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Showing posts with the label Kent Kiehl

I Did Not Kill President Garfield

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”—Benjamin Disraeli In every country and in every time and in every point in history, citizens complain about corruption in their government. There are always people saying it’s never been worse. Sometimes they’re correct about that, too, but really, in most cases, you can find at least one point in history where corruption had been worse than however terrible it might happen to be right now. In America, for all the corruption that might be going on in the national and state capitals today, it’s reasonable to say that in the 1870s, corruption was much worse. Scandals plagued the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, didn’t manage to do much to clean things up, despite high expectations from the voters and his own best intentions. One big issue on the minds of critics of the day was the buying of offices, where a politician was allowed to offer a job to someone in exch