History

Must reads

 * Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: 1967)
 * Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: 1969)
 * J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975)
 * John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion or Court vs. Country: A Comparison of the Revolutionary Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)," in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1981), 368-453.
 * Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. 39 (1982), pp. 401-41.
 * Isaac Kramnick, "Republicanism Revisionism Revisited," American Historical Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (June 1982), pp. 629-64.
 * Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 1 (June 1992), pp. 11-38.
 * Gabriel Kolko, "| Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916." Greenwood Pub Group; New Ed edition (January 1977). An excellent history of the origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission and its corruption by railroad interests. Ralph Nader produced a report documenting the outcome in 1970, which was | reported on by Time magazine.

Please research

 * The notion of "corruption" you appear to have in mind seems very similar to that targeted by "civic republicanism" or "Country" ideology of Britain in the early eighteenth century. For a time, historians of early America believed that the Revolutionary leaders were primarily motivated by civic republican ideology, but that idea has waned somewhat in recent years (see Rodgers).