In October 1930, Paul Vanorden Shaw sought to explain why US citizens don’t take to the streets to protest corruption like their peers in Latin America. “With all frankness,” the Brazilian-born scholar and journalist wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “let us admit that there have been municipal, State and national governments in the United States just as corrupt as those overthrown by revolution in Latin America. Yet the Latin Americans revolted and American citizens did not. Why?”

Shaw raised a number of pseudoscientific arguments we would flatly dismiss today, like the idea that Latin Americans mature faster than people in cooler climes, leading to more intense political outbursts beneath the equator. But the heart of his explanation merits a closer look:

That the American does not revolt is not because he is a coward. His business interests and instincts develop in him an aversion to disorder . . . When he runs into graft and corruption, he groans with despair but makes a mental note to vote against the grafting party in the next election and also to ask Smith to help cast out the crooks with his vote.