Harry Siegel on the Supreme Court, Bribery, and Scofflaws

New York Daily News columnist Harry Siegel joins co-host V.V. Ganeshananthan and guest co-host Matt Gallagher to talk about his recent piece about the Supreme Court’s decision to permit what he has dubbed “after-the-fact bribery.” Siegel, who has covered corruption for years, explains how the legality of accepting gratuities, tips, and gifts has become so nuanced that it’s now almost impossible to prosecute a politician who’s been bought off, and details why the newest version of the law is “fundamentally incoherent.” Siegel also talks about the language, literature, and history around ducking the rules, including the origin of the word “scofflaw,” and reads from a recent New York Daily News article.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: I’m curious about your thoughts: with the erosion of the judiciary, will our words for people operating outside the law change? Can you be called a scofflaw if you aren’t technically following a ridiculous law? How are you going to have to change how you write about the nature of corruption, or will you stick to your understanding of what corruption is and begin to include this evolving line? How will that work for you narratively, and reporting-wise?

Harry Siegel: I know what’s dirty, and I’m going to keep writing about it, whether it is criminal or not. When people do things I think are inappropriate, untoward, or not in the public interest, who are elected officials or their agents, I’m going to say so, and

I hope other people do so as well. 

But obviously, having a legal case or something prosecutors have done, and with their subpoena powers and so on, it’s very helpful in clarifying those things to the public, who otherwise, especially when there’s like 55 characters—and wait, this guy did what? And then, they seized the mayor’s phones while he was getting into his car? Huh? You just start losing the plot and this stuff all blends together. And so, if you are actually watching Breaking Bad on one screen and Succession on another and The Sopranos on a third, or whatever, you’re not really absorbing any of them. And it becomes just a background noise and rhythm, and I’m very worried that our politics are moving in that direction, where people who have other lives to live and aren’t getting paid to pay attention to this stuff, because eh, this looks really bad. They’re all dirty, whatever. And that bothers me. 

I am not combobulated. And the reason why I am not combobulated is you cannot be combobulated. Combobulated is not even a word. Discombobulated, which is a little older than scofflaw, comes from this craze of inventing fake Latin words, things that sound like fancy Latin in America in the mid to late 19th century. And that’s where discombobulation comes from. And that’s why there’s the opposite of the thing but not the thing.  

As to scofflaw… aw, man! So I wrote this column, and a big shoutout to Ammon Shea’s book, Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravations, where this came from, and to Britt Peterson, who wrote a very similar column straight up in 2014, for The Boston Globe. I just read it, and I loved it. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got to go as far down this rabbit hole as I can.” 

But, in brief, you’ve got this crazy dude, who’s the son of Granite Trust Company President Theophilus King, who’s a super rich guy with all sorts of causes, and among them, he hates alcohol. So this is just before Prohibition, this is just before women’s suffrage. And as this is happening, his son starts rolling on this, and this becomes his cause. He’s got money to put into it, and a few years into Prohibition as this is not going well… It’s almost the Malthus thing, right? 

So, Malthus, at the end of the Enlightenment, and the dismal science, and all that, and he’s like, look: a population exponential, food, arithmetic, we’re all going to die. And the result is all these countries in Europe end up raising their age for marriage. And he uses marriage as a euphemism for sex, and there’s this presumption that there is actually a tie-in. And one of the results is you end up with a generation of bastards; children born out of wedlock. Because it’s like, wait, we have to do something about this and slow down how many children we’re having, so now you can’t get married. It’s not 14, it’s 22. And it turns out, people did not stop procreating in those additional years. So these things get weird. 

Back to Prohibition, my man King has a contest to come up with the best word which will stab awake the conscience of the drinker and the public conscience to the fact that such lawless drinking is a menace to the Republic itself. It got 25,000 submissions. Some of the losers were “wet-a-crat,” “slicker,” and my favorite—I want to call everyone this now— “booze-shevik,” which is, I presume, melting “Bolshevik” and “booze.” 

VVG: That’s great. 

HS: And “scofflaw” was the winner. It’s a big hit. There’s like all these little newspaper stories about it. And a New York Sun columnist… Shoutout to the era when columnists would fill their extra inches with weird bits of random doggerel and poetry, because there’s such great stuff just buried in the midst of that. It’s where Don Marquis… that’s what Mehitabel and Archy was… The cockroach was reincarnated as a free verse poet, who then goes up to Marquis, the columnist typewriter, and punches in e.e. cummings-style one typewriter key at a time, his adventures and those of Mehitabel the alleycat, who is the reincarnation of Cleopatra. It’s the best stuff. George Harriman of Krazy Kat did the illustrations later for the books. But the New York Sun columnist did just a throwaway poem about the word, obviously. And it goes,

“A scofflaw cop is on the beat;

He’s on a scofflaw force

And when he sees a scofflaw fete

He scoffs his share, of course

It wouldn’t do to make arrests

Of scofflaws small or great,

For in the court, the scofflaw’d find

A scofflaw magistrate.”

VVG: So good. It’s so good and I was like, “Ah, the Supreme Court!” It is still really relevant. Maybe we should all be going back to putting poems in our journalism.

Matt Gallagher: That’s tremendous. Speaking of literary connections, you mentioned Dead Souls already, and as we were preparing for this episode, you also mentioned the impact All the King’s Men and The Last Hurrah have had on you as well. Why did you pick those three books? What stands out about them as it relates to the topic of corruption?

HS: For starters, I’ve read them. And now I’m going to read, after we do this, both books called Democracy. So the first Democracy was a novel published anonymously, like Primary Colors-style, in 1880. That became a big hit and was written by Henry Brooks Adams. It came out many, many years later after his death. And then Joan Didion’s Democracy is based on that, and both of them are sort of about, as I understand them – I haven’t read them yet – corruption and disillusionment in American governance, which there’s, from a fictional perspective, surprisingly, little of. 

All the King’s Men is by Robert Penn Warren, it’s a hell of a book. The movies are okay; the older one is much, much better. But it’s about, in fact, both these are, that and The Last Hurrah center on journalists in the sphere of politicians and observing them. All the King’s Men, which is about a decade earlier, is really, I think, ethically centered on the idea that there are no just observers, that you’re necessarily something of a participant in the events you’re observing and complicit in them and the decisions you’re making. It also has like an 85-page, or so, digression about the narrator’s…

VVG: Dissertation?

HS: Yeah! A long thing about his struggles with a dissertation. It’s awesome, and like a great weird piece of academic writing, if memory serves. And The Last Hurrah was by Connor, who’s this great, totally middlebrow writer, and Robert Penn Warren sometimes gets considered as one, I think incorrectly, for a bunch of reasons, but this is his most famous book, in part because there’s an excellent movie of it with Spencer Tracy, and it corresponds very closely with corrupt Boston Mayor James Curley, who condemned the book and, I believe, threatened to sue. And then, when it was very favorably reviewed and discussed, took credit for it, and complained about the small things that weren’t actually like him. It was a wonderful, very warm read about how retail politics works, including the corrupt decisions people make in the course of that, and this goes back to Plunkitt of Tammany Hall stuff and the idea of honest corruption, honest graft. And it’s right at the edges of that, and these are the questions you ask.  People who owe other people favors to get this institutional support and other things they need to go into office are going to pay some of those back.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Harry Siegel by Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY.

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Harry Siegel

“Supreme Court Legalizes After-the-Fact Bribery” New York Daily News | June 6, 2024 • “Scofflaw Trump is a Defaming Menace to America” New York Daily News | January 27, 2024 • The muckrackers and the gunslingers: What’s in the balance as the Supreme Court gets ready to take up a legal challenge to New York’s tough firearm laws” New York Daily News | February 1, 2019

Others:

“English, loanword champion of the world” by Britt Peterson | The Boston Globe | June 29, 2014 • Breaking Bad • The Sopranos • Succession • Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravations by Amman Shea • Thomas Malthus • Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis • e.e. cummings • Krazy Kat by George Harriman • Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol • All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren • The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor • Democracy by Joan Didion • Democracy and American Novel by Henry Brooks Adams • Primary Colors by Joe Klein • Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by William R. Riordon • The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan • The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings of Theodore Roosevelt: A Reader by Theodore Roosevelt