"You can buy now and then a Senator or a Representative; but they do not know it is wrong, and so they are not ashamed of it." So says a cynical newspaperman to an equally cynical speculator in The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The speculator, though, sees virtues in the corrupt system: "We would have to go without the services of some of our ablest men, sir, if the country were opposed to--to--bribery. It is a harsh term. I do not like to use it." John T. Noonan Jr., 58, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, feels quite differently about the term. In a monumental new book bluntly titled Bribes (Macmillan; $29.95), he applies the word to figures as distinguished as Francis Bacon and Thomas a Becket, and to a whole array of U.S. Presidents: Monroe, Garfield, Johnson, Nixon. Noonan's 5,000-year chronicle of scandals is deplorably entertaining, but what is still more interesting is his demonstration of how the whole concept of bribery has evolved.
Noonan inevitably begins by attempting a definition: "A bribe is an inducement improperly influencing the performance of a public function meant to be gratuitously exercised." Fair enough, but what is an inducement? What is improper? At the very dawn of human society, Noonan argues, the offering of gifts for reciprocal services was a commonplace sign of good intentions. A roving tribesman might offer some bright stone to a stranger simply to show that he meant no violence. The most important strangers to be courted with such gifts were the divine forces that brought rain or wind, hence the tradition of sacrifices left hopefully on an altar. The results of such efforts could be vexing. The Lord accepted Abel's offering of sheep but mysteriously rejected Cain's fruit of the ground, and Cain, according to Genesis 4: 5, "was very wroth."
The first judges who undertook to settle disputes were priestly figures credited with a semidivine authority, and they soon became accustomed to receiving gifts from litigants. The words for such offerings--shohadh in Hebrew or munus in Latin--were ambiguous; none of the classical languages had a specific term for a corrupting gift. Theoretically, even in Roman law a judge could accept contributions from both sides and still rule justly. Not until 1535 did Miles Coverdale use a Middle English term for stolen objects to translate a passage in Ecclesiastes as "all brybes and unrighteousness."
King James I called on any citizen who knew of bribery of his judges to make a public accusation. One of the first to complain, John Wrenham, charged in 1617 that the learned Lord Chancellor Bacon had unfairly ruled against him. When Wrenham was unable to prove bribery, however, both his ears were cut off, after which he was "perpetually imprisoned." Four years later, Bacon finally confessed to a whole array of bribes, and Parliament fined him (pounds)40,000 and sentenced him to the Tower. The King majestically commuted the penalties.
If a King's minister could get off easily, a King himself was completely immune to bribery charges, but the American authors of the Constitution changed the rules. Article II specified that the President and "all civil officers" of the U.S. could be impeached for "treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors." Not until 1853, however, was there a specific law against bribing a Congressman.