Civil Service Reform

Civil Service Reform. Early nineteenth‐century Americans, with the widest suffrage in the world and many offices to be filled by election, invented mass‐based political parties to nominate and elect candidates. Since electioneering required time and money that few Americans could spare, political leaders recruited civil servants (or would‐be civil servants) to perform party work and contribute to the party a percentage of their salary (called a political assessment). Local, state, and federal civil officers accepted this arrangement, because not to do so would jeopardize their jobs. If reelected, the patron could replace a recalcitrant civil servant; if the patron was defeated, his victorious opponent would distribute the spoils of office (the patronage) among his party workers. This spoils system, critics maintained, had a deleterious effect on the civil service and on politics. Government service suffered from frequent turnover and low morals among workers more loyal to their patron than to their agency. And the patronage system enabled political bosses to control party machinery and determine the fate of aspiring politicians.

After the Civil War, merchants angered by customhouse irregularities and corruption; urban professionals in the Northeast; and intellectuals (especially editors and writers) embraced civil service reform. Leaders of the National Civil‐Service Reform League included such figures as Carl Schurz (1829–1906), a Republican senator and journalist; Edwin L. Godkin (1831–1902), editor of The Nation; and George William Curtis (1824–1892), editor of Harper's Weekly. These reform‐minded Republicans deplored their party's crassness and corruption in the era of Ulysses S. Grant and James G. Blaine.

Civil service reformers advocated open, competitive examinations for government work and a ban on political assessments. Since this reform was modeled on British experience and would deprive the political parties of money and workers, politicians of both parties attacked it as antidemocratic and monarchical. Supporters claimed that this reform would introduce efficient business practices in the civil service and raise the level of party politics. Although civil service reform was introduced in the New York Customhouse (the nation's largest office) in 1879 during the Rutherford Hayes administration, it was the shocking assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a mentally deranged disappointed office‐seeker that spurred reform on the federal level. After the Republican party lost the midterm election of 1882, a lame‐duck Congress passed the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. While that act initially applied to (classified) only 10 percent of federal workers, outgoing presidents, to freeze their partisans in office, gradually extended the ranks of classified workers. By the Progressive Era, most important nonpolicy‐making positions were classified.

Civil service reform profoundly affected American society and politics. By laying the base for professional bureaucracies, it enabled twentieth‐century government on all levels to play a larger role in American society. But this innovation, by depriving political parties of a dependable source of funds and workers, also forced politicians to rely on, and become beholden to, corporations and political‐action committees to finance soaring campaign costs in the age of television.
See also Antebellum Era; Gilded Age; Jackson, Andrew; Roosevelt, Theodore.

Bibliography

Ari Hoogenboom , Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883, 1961.

Ari Hoogenboom