Politics & Power Quote by Howard Crosby

Crosby’s line reads like a moral trap set for the comfortably disengaged. It indicts not only corruption in politics but the bourgeois reflex to treat that corruption as an alibi for retreat. The “cesspool” metaphor does two things at once: it concedes the obvious ugliness of public life while refusing to let that ugliness serve as an excuse. The stinging pivot is “double crime.” Crosby isn’t describing a personal preference; he’s announcing culpability. If politics rots, it’s because decent people helped create the conditions for rot by abandoning the field to the shameless.

As a 19th-century clergyman, Crosby is speaking from a pulpit culture that understood citizenship as moral duty, not lifestyle choice. In the Gilded Age-adjacent atmosphere of machines, patronage, and rising urban inequality, “avoid it” names a specific class posture: the respectable citizen who benefits from order but refuses the messy labor of maintaining it. The subtext is democratic: politics is not something “they” do to “us.” It’s a commons, and neglect is participation by default.

The quote works because it weaponizes shame without piety. “Let politics become” implies passivity that masquerades as innocence. Crosby punctures that pose. If you step back because the water is dirty, you’ve already been standing by while it was poisoned. The moral demand is blunt: enter the mess, or admit you helped make it.