Cameron’s Rule of Etiquette
You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
This rule is attributed to Simon Cameron, powerful Pennsylvanian politician, U.S. Senator, and first secretary of war, in Abraham Lincoln’s first administration. In practice, Secretary Cameron’s mutual back-scratching bore a close resemblance to corruption, with an unseemly number of war contracts being awarded without competitive bidding to firms in his own state. He even scratched his own back, with much military traffic being routed over railroads in which he and the assistant secretary of war had direct financial interests. In all of this, Cameron was running true to form: long before the war started, he was so widely believed to have cheated an Indian tribe on a supply contract that he was nicknamed ‘the Winnebago Chief.’
Lincoln dealt with the Cameron scandal by asking for his resignation from the cabinet in January 1862. The House of Representatives launched an investigation that eventually resulted in a formal censure of the Secretary’s conduct, but Lincoln, an astute politician himself, spirited Cameron away in the meantime by naming him ambassador to Russia.
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