I am interested in the discussion over a hundred years ago about the robber baron generation and what brought the corruption to an end – in this case, Boss Tweed. (The Arena, 1905, in the Walt Whitman files) Italics mine.
“Tweed thus early learned what every great public plunderer, thief and corruptionist
since that day has known and felt,—namely, that the fearless and incorruptible cartoonist
is the deadly enemy of wholesale corruption, the debauching of public officials, the defying
of the laws made to protect the people, and the robbery of the public…”