The legislature has been the focal point of public outrage in Michigan, as newspapers across the state have described graphically years of unrestrained pillage of the House Fiscal Agency's budget, the dubious role of legislators in administrative decisions conferring million-dollar windfalls on garbage barons, resort developers and snake-oil "technology" peddlers, and the revolving doors between legislative offices and lobbying dens.

Historical perspective can be useful as you confront concerned and disenchanted constituents. While it is difficult to judge comparative degrees of depravity, as bread-and-circus drama the Lansing scene of today pales by comparison to the Lansing of the mid-1940s, when the high-powered deal-making among lobbyists and legislators implicated some of Michigan's most powerful political, business and criminal figures in the murder of a state senator.

In 1943 the executive secretary of the Michigan Medical Sochety was convicted of bribery for a 1939 offer of a free California trip to a member of the Michigan House of Representatives in exchange for support of legislation barring osteopaths from certain medical practices. In the meantime, the representative, Warren Hooper of Adrian, had become both chairman of the House Public Health Committee and paid executive secretary of the Michigan Association of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons! Hooper reported the Medical Society's bribe offer only after an official inquiry into legislative corruption had been forced on Attorney General Herbert Rushton (himself a former state senator) by reports of an independent Detroit Citizens' League investigation and by another representative's unwitting revelation of a bribe when he told reporters that a man in a gray suit had stuffed $1,350 and a note instructing him to vote against an anti-chain-bank bill into his overcoat pocket in the Capitol cloakroom.

In August 1944 a jury convicted 20 current or former legislators and four finance-company officials of bribery involving a 1939 automobile financing bill. A key witness was attorney and lobbyist Charles Fitch Hemans, who was also to be a witness in the anti-chain-bank-bill case. By late 1944, the principle witness in the chain-bank case was Representative (and Senator-elect) Warren Hooper. Under intense grand-jury interrogation, Hooper had crumbled, admitting that he was on the payroll of Grand Rapids political boss Frank D. McKay and accusing McKay of bribery to kill the anti-chain-bank bill and legislation to curb corruption in horse-race betting.

Indicted in December 1944, McKay became the primary target of the corruption investigation. Michigan's Republican national committeeman and founder of General Tire Company, McKay had served three terms as state treasurer (leaving office in 1931 under the cloud of a grand jury investigation into his handling of state funds). As treasurer, McKay had insured that the state purchased only General Tire products (including inventories of obsolete and flawed tires). Later, he was reputed to have used his influence over Governor Frank Fitzgerald to protect illegal gambling operations and to have his cronies appointed state purchasing director and chairmen of the Liquor Control and Corrections Commissions. In the early 1940s federal grand juries indicted McKay for shaking down distillers to get their products into state liquor stores, for defrauding the city of Grand Rapids through rigged bids on municipal bonds, and for extorting $10,000 from Edsel Ford, supposedly to pay party campaign debts. But, all of McKay's trials ended in acquittals.

The testimony of Senator Hooper and lobbyist Hemans was expected to bring McKay's run of legal luck to an end. However, on the evening of January 11, 1945, en route from Lansing to Adrian, Senator Hooper was murdered in what authors Bruce Rubenstein and Lawrence Ziewacz (THREE BULLETS SEALED HIS LIPS, Michigan State University Press, 1987) concluded was a plot involving McKay, Jackson State Prison officials and Purple Gang members in and outside of Jackson Prison.

Further dooming McKay's prosecution, Hemans refused to testify in the anti-chain-bank case, eventually fleeing to Washington, D.C., where he was arrested for unlawful flight from Michigan, convicted and sentenced to a year and a half in federal prison. On his release Hemans was rewarded with a high-paying position by Charles Bohn, president of Bohn Aluminum Company and a member of the board of directors of Michigan National Bank, the state's largest chain bank; Bohn was one of those against whom Hemans had refused to testify.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, observing the blatant buying and selling of legislative influence and votes involving auto insurance, medical malpractice insurance, telecommunications, "economic development" grants and loans, landfill and other environmental regulation, state contracts, criminal investigations, ..., it is difficult to conclude that anything has really changed in Michigan.

Consider a 1992 incident eerily reminiscent of Hooper, his public health committee, Medical Society bribes, the anti-chain-bank bill and related scandals of the 1940s: Senator John Pridnia adjourned a Public Health Committee hearing on a bill favorable to chiropractors, crossed the street from the Capitol to the Michigan National Bank's tower, a lobbyists' den, to pick up checks at a chiropractor-sponsored fund-raiser, and later reconvened the hearing and favorably reported the chiropractors' bill.

As in the 1940s, criminal investigations, occasionally, are initiated, as in the case of the House Fiscal Agency, and convictions, occasionally, are obtained, as in the Michigan Tech Ventures case. Sufficiently dangerous lips might again be sealed by a sweet-heart job or, if necessary, by three bullets.

However, one contrast can be drawn between the prosecutions of the 1940s and those of the 1990s: In the earlier cases the 62 people convicted included a former lieutenant governor, 12 state senators, 11 state representatives, and scores of prosecuting attorneys, police officials and lobbyists. In the 1990s it is very unlikely that the lieutenant governor, legislators or lobbyists will be either indicted or convicted for anything other than the simplest fraud (for example, billing the state for bogus travel expenses).

The legislature learned the lesson of the 1940s corruption prosecutions. No longer do lobbyists surreptitiously place instructions and $1,350 in coat pockets in the Capitol cloakroom. Rather, they openly tell legislators what legislation they want and openly hand legislators their checks, payable to "campaign accounts" and "office holder expense funds," which the legislators then use to pay for their own trips to California (and elsewhere), to compensate their wives for "secretarial services," to pay their children for "shoveling snow" at "district offices" (their homes), to purchase clothing, to buy presents for supporters, ... Legislators and lobbyists no longer need fear prosecution for what would have been bribery in the 1940s, for the very simple reason that the legislature legalized that bribery.

Postscript to Legislators: Read THREE BULLETS SEALED HIS LIPS and relieve your constituents' fears: It is less likely today that you will be so dangerous as to warrant three bullets.