Politics & Power Quote by Charles Evans Hughes

Publicity, for Hughes, isn’t celebrity or spectacle; it’s disinfectant. The line lands with a Progressive Era confidence that sunlight can do what formal checks sometimes can’t: force institutions to behave. As a jurist and later a statesman, Hughes is arguing for a civic technology as much as a moral one. Make wrongdoing visible and you don’t need to rely solely on courts, party bosses, or backroom bargains; you activate a parallel system of accountability that runs on shame, outrage, and legitimacy.

The phrasing is carefully legalistic. “Great purifier” borrows the language of contamination, implying politics naturally tends toward rot when sealed off from scrutiny. “Sets in action” makes publicity sound like a trigger, not a sermon. This isn’t naive faith in people’s goodness; it’s an instrumental faith in pressure. Hughes frames public opinion as a force of nature - impersonal, relentless - and that’s the subtext: officials may ignore petitions, but they fear the crowd once it’s organized by knowledge.

The most revealing move is the confident final claim: “in this country public opinion controls the courses of the nation.” It’s both an assertion and a warning. The democratic ideal is that voters steer the ship; the reality, Hughes suggests, is that perception does. That faith made sense in a moment when muckrakers, mass-circulation newspapers, and reform movements were redefining governance. It also hints at the gamble: if publicity is the purifier, whoever controls the spotlight can decide what counts as “dirty.”