Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-2n9c9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T04:19:42.689Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bringing The “Ring” Back In: The Politics Of Booty Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2020

Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer
Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer*
Affiliation:
University of Toledo
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: jeffrey.broxmeyer@utoledo.edu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

One striking parallel between the Gilded Age and today is the return of the “ring” as a volatile form of governance. Rings are small bands of entrepreneurs who, through capture of key political institutions, exploit the coalition-building imperatives of party politics to rapidly accumulate large personal fortunes. The vernacular hails from the 1860s and 1870s, when the Tweed Ring, Gold Ring, Whiskey Ring, and Bank Ring, among others, scandalized the public with smash and grab practices. In the Trump era, Paul Manafort's career and the president's family business share many similarities to these classic episodes, both in the contested origin of private wealth and the circulation of profits throughout the political system. Rings thus have a tendency to recur in American political development. When electoral politics becomes financialized, speculators may seize opportunities to extract a hefty surplus from the public domain. In premodern contexts, Max Weber called this plundering phenomenon “booty capitalism.” The variant specific to American electoral institutions highlights a periodic conflict in democratic capitalism that arises over the legitimacy of political wealth accumulation.

Information

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020, pp. 235 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

The American presidency is open for business. Three weeks before the 2016 election, Donald J. Trump attended the grand opening of his new luxury hotel a few blocks away from the White House. The grandiose structure is housed in the Old Post Office and runs on a lease from the federal government. Virtually empty before his victory, Trump International Hotel quickly turned a large profit from hosting political events, foreign dignitaries, and business types.Footnote 1 The president-elect also announced shortly before inauguration day that he would not divest from his sprawling business or myriad investments—a significant departure from modern precedent. His children, Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, as well as son-in-law, Jared Kushner, operate their own ventures parallel with the administration, as do cabinet secretaries, aides, former campaign operatives, and longtime business associates.Footnote 2 Today, the accumulation of wealth through officeholding is at the center of governing.

Commentators are struggling for a vocabulary to describe these political developments. Public opinion is aware that officeholders use public office for private gain.Footnote 3 Yet talk about “conflicts of interest” sounds positively quaint. That concept assumes a post-Watergate legal consensus to regulate political finance that no longer exists. How do we make sense of the main drift? Thankfully, we can draw on the tools of historical perspective. There was a time, after all, when for-profit government was common. Nineteenth-century officeholders routinely expected personal compensation in the form of fees, bounties, moieties, and gifts.Footnote 4 Political parties were structurally dependent on generating funds from the capture of public office. Officeholding entrepreneurs oversaw distribution of that surplus to close allies. After the Civil War, the heyday of the spoils system overlapped with a speculative frenzy in real estate, finance, and railroads, generating impressive windfalls for party leaders. Meanwhile, critics denounced the wealth accumulated from politics as capital “wrongly acquired.”Footnote 5

Now is the moment to “bring the ‘ring’ back in” to better understand party government in our own time.Footnote 6 Rings were the purest expression of the gilded rage for political wealth accumulation. All but forgotten by the lay public today, the names are immediately recognizable to the student of American political history: the Tweed Ring, the Gold Ring, the Whiskey Ring, the Bank Ring, the Canal Ring, the Gas Ring, and so on. Sensational newspaper exposés once enraptured citizens with allegations of self-dealing and conspiracy. Partisan investigations probed legislators, commissioners, and corporations to discover the origins of fortunes in embezzled taxpayer money or wildly inflated government contracts. Court proceedings over ring spoils unfolded over the course of years, or in some cases decades.Footnote 7 The rise and fall of rings across the country raised fundamental questions about who should benefit from democracy in the age of mass politics and high-flying capitalism. Contemporary events have once again forced these questions to the center of public attention.

Do we live, then, in a Second Gilded Age? For better or worse, the idea is fast solidifying into common sense. The methodological urge to compare the Gilded Age with the present day, however, requires a slight of hand that submerges many incompatibilities. Chief among these are the structuring experiences of the Civil War and emancipation on the one hand and the fundamentally dissimilar position of the United States vis à vis the world economy on the other. Patterns of war and trade mold the parameters of domestic politics. From this vantage, it is hard to establish a fully comparative periodization between the Gilded Age and today.

In contrast to entire periods, discrete trends within historical periods are readily comparable because they involve temporally bounded social and political processes that are analytically coherent. Electoral capitalism, for instance, is the process by which officeholding begets wealth.Footnote 8 Political practices involved are empirically describable, for example, via embezzlement or collection of political assessments, through exclusive contracts, or by shepherding the creation of new markets. If the political system is producing great personal fortunes, we can establish who is doing what and under which circumstances. Of course, there have always been political entrepreneurs here and there looking for ways to make a quick buck. The crucial distinction, both qualitative and quantitative, is when the party system becomes entirely commodified. We then go from an electoral-representative system operating alongside markets to one in which political institutions themselves become markets.Footnote 9 Political wealth accumulation moves from the margins, a province of scoundrels and hacks, to the center of electoral competition and policy implementation organized by party leaders.

What Rings Are

The nineteenth-century heyday of the ring occurred at the meeting point of mass politics and capitalist takeoff. Scattered references date back to an “aristocratic Ring” as early as 1825.Footnote 10 The Gas Ring of Philadelphia carried on until 1885, living off municipal utilities and bank deposits. Lincoln Steffens had no qualms about claiming that a “ring” governed the city as late as 1903, so at least the vernacular endured into the new century.Footnote 11 Ring talk in the press and on the street, however, was most common during the 1860s and 1870s. What rings accomplished—or tried to—was not exactly novel. Almost every case grew out of a culture decades-long in gestation. Postbellum rings, on the other hand, were unprecedented in scale and impact. What made news was the advent of the ring as a volatile form of governance, a “semi-political business … half political and half financial,” according to one congressional investigation. Above all, rings were audacious in their treatment of public office like “merchandise, to be bartered and sold.”Footnote 12

Samuel J. Tilden characterized the ring as “encirclement.” The governor during the Tweed Ring and the Canal Ring, he suggested that the phenomenon was made up of a small band of adventurers who hijacked an institution, commonly (but not exclusively) a party organization, to promote “schemes for personal power and profit.”Footnote 13 In social science terms, the ring was “booty capitalism,” or what Max Weber termed the accumulation of riches by plunder.Footnote 14 As a type of political authority, it was far less autocratic domination than coalition-building. Political scientists note that officeholders coordinate actions in mutual self-interest. The degree to which party organizations, formal or otherwise, take shape is directly related to their usefulness as vehicles to solve problems of collective action.Footnote 15 In this vein, James Bryce referred to the ring as a “combination” of spoilsmen who form a covert alliance to guide nominations and appointments.Footnote 16 The ring was thus more than an individual but smaller than a party or faction—a small club, in the words of William Tweed, consisting of “none but honorable men, and very few even of them.”Footnote 17 Whiskey Ring organizers initially harbored the ambition to “make the ring coextensive with the nation,” a kind of shadow committee to reelect Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.Footnote 18 The ambition illustrates that the difference lay in the scale of an alliance. With so few people actively involved, the underlying assumption was that party regularity would bring the rest of the apparatus along for the ride. It nearly always did, for a time.

The ring's inner circle was no larger than a handful of people because it tracked closely with the peak of whatever institution happened to be at the crux of power. In place of trust or kinship, property was spread around to bind together the destiny of fellow stakeholders. The board of trustees of the Philadelphia Gas Works controlled a $4 million budget in 1871 ($83 million today) and 2,000 appointments.Footnote 19 For the New York Tweed Ring, the captured institution was the city's Board of Audit under the Charter of 1870, which allowed ring members to freely cosign spending. William Tweed employed the habit of going into business with each new ally—from steamships to railroads, real estate to liquor distilleries.Footnote 20 The ever-growing tally of Tweed's investments, along with those of Richard Connolly and Peter Sweeny, showcased the increasing complexity of a coalition that transcended factionalism, political party, geographic divide, ethnicity, and class. Still, the history of rings is littered with double-crossers, turncoats, and squealers. Secrecy was the Achilles heel, as the origin of profits was of contested legitimacy. Publicity was dangerous because it might disturb the passive consent required of crucial voting publics.Footnote 21 The partisan press worked this gap between party insiders and the mass public, searching for and seizing upon “conspiracies” to make factional hay and sell copy.Footnote 22

Ring Rule

The ring was not just about urban politics or even exclusively about politics, but rather about how politics could extract a surplus quickly. To be sure, the Tweed Ring and the Gas Ring were electoral struggles over who would benefit from the urban revolution. The Whiskey Ring was a federal gambit; what made it possible was a disjuncture between the growing fiscal capacity of the Yankee Leviathan and the mass party's demand for working capital.Footnote 23 Whiskey taxes were unpopular among distillers, while revenue was badly needed to pay off war debt. And from its inception, the Republican Party hosted an influential prohibitionist wing that sought to limit drinking in any form. The scandal centered on Treasury agents like John McDonald, who defrauded the government of $4 million in tax revenue in collusion with distillers (the equivalent of about $91 million today). Along with a ready supply of cash, the alliance produced the trappings of luxury for its main protagonists, including boxes of cigars and diamonds.Footnote 24 The ring's plucky spirit was tolerated because its ostensible purpose was fundraising for the Stalwart wing of the Republican Party, then at the height of power. During the election of 1872, pilfered whiskey revenues flowed to electoral battlegrounds through the Republican National Committee, as well as to the reelection campaigns of Stalwart senators like Oliver P. Morton of Indiana.Footnote 25

Neither were all rings led by public officeholders—just enabled by them. In late September 1869, the Gold Ring brought the national economy to the precipice of calamity when Jay Gould and Jim Fisk briefly cornered the market in gold.Footnote 26 The financiers drew speculative capital from the Erie Railroad, the city of New York's bank deposits (made available by the Tweed Ring), and a secretive group of investors. The Gold Ring pulled out an estimated $10 to $20 million in profit ($187 million to $347 million adjusted for inflation) before it was shut down by Treasury Secretary George Boutwell.Footnote 27 The surplus was lifted directly from the wealth of the nation. Black Friday, Sept. 24, provoked a string of Wall Street bankruptcies, a decline in farm prices, and a bankers’ riot on Broad Street (where the Gold Exchange was located). Lobbying and insider information was the vital link. Jay Gould would never have gotten so far without clandestine aid from Assistant Treasury Secretary Daniel Butterfield, an old friend of President Grant's looking to make his fortune. Abel Corbin, the president's brother-in-law, was also implicated. The public's role was simply to bear the cost.

The western Bank Ring demonstrates the extractive codependence of business and party politics. In the late 1860s, a triumvirate of California-based investors—William Sharon, William Ralston, and Ogden Mills—seized financial control over the Nevada Comstock Lode, the largest silver strike in American history. Sharon had moved to California and helped found the Republican Party there, along with the state's first chartered bank in 1864. The Bank of California quickly became one of the region's most important financial institutions. The ring took shape in 1866 by foreclosing on mines and custom mills that stamped ore, and then consolidating the disparate pieces into a monopoly. By 1867, Sharon's crew was minting a fortune by diluting the ore (without the knowledge of other shareholders, including small-time laborers), charging them for the cost and short-selling the mining stocks back in San Francisco.Footnote 28 From this growing empire, the Bank Ring further consolidated water, timber, and transportation operations around the mining community. As biographer Gregory Crouch put it, “William Sharon leeched profit from the Comstock Lode like a poor man boiling sustenance from a beef shank.”Footnote 29 In 1875, a run on the bank led to the ring's collapse. Sharon was elected to the U.S. Senate from Nevada. Ralston, his longtime partner and mentor, went penniless to the grave.Footnote 30

The Bonanza This Time

The return of electoral capitalism practiced by the Trump coalition is at once decades in coming and a sudden redirection. Since the 1980s, the dominant philosophy in Washington, D.C., has been that government should operate like a business. Financialization of the electoral system, which privileges mega-donors, dates back to the same period.Footnote 31 One striking effect is that there are now more ways to get paid from politics than ever before. Moreover, risk-taking entrepreneurs are able to commandeer party labels by rallying intensive fractions of voter support. Parties today are “hollow,” with little organizational capacity to guide nominations or whip internal support among party-in-government.Footnote 32 The modern presidency's capacity for unilateral action has arguably displaced the center of gravity away from the two-party system.Footnote 33 Leaders now capture the presidency first and the party second, rather than vice versa. Inherent weaknesses of party organization, however, are paired with historic levels of voter polarization.Footnote 34 Active and engaged voters are far more worried about sins of the other side than behavior within their own camp.Footnote 35 These factors are fertile soil for the current experiment in Trumpism's “pluto-populism,” a hybrid of plutocracy and popular mobilization.Footnote 36

Among what makes Donald Trump norm-shattering is his embrace of patrimonial state capitalism.Footnote 37 While he inherited an executive-centered party system, Trump departs from predecessors by placing the administrative state in the service of family, friends, and his own private business interests. Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner were both appointed to White House roles in violation of anti-nepotism statutes.Footnote 38 Without clearly defined purposes, their very presence collapses the distinction between public and private ownership of the means of administration. Furthermore, all presidents have Article II powers to appoint ambassadors, yet there has never been an unofficial ambassador whose portfolio was a family business like the Trump Organization. Donald Jr. and Eric Trump manage the family business in travels around the world while engaging in shadow diplomacy at taxpayer expense.Footnote 39 President Trump also personally intervenes into bureaucratic minutiae when it impacts his business. For example, in a series of personal meetings, he scuttled the Federal Bureau of Investigation's long-planned move from its headquarters across the street from Trump International Hotel.Footnote 40

It is not the case that each public revelation of profit-seeking is evidence of a “Trump Ring.” When Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross shorted stocks on a shipping investment, the most likely explanation is that he “seen his opportunities and took ’em.”Footnote 41 Other, more systematic practices are classic-style ring behavior. Exemplary is the dramatic fall of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign manager. Manafort established a “double-breasted” (campaign-plus-lobbying) consulting career in the 1980s alongside the rise of a conservative governing majority.Footnote 42 By the new millennium, much like a business corporation, Manafort globalized operations. His most significant client became Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-backed Ukrainian president deposed in 2014 by a popular uprising. Manafort ran Yanukovych's 2010 political comeback and opened up a policy front for his Party of Regions in the form of the European Centre for Modern Ukraine.Footnote 43 When protesters occupied Yanukovych's palace, they discovered a “black ledger” detailing secret payments worth tens of millions of dollars to Manafort through the exiled president's party apparatus.

Rather than bury his treasure, Manafort put it to work. According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team, he routed $75 million in Ukrainian spoils back home through an archipelago of real estate investments. Manafort then pulled out liquid capital from the properties acquired by shell corporations, laundering money in the form of bank loans. A good deal of Manafort's surplus also appears to have been lost in Pericles, a failed private equity firm that he established to invest in the former Soviet bloc.Footnote 44 These activities became the target of the Special Counsel's Russia investigation only after Manafort offered services to the 2016 Trump campaign free of charge. Manafort was hired on to forestall a delegate fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also managed a platform change on the party's Ukraine policy. What Manafort's indictment and subsequent convictions have established with ample evidence is that he converted partisan connections into a relationship with a foreign leader that netted him a large fortune. His close ally's political reversal triggered cash flow problems, which drove Manafort back to U.S. presidential politics “to get whole” again with jilted Pericles investors.Footnote 45

Gilded Age rings found creative mechanisms to pay themselves through the party-state linkage. Donald Trump's organizational innovations fall into this category. After Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the realm of political finance has become a “Wild West” of unlimited money and corporate influence.Footnote 46 Many candidates in both parties have pushed against the limits of shifting rules, but none so like Donald Trump. He was the first billionaire to bring the full weight of a business empire directly into national politics. Trump Tower in Manhattan was campaign headquarters. Well beyond symbolism, the Trump Organization stood in for the institutional and logistical absence of a traditional campaign apparatus. Badly outspent by opponents, Trump's official campaign was financed initially by personal loans, then by a surge of grassroots contributions, and finally, by a coterie of mega-donors.Footnote 47 Yet among Trump's largest publicly disclosed expenditures were the use of his own private jet, his use of Trump Organization facilities like Mar-a-Lago for political campaigning, and the purchase of self-branded merchandise.Footnote 48 The Trump Foundation also spent several million tax-exempt dollars on illegal electioneering activities directed by Corey Lewandowski, then campaign manager, including in the final days leading up to the Iowa Caucus.Footnote 49 We now know that the Trump Organization made unlawful corporate contributions directly to the campaign, and that it also accepted donations far in excess of legal limits.Footnote 50 In sum: once the campaign was up and running, Trump was paying himself to run for office through a mix of legal and unorthodox means.

Circulation of money through political channels to friends and family continued after the election. The inaugural committee raised the most funds in presidential history and paid Trump's hotel in Washington double the fair market rate for event space. The single-largest check from the inaugural event was for $26 million to the firm of Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, senior advisor to First Lady Melania Trump.Footnote 51 Since 2016, Republican Party committees, super PACs, and candidates have spent at least $18 million at Trump properties.Footnote 52 Trade associations and lobby groups held forty post-election events during Trump's first year in office.Footnote 53 By comparison, political committees and interest groups had spent virtually nothing on Trump properties prior to his officeholding career. President Trump also accepts payment from foreign governments at his businesses in apparent violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause.Footnote 54 And because the president spends so much time at his resorts and clubs—261 days in the first two-and-a-half years of his term—the public pays for his travel and security details on-site. Following the chief's lead, more than 70 executive branch officials made 200 visits in the first year of Trump's term, increasing to 186 officials visiting in year two.Footnote 55 How much does it cost the public to host the Trump administration at Trump properties? The bill is not currently public information, but it is reasonable to assume that the cost is high given the branding of Trump properties as exclusive venues.Footnote 56

The Party State Goes ’Round

The ring is not a museum piece. Rather, it is a volatile form of governance that recurs in American political development. The reason is twofold. In the American party system, officeseeking entrepreneurs must satisfy their ambitions by finding novel ways to put resources together. The ring is an example, albeit a dramatic one, of a party alliance in which a few people carry off riches at the expense of everyone else. The context is important. Electoral politics emerges as a more enticing place to make a fortune than elsewhere during certain historical periods, like the 1870s and today. As long as this is true, and parties organize government, risk-takers may use the former to plunder the latter. “Tweed Courthouse” in lower Manhattan is a reminder of the bottomless possibilities for wealth extraction from state functions: Tammany Hall embezzled millions during its prolonged construction.Footnote 57 If plundering seems like a passing craze, consider that it was an originary form of state-building in the ancient world.Footnote 58 Leaders of authoritarian regimes today routinely expropriate national wealth as their own by moving loot through Wall Street, storing value in real estate or fine art, and hiding stolen funds in offshore bank accounts.Footnote 59

The other element contributing to a pattern of recurrence is the sacrosanct nature of property within American society. Constitutional safeguards and market ideology render it difficult to separate individuals from claimed wealth—in many cases, no matter how they obtain it. The problem is further aggravated by a substantial difference between ring governance and, say, the plundering of livestock in premodern raids. The American context is one that allows spoils to be quickly reinvested back into the capitalist economy. Property travels through a host of respectable institutions, including banks, which obscure its provenance from electoral politics.Footnote 60 In federal court, Judge T. S. Ellis instructed the jury that Paul Manafort was not on trial for being rich or for engaging in conspicuous consumption.Footnote 61 The judge's assertion is worth pondering at length because it strikes at the heart of the debate over ring rule. In Ukraine, the post-Yanukovych government considers the Manafort fortune to be stolen national patrimony. Is it legitimate to accumulate wealth under conditions of booty capitalism? The stakes are about nothing less than the meaning and substance of democratic representation.

References

Notes

1 The Trump Organization initially projected that it would lose $1.2 million during the first four months of 2017. Instead, it turned a $2 million profit. Jonathan O'Connell, “Trump D.C. Hotel Turns $2 Million Profit in Four Months,” The Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2017. Donald Trump's official financial disclosures reported $17 million in income from his D.C. hotel in 2017 and $40 million in 2018. “Donald J. Trump, Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Reports,” June 14, 2017, 21; and May 15, 2018, 20, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, available via Center for Responsive Politics, Trump Administration Financial Disclosures, www.opensecrets.org/trump/financial-disclosures (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

2 Andy Sullivan, Emily Stephenson, and Steve Holland, “Trump Says He Won't Divest From His Business While President,” Reuters, Jan. 11, 2017; “Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, as prepared for delivery at 4:00 p.m. on January 11, 2017, at the Brookings Institution,” available online at www.brookings.edu/events/white-house-ethics-experts-repond-to-donald-trumps-announcement (accessed Dec. 31, 2019). One nonpartisan watchdog group found over 500 conflicts of interest in the first year of the presidency alone. See Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), “Profiting from the Presidency: A Year's Worth of President Trump's Conflicts of Interest,” Jan. 19, 2017, www.citizensforethics.org/profitingfromthepresidency (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

3 “Erosion, Polarization, and Norm Violations: Bright Line Watch Survey Report, Wave 6,” Aug. 1, 2018, http://brightlinewatch.org/wave6 (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

4 Parrillo, Nicholas R., Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Taken from an editorial denouncing the Tweed Ring fortunes. New York Times, “Minor Topics,” Nov. 25, 1871, 4.

6 The phrase “bring the ‘ring’ back in” is adapted from the title of the political science classic Bringing The State Back In. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol ed., Bringing The State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

7 The first court case over the Tweed Ring went to trial in 1871. The last case related to it was a libel suit only dismissed in 1898.

8 Broxmeyer, Jeffrey D., Electoral Capitalism: The Party System In New York's Gilded Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)Google Scholar.

9 I make this analytic distinction as corollary to the contention that “only in the nineteenth century did … societies with markets become market societies.” Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith ed., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), 4.

10 Sperber, Hans and Trittschuh, Travis, American Political Terms: An Historical Dictionary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 374–76Google Scholar.

11 McCaffery, Peter, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867–1933 (University Park: Pennsylvania University State Press, 1993), chapter 2Google Scholar; Steffens, Lincoln, The Shame of the Cities (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), 134–61Google Scholar.

12 Report and Testimony of the Committee on Investigation and Retrenchment on the Alleged Frauds In The New York Custom-House, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), vii, cxxvi.

13 Tilden, Samuel Jones, The Writing and Speeches of Samuel J. Tilden, vol. 1, ed. Bigelow, John (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), 561Google Scholar.

14 The term arises in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic, as published in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 67.

15 Aldrich, John, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A prime example is the Canal Ring, a loose association of bipartisan state legislators who inflated no-bid contracts to service and maintain New York's state-owned system of canals. Archdeacon, Thomas, “The Erie Canal Ring, Samuel J. Tilden, and the Democratic Party,” New York History 55 (Oct. 1978): 408–29Google Scholar.

16 “Once they discover by how few persons the world is governed,” Bryce recounted, “they see a door to wealth and power, and they walk in.” Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 108, 111Google Scholar.

17 William M. Tweed to James Murphy, Feb. 8, 20, 1855, William M. Tweed, folder 1: Letters 1847–1857, New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York, NY.

18 McDonald, John, The Secrets of the Great Whiskey Ring (St. Louis, MO: W. S. Bryan, 1880), 17Google Scholar.

19 McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia, 18–22.

20 Broxmeyer, Jeffrey D., “The Boss's Brains: Political Capital, Democratic Commerce, and the New York Tweed Ring, 1868–1871,” Journal of Historical Sociology 28 (Sept. 2015): 374–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For a sinister ring case involving a brutal murder, a $3,000 bounty, and a “Dem trick” to “gain political capital and further oppress honest men,” see D. K. Young to Le Baron Bradford Prince, Feb. 7, 1874, folder 1874, box 3, Prince Family Papers, 1816–1916, New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York, NY.

22 Summers, Mark W., The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1863–1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 258Google Scholar.

23 During the Civil War, Congress placed a tax on distilled liquor as part of its wartime program to raise revenue. The tax began at 20 cents per gallon on July 21, 1862, and peaked at $2 in 1865. By the time the Whiskey Ring formed, the tax had been lowered to 70 cents per gallon. Wood, Barry Robert, The St. Louis Whiskey Ring: Corruption and Reform In The Gilded Age (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 1973), 1Google Scholar; Bensel, Richard, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

24 Wood, The St. Louis Whiskey Ring, 17.

25 New York Senator Roscoe Conkling sponsored a legal defense fund for Orville E. Babcock, President Ulysses S. Grant's private secretary. The gesture provides a clarifying window into the ring's centrality to party government in the 1870s. Reeves, Thomas C., Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester Arthur (New York: Knopf, 1975), 81Google Scholar.

26 Gould and Fisk's maneuver exploited the hard currency's speculative potential while the country was temporarily off the gold standard. Barreyre, Nicolas, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 47–53Google Scholar.

27 Ackerman, Kenneth, The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869 (New York: Dodd, Meade & Company, 1988), 276Google Scholar.

28 The parallels with other rings are too obvious to miss. Jay Gould diluted Erie Railroad stock to finance his “lock up” and Gold Ring—he had a veritable press printing stock certificates in the basement of his offices. The Tweed Ring swelled voter rolls with “naturalization mills” in 1868 to elect the Tammany-backed candidate for governor, John Hoffman.

29 Crouch, Gregory, The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West (New York: Scribner, 2018), 228Google Scholar.

30 William Ralston likely committed suicide as a result of bankruptcy. On Ralston's gambit to create an alternative silver market, through lobbying and bribery, by demonetizing silver in the “Crime of ’73,” see Samuel DeCanio, “Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver,” Studies in American Political Development 25 (Apr. 2011): 1–26.

31 Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (Mar. 2013): 51–73. The explosive growth of money in politics is driven by the FIRE sector. Lee Drutman, “On FIRE: How the Finance, Insurance, Real Estate Sector Drove the Growth of the Political 1 Percent of the 1 Percent,” Sunlight Foundation, Jan. 26, 2012, https://bit.ly/2LpqGWA (accessed Dec. 31, 2019). Congressional offices are three to four times more responsive to donors. Kalla, Joshua L. and Broockman, David E., “Campaign Contributions Facilitate Access to Congressional Officials: A Randomized Experiment,” American Journal of Political Science 60 (July 2016): 545–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Schlozman, Daniel and Rosenfeld, Sam, “The Hollow Parties” in Can America Govern Itself?, ed. Lee, Frances E. and McCarty, Nolan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 120–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Milkis, Sidney M. and Jacobs, Nicholas, “I Alone Can Fix It’: Donald Trump the Administrative Presidency, and Hazards of Executive-Centered Partisanship,” The Forum 15 (Nov. 2017): 583–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Andrew Gelman and Julia Azari, “19 Things We Learned From The 2016 Election,” Statistics and Public Policy 40 (Jan. 2017): 1–10.

35 “Political Polarization In The American Public: How Increasing Ideological Uniformity and Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics, Compromise and Everyday Life,” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C., June 12, 2014.

36 Pierson, Paul, “American Hybrid: Donald Trump and the Strange Merger of Plutocracy and Populism,” The British Journal of Sociology 68 (Nov. 2017): 105–19Google Scholar.

37 Broxmeyer, Jeffrey D., “The Patrimonial Turn in the American State,” Clio 28 (Summer 2019): 6, 20–4Google Scholar.

38 CREW, “Nepotism and Conflicts of Interest—Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump,” undated, https://bit.ly/2NeDSiL (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

39 For concrete examples, see Eric Umansky and Andrea Bernstein, “Donald Trump Jr. Pushed ‘Blatantly Illegal’ Project in India, Former Official Says—‘Trump, Inc.’ Podcast,” ProPublica, Mar. 21, 2018; CREW, “CREW Gets Trump Family Business Secret Service Spending Documents,” July 18, 2018, https://bit.ly/2uKLu4D (accessed June 14, 2019).

40 “Review of GSA's Revised Plan for the Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters Consolidation Project,” Office of the Inspector General, U.S. General Services Administration, Aug. 27, 2018, 7–8, https://bit.ly/2wBnkuu (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

41 CREW filed a complaint with the Department of Justice and the Office of Government Ethics alleging Ross's violation of the STOCK Act and securities law. CREW, “CREW Requests Investigation into Wilbur Ross,” June 22, 2018, www.citizensforethics.org/legal-filing/crew-requests-investigation-into-wilbur-boss-for-potential-stock-act-violation/ (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

42 Manafort's various firms managed campaigns for everyone from Senator Jesse Helms to Senator Arlen Specter; they managed the entire top-tier field of 1988 presidential candidates and organized the inaugural activities of President George H. W. Bush. Manafort's last business partner, Rick Davis, ran John McCain's presidential races in 2000 and 2008. See Franklin Foer, “Paul Manafort, American Hustler,” The Atlantic, Mar. 2018.

43 United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr., and Richard W. Gates III, 1:18 Cr. 83, Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, Feb. 2018, www.justice.gov/file/1038391/download, (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

44 Foer, “Paul Manafort, American Hustler.”

45 Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, vol. 1 (Mar. 2019), 131–2, 134–5, 139, 141, www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

46 Hasen, Richard L., Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, The Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

47 Toner, Michael and Trainer, Karen, “The $7 Billion Election: Emerging Campaign Finance Trends and Their Impact on the 2016 Presidential Race and Beyond,” chapter 12, in Sabato, Larry, Kondik, Kyle, and Skelley, Geoffrey ed., Trumped: The 2016 Election that Broke All the Rules (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 181–201Google Scholar.

48 Isaac Arnsdorf and Kenneth Vogel, “Trump Getting Crushed By Clinton Money Machine: The presumptive GOP nominee reported just $1.3 million in cash on hand, Politico, June 20, 2016.

49 The State of New York v. Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric F. Trump, and the Donald J. Trump Foundation, Supreme Court of the State of New York, index no. 451130/2018, June 13, 2018. For relevant documents from the New York Attorney General, see https://on.ny.gov/2JGcVag (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

50 We know this from Michael Cohen's guilty plea. Robert Kuzami, United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, to Guy Petrillo, re: United States v. Michael Cohen, Aug. 21, 2018, https://bit.ly/2OT1utW (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

51 Justin Elliot, “New Evidence Emerges of Possible Wrongdoing by Trump Inaugural Committee,” ProPublica, Feb. 8, 2019; Maggie Haberman and Kenneth P. Vogel, “Trump's Inaugural Committee Paid $26 Million to Firm of First Lady's Adviser,” New York Times, Feb. 15, 2018.

52 As of the Feb. 1, 2019 filing. Center for Responsive Politics, “All The President's Profiting,” Center for Responsive Politics, www.opensecrets.org/trump/trump-properties?cycle=All (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

53 We do not know how much lobbyists have spent at Trump properties because disclosure is not required by law. CREW, “Profiting from the Presidency.”

54 Lorraine Woellert and Stephanie Murray, “Judge Lets Emoluments Lawsuit Against Trump Move Ahead,” Politico, July 25, 2018.

55 Karen Yourish and Troy Griggs, “Tracking The President's Visits To Trump Properties,” New York Times, June 10, 2019, updated Dec. 30, 2019; CREW, “Presidential Profiteering: Trump's Conflicts in Year Two,” www.citizensforethics.org/presidential-profiteering-trumps-conflicts-got-worse (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

56 Mar-a-Lago, where confidants have the president's ear on policy, doubled fees for new members after the election. Isaac Arnsdorf, “The Shadow Rulers of the VA,” ProPublica, Aug. 7, 2018.

57 Tammany Hall was a political machine in New York City that became synonymous with Democratic Party regulars from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. On “Tweed's Courthouse,” see Callow, Alexander Jr., The Tweed Ring (Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Broxmeyer, “Boss's Brains,” 390.

58 Scott, James C., Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 171–3Google Scholar.

59 Leaks from the Panama Papers allow a rare glimpse into the pervasive interconnection between authoritarianism and the global circuits of capital. “The Panama Papers: Exposing the Rogue Offshore Finance Industry,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers (accessed Dec. 31, 2019); Zucman, Gabriel, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, trans. Fagan, Teresa Lavender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrington, Brooke, Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 For a historical example, see Broxmeyer, Jeffrey D., “Political Capitalism in the Gilded Age: The Tammany Bank Run of 1871,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16 (Jan. 2017): 44–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Gerstein, “Cranky Judge, Flawed Witness Threaten Mueller's Manafort Case,” Politico, Aug. 8, 2018.