I believe that the term “governor” and “corruption” have been synonymous since at least 70 B.C. when Cicero (above) made the legal case against Caius Verres, the Roman governor of Sicily. Amongst a host of other allegations, Cicero charged that Verres had famously stripped the interior of that contented island of everything of value, and then forced the city of Syracuse to build and crew a new ship each year to transport Verres’ plunder back to Rome, where he kept the plunder and sold the ship. And kept the money. Before the prosecution had even finished its case, on the advice of his own lawyer, Verres fled Italy with a fair part of his wealth still intact. We know this because years later Mark Anthony had Verres executed, in order to steal what Verres had stolen from Sicily. The murder of corrupt Roman officials by other corrupt Roman officials had, by then, become part of the circle of life.
Fifteen hundred years later the image of the corrupt governor had changed very little, except in nationality. A prime example was William Crosby (above), who was English governor of Minorca (the name means “the lesser island”). The strategic little island is 200 miles off the coast from Barcelona, Spain and 300 miles west of Sardinia. The British Navy had just seized the island from the Spanish in 1708, and the Treaty of Utrecht had not officially awarded it to England until 1713, leaving the Spanish population far from resigned to British rule. So in 1718 the British government could not afford to just look the other way when Governor Crosby seized a shipload of snuff, valued at nine thousand pounds sterling. 
The problem was that Crosby had just mugged a local power broker. His name was Bonaventura Capedvilla, a Portuguese merchant and it had been his snuff that had been filched by Crosby. Capedvilla contended that he had paid the import duties on the snuff, and when the local authorities began to ask questions, Governor Crosby simply refused to allow them access to government documents. But Capedvilla was wealthy enough and powerful enough to fight back against Crosby. Besides, Portugal was an English ally in their war against Spain, and the British government really could not afford to offend one of Portugal's richest citizens. So Señor Capedvilla appealed directly to the Privy Counsel in London, and eventually, in 1722, they requested a look at the documents themselves. When Crosby eventually responded, (in 1724) it was immediately clear that the importation papers he offered as proof had been “tampered” with. In other words they had been forged. The Privy Council finally (in 1728) ordered Crosby to pay Capedvilla ten thousand pounds sterling. He did but it did great damage to his personal bank account. The Coouncil also decided that perhaps it would be better if Crosby were governor of some other island not quite so vital to the security of Great Britain. And that could end up hurting his bank account even more.
In 1730, as Governor Crosby packed his bags to take up his new posting to the Leeward Islands off the north coast of Venezuela, he received word that John Montgomerie, the royal Governor of New York and New Jersey in America, had just dropped dead of a stroke. Immediately William Crosby made his way to London to pay a little visit to Thomas Pelham-Holles, the duke of Newcastle. Newcastle had been the secretary of state for the Southern Department, which included everything in America south of Canada. He was also a first cousin to Grace Montague, who was Cosby’s wife. And Newcastle was ever happy to see another relative doing well in government service.
And that was why, in 1731, William Crosby arrived in New York armed with the royal seal of approval and carrying his own particular brand of insensitive and clumsy avariciousness still intact. To quote one of Crosby’s staunchest critics, "The Government of New York by the death of Coll Montgomerie came seasonably in (Crosby’s) way to repair his broken fortune." When a New Yorker later pointed out that one of Crosby’s actions was illegal, he answered directly, “How, gentlemen, do you think I mind that: alas! I have great interests in England, of the Dukes of New Castle, Montague and Lord Halifax." Now that is arrogance with its mask off.
When Montgomerie had died, 71 year old Rip Van Dam (above) was asked by the colonial council to step in to manage the colony. Shortly after his arrival in New York, William Crosby asked Van Dam to turn over half of the salary he had collected since Montgomerie’s death. That was actually a fairly common practice in the British Empire, but Van Dam was a survivor of the Dutch power structure (they had founded the colony) and he did not take kindly to the rude manners and uneducated brashness of the new royal governor. He told Crosby that by his calculations Crosby actually owed him four thousand pounds. Crosby did not find that very funny, and in August of 1732 he sued Van Dam for half of his salary.
Crosby was of course, not going to allow a jury to tell him what was legal. So he instructed the Colonies’ three judge Supreme Court to hear the case. Van Dam challenged the legality of that order, and his challenge was argued before…the three judges of the Supreme Court. Their vote was two-to-one, in Crosby’s favor. Crosby then ordered the dismissal of Chief Justice Lewis Morris, the only court member with the courage to vote against the governor. Justice Morris laid out his reasons for opposing Crosby’s actions in a letter he had printed up by the “second” printer in the colony, Mr. John Peter Zenger. The success of that broadsheet in rallying the citizens against Corsby convinced certain wealthy citizens to start an opposition newspaper, the weekly “New York Gazette”, again using the printing press operated by Mr. Zenger. Crosby paid little attention, as he was busy stealing land from the Indians, from the original Dutch settlers and from recent English immigrants. But finally, after certain colonists complained about him to London, Crosby decided to take action. In November of 1734 he ordered Zenger arrested.
And that is how a lowly German immigrant - Peter Zenger - who could barely spell in English, became the center of the first great confrontation between Americans seeking “Liberty and Justice” and the caprice of a Royal prerogative. In the trial on August 5, 1734, an American jury decided that the truth of an allegation was a valid defense against libel, and found Zenger not guilty.
"Truth" was not an accepted legal argument against libel at the time, and it would be some years before it would gain acceptance. But long before that happened Governor William Crosby had answered to a higher court. In early March of 1736 the pompus jerk died of tuberculosis at the Governor’s house, in New York City. He was buried in St. George’s Chapel (below), but in 1788 the post-revolutionary American governor of New York had the last word on the old royal governor, when he ordered Crosby's remains be moved to the graveyard at St. Paul’s Church, and dumped in an unmarked grave.
And good riddance, to him.
And good riddance, to him.- 30 -
In fact, in an age of unlabeled Corporate Video News Releases (VNRs) padding out local news programming from sea to shinning sea it’s gotten easier to fool the fools, not harder. In Edgar Allen Poe’s day fake news had to be an inside job. Even Poe himself did it. Poe had already written “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” but when he moved to Baltimore with a sick wife he had just $5 in his pocket. And as a hungry writer who has produced articles for such distinguished men’s publications as “Velvet” and “Velvet Talks”, (back in the 1980's they paid $125 for 1200 obscene words and $25 for three accompanying obscene “letters”) I can sympathize with Edgar.
Now, Edgar Allen Poe was “odd”. Both his parents died when he was young. He was adopted by a wealthy manic depressive patriarch who was alternately loving and vicious toward him. The result was that Poe became an un-socialized morose alcoholic who as a college student confided to his roommate that he had “joked” that he was going to murder their landlord, and the landlord had believed him: ha, ha. Poe was married in 1835, when he was 25, to the sickly Miss Virginia Clemm, who was just 13 years old. Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with this guy.
Faced with imminent starvation Poe undoubtedly sought out Locke’s advice, and probably based on what Locke told him, Poe wrote what later would be called “The Great Balloon Hoax of 1844”, or as I like to call it, “72 Hours of Hot Air”. The headlines in the Sun read, “Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three days!...in the Steering Balloon “Victoria”, after a passage of Seventy-five hours from Land to Land! Full Particulars of the Voyage!” According to the 5,000 word front page story, the plan had been to cross the English Channel suspended beneath a silk dirigible filled with 40,000 cubic feet of coal tar gas, but once airborne above Wales, and impressed with their “Archimedean Screw” propeller, the decision was made “on the fly” to sail to North America instead.
“We soon found ourselves driving out to sea at the rate of not less, certainly, than 50 or 60 miles an hour…as the shades of night have closed around us, we made a rough estimate of the distance traversed. It could not have been less than 500 miles…The wind was from the East all night…We suffered no little from cold and dampness…Sunday, the 7th, this morning the gale…had subsided to an eight or nine knot breeze, and bears us, perhaps, 30 miles an hour, or more…at sundown, we are holding our course due West...Monday the 8th, the wind was blowing steadily and strongly from the North-East all day…Tuesday, the 9th One P.M. We are in full view if the low coast of South Carolina. The great problem is accomplished. We have crossed the Atlantic – fairly and easily in a balloon! God be praised!”
According to Poe’s unbiased reporting, the day of publication the Sun’s offices were besieged from soon after sunrise till two o’clock in the afternoon. “As soon as the first copies made their way into the streets, they were bought up," wrote Poe, "at almost any price. I saw a half a dollar given, in one instance, for a single paper…I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy.” And Poe was there, telling anyone who would listen that he was the author of the story, and…that it was false. Now why would he do that?
Poor old Poe had a number of personality traits that confused most people who liked him. For instance, he could not stop himself from maintaining contact with the writer Elizabeth Ellet, a carnivorous little “pot-stirrer” who made passes at Edgar in German. I mean, German has always been the language of love, hasn’t it? “Halten Sie mich schlieben, meine little Turtle Dove?” Doesn’t that make you feel all romantic? And then when Poe cut off all contact with her, she "sic’ed" her brother on him. Poe asked a friend to loan him a gun for the duel, and the friend bluntly said he didn’t believe Poe. They ended up beating each other up, over a woman who clearly didn’t think much of either of them; men. Sigh.
Me, I’m willing to bet that Poe was paid $25 for writing the back page mea culpa. The publishing business hasn’t changed much in 200 years. And neither has the life of writers. Poe’s wife died of tuberculoses in New York, three years after the Balloon Hoax. And two years later the New York Sun, which sold for a penny a copy, was bought for $250,000 (more than $6 million in today’s dollars). That was the same year that Edgar Allen Poe died in Baltimore, flat broke as usual. Sigh.
Jimmy was an Irishman, and so English –English was a second language to him, which may help explain his lyrics for “Every gal in Cons-tan-tinople, lives in Istanbul, not Con-stan-tinople, so if you've got a date in Cons-tan-tinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul.” (The name was officially changed in 1930, at the behest of the Turkish Post Office.) 
I have a long held the image of the “Teddy Bears Picnic” being sung by that looming giant of economists, John Maynard Keynes. Can’t you just hear him croaking in his perfectly correct Eton English? “If you go down to the woods today you better not go alone. It’s lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home.” I can.
Would you like to know what kind of an economist Keynes was? He was married to a ballarina, that's what kind of an economist he was. He was attracted to drama. Interesting, for a student of "the dismal science" of economics.
But things change over time, and eventually we Americans tried to pay for our “Great Society” and the Vietnam War, both at the same time, and both without raising taxes. You know what? You can’t do that, no matter how many voters may want to believe that you can, you can’t, as George Bush Jr. could now explain if he had two neurons worth of introspection .
The immediate effect was that the U.S. was plagued by both inflation and a stagnant economy, called “Stagflation”. Wages were stuck. The nation was losing jobs because the Federal deficits were gobbling up all the available dollars. Businesses couldn’t borrow, so they were shutting down. And, as I recall, that was when hamburger jumped from 35 cents a pound to something closer to a $1.25 a pound. It is not the same situation we face today, but at the time it was an untenable situation. But “Tricky Dick” eventually found a way to make it "tenable". He took America off the gold standard.
In the stroke of a pen the dollar was no longer backed by gold. That’s when the treasury stopped issuing real dollars and started issuing “silver certificates”. Read your dollar sometime. With out the limit of gold reserves on the treasury, the printing presses were free to work overtime, and suddenly you could print enough money to afford any war you wanted for however long you wanted.
This period also saw the introduction of the computer into the general economy, so a great deal of new wealth was also being created. But that only masked the growing instability of the new monetary system Nixon had placed us on. Economists call it “Floating Currency” but I call it the “Trust Economy”. There is no longer any gold behind your dollar, and, really, there is no silver, either. You trust that your dollar will provide you with goods and services of value.
I don’t blame Nixon for our current mess. Politicians are not hired to create perfect systems, just systems that can function for the time being. But what the sub-prime mortgage fiasco has proven, and the dot-com bubble proved before that, and the Savings & Loan debacle proved before that, is that without regulation there can be no trust. To quote Ronald Regan; “Trust and verify.” And to quote French President Sarkozy, “We must rethink the financial system from scratch, as at Bretton Woods”. And this time we (the United States) ain’t got the gold, so we ain’t making the rules. Those days are past. Or as Jimmy Kennedy put it, “No, you can't go back to Con-stan-tinople, been a long time gone, Con-stan-tinople, Why did Con-tan-tinople get the works? That’s nobody's business but the Turks.” Words of wisdom to ponder as we enter the woods again.
