisanship artificially stimulated the issue and continually "added strength to the argument against the new, active state that the war had fostered" (28). Democrats constantly struggled to make effective use of the issue, but instead of riding it into power, they ultimately rode it to death in the mid-1870s with the resilient Republicans fighting them off. The issue thus "discredited programs more easily than parties, and policy more readily than politics" at the national level (260), but in the South real and alleged Republican misconduct became a powerful weapon in conservative hands. The climax came with the disputed election of 1 876, so riddled with fraud on both sides that neither party could press the corruption issue any longer. Summers's final focal point is the dialectic between corruption and reform. The variously motivated reformers tended to believe that "cures might well lie in a return to old ways of doing things: states' rights, cheap and limited government , and a society in which neither generals nor former slaves played an important political role" (28-29). Reformers accordingly pushes suffrage restriction , civil service, retrenchment, and limitations on legislative power. On balance, corruption "raised a shadow of wrongdoing larger...