ABSTRACT
The United States came into being on the back of "aristocratic corruption," sequed into "republican corruption" shortly after the Revolution, moved from there to overt cronyism and a systematized patronage reward system, and then perfected machine politics in the early twentieth century. The Pendleton Act created a civil service, designed to escape the scourge of patronage, and the Tillman Act prevented corporations from directly bankrolling election campaigns. In 1987 a group of psychologists published The Compleat Academic: A Practical Guide for the Beginning Social Scientist, which has apparently become a standard reference for young professors, and not only psychologists. In the early 1960s, Robert K. Merton inspired Eugene Garfield to perfect the Social Science Citation Index, in part to benefit the former's work on the Matthew Effect and related phenomena in the sociology of the physical sciences.
