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It was a law largely ignored. To get federal support for building the Union Pacific Railroad at vastly inflated costs, the Credit Mobilier conspirators handed out bargain-priced stocks to more than a score of Congressmen, including future President James Garfield and future Secretary of State James Blaine.
Despite the widespread acceptance of corruption, though, new laws kept gradually broadening the concept of bribery. In 1881 New York became the first state to make it a misdemeanor to bribe private citizens. During the next half century, 16 other states passed laws against bribing specific kinds of private employees: chauffeurs in Illinois, gardeners in Maryland.
Noonan credits a remarkable extension of bribery laws to a remark- able source: the Nixon Administration. Stretching precedents, Nixon-appointed prosecutors invoked the Hobbs Act of 1946, originally aimed at union racketeers, against the Democratic Kenny machine in Jersey City. When the convictions were upheld, federal prosecutors brought similar charges against local officials throughout the country, thus beginning what Noonan calls "an effective federalization of the law of bribery."
The law had been slow to punish what it forbade. Not until the 1920s was the first Cabinet-level official convicted of bribery (former Interior Secretary Albert Fall in the Teapot Dome scandal). By the time of Watergate, the anticorruption ethic was so extensive that a number of Nixon officials ended up in jail after hush money was offered to the burglars. Noonan even suggests that the campaign against corruption may now conflict with other standards. Of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, which made it a crime for companies to bribe officials abroad, Noonan remarks that "no such law had ever been framed in this country or anywhere else." And with the Abscam sting, he writes, the Justice Department simply went too far: "A moral government will not resort to foul means to enforce the ethic."
One of the dangers in making ethical judgments is that the standards keep changing. Noonan suggests analogies to slavery, which was once considered acceptable in most of the world, and to usury, which was once considered morally reprehensible. He cites a series of arguments claiming that morality has little relevance to corruption, that many people take bribes and that all punishments are uneven and hypocritical. Having cited these arguments, Noonan rejects them all. Bribery, he concludes (a bit sententiously), is a betrayal of the public trust necessary for society's survival. Beyond that, he sees a theological principle at work: "The imitation of God lies at the root of the bribery prohibition. God 'does not take shohadh,' the book of Deuteronomy proclaims."