When Bad Men Combine: The Star Route Scandal and the Twilight of Gilded Age Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This crisply written book tells the story of the Star Route scandal, a sprawling case of corruption in the U.S. Postal Service that convulsed American politics in the early 1880s. Star Routes were mail delivery routes paid for by the postal service but operated by private contractors. Entrepreneurs bid for postal contracts, promising to deliver mail along a given route for a particular price. Thousands of these routes existed all over the country, with the longest, most potentially lucrative routes traversing the trans-Mississippi West. The situation was rife with graft opportunities. Speculators made fortunes by winning and then subcontracting multiple postal routes. Bribes and kickbacks to post office officials were widespread. Individuals could collude to drive out rival bidders or win contracts with phony bids, then default, letting confederates take over those routes at much-inflated prices. In 1881, the postal service paid one ring, surrounding former Arkansas senator Stephen W. Dorsey, over $100,000 to deliver just $582 worth of mail. That was for only one route, over the course of one year.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".