Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United Statesby
Murray
N. Rothbard
The free market economy provides an unparalleled example of a continuing healthy circulation of elites. In this dynamic economy, failure to keep up with competitors, failure to satisfy the demands of consumers in the best possible way, will topple elites quickly and establish new ones who do the job better. Ludwig von Mises wrote frequently of the inappropriateness of leftists referring to so-and-so as the "Steel King" or the "Automobile King"; for consumers frequently uncrown these alleged monarchs. Dethroning of financial monarchs on Wall Street is a frequent phenomenon. There are innumerable striking examples of big businesses failing to grasp the importance of a new product or new development, and of losing out to newer upstarts. I will refer to only two glaring cases experienced in my lifetime: the cry of leftists to "break up A&P" in the 1930s because of its alleged "monopoly" of the retail grocery business; and the failure of the old-time photography "monopolist" Eastman-Kodak to grasp the enormous significance, after World War II, of either instant photography or xerography, thereby leaving the field to newer, and more alert competitors. By its nature, government is not subject to the profit-and-loss test, to the domination by the consumers, of the free market. Even voluntary non-profit organizations, while not seeking maximum profit, at least have to be efficient enough to avoid severe losses or bankruptcy. Furthermore, such voluntary organizations at least must satisfy the values and demands of their donors, if not the users of the good or service as in the profit-making market. But government is unique among organizations in attaining its revenue via the coercion of taxpayers. Hence, government suffers no worries about losses or bankruptcy; it need serve no one except itself. The only limit on government is the enormously wide one of people rising up to refuse to obey its orders (including taxes); short of such revolution, however, there is little to limit government or to check the entrenchment or burgeoning of its elite.[1]
Government, in short, is particularly subject to the well-known evils of an arrogant, hidebound, inefficient, red-tape-ridden, ever-expanding "bureaucracy." Socialists, even during the seeming heyday of the Soviet Union, were often worried about the problem of bureaucracy, and have tried vainly to detach government from its bureaucratic aspect. But Mises trenchantly pointed out in his classic Bureaucracy that all such hopes are in vain. Bureaucracy, with all its evident evils, goes hand-in-hand with government. A profit-making firm saves and invests its money, attempting to make profits and avoid losses; its use of funds is flexible, dependent on its profit-seeking decisions. But bureaucratic agencies have their allocated funds from the government budget. And strict, precise, quibbling rule-keeping is vital so that each bureaucrat and sub-bureaucrat can demonstrate that he has used the funds in the manner designated by the legislature or Chief Executive, and has not put them into his own pocket or spent them in some other, non-authorized way.[2] Mises points out a crucial difference between bureaucratic and profit management. Business expenditures and products are gauged by the valuations of consumers, whose judgments "are congealed into an impersonal phenomenon, the market price." Moreover, consumer judgments are levied on the goods and services, not on the producers themselves. "The seller-buyer nexus as well as the employer-employee relation in profit-seeking business," Mises declares, "is a deal from which both parties derive an advantage." But in government, in bureaucratic organization, on the other hand, what the nation "gets for the expenditure, the service rendered, cannot be appraised in terms of money, however important and valuable this 'output' may be." Instead, Mises points out, "its appraisal depends on the discretion of the government" – that is, on arbitrary, personal decisions. Mises adds that "the nexus between superior and subordinate is personal. The subordinate depends on the superior's judgment of his personality, not of his work." In short, in government bureaucracy, there is no reality check.[3] As Mises analyzes the difference for a branch agency: In a government bureau,
In a business firm on the market, the desires and goals of the managers are yoked to the profit-making goals of the owners. As Mises says, the manager of a branch must make sure that his branch contributes to the profit of the firm. But, shorn of the regiment of profit-and-loss, the desires and goals of the managers, limited only by the prescriptions and budget of the central legislature or planning board, necessarily take control. And that goal, guided only by the vague rubric of the "public interest," amounts to increasing the income and prestige of the manager. In a rule-bound bureaucracy, that income and status inevitably depend on how many sub-bureaucrats report to that manager. Hence, each agency and department of government engage in fierce turf wars, each attempting to add to its functions and the number of its employees, and to grab functions from other agencies. So that while the natural tendency of firms or institutions on the free market is to be as efficient as possible in serving the demands of consumers, the natural tendency of government bureaucracy is to grow, and grow, and grow, at the expense of the fleeced and benighted tax-payers.
If the watchword of the market economy is profit, the watchword of bureaucracy is growth. How are these respective objectives to be achieved? The way to attain profit in a market economy is to beat the competitors in the dynamic, ever-changing process of satisfying consumer demands in the best possible way: to create a self-service supermarket instead of the older grocery store (even a chain store), or to create a Polaroid or a Xerox process. In other words, to produce concrete goods or services that consumers will be willing to pay for. But to attain growth, the bureaucratic manager must convince the legislature or planning board that his service will, in some vague way, aid the "public interest" or the "general welfare." Since the taxpayer is forced to pay, there is not only no incentive or reason for the bureaucrat to be efficient; there is no way that a bureaucrat, even with the most eager will in the world, can find out what the consumers want and how to meet their demands. Users pay little or nothing for the service, and even if they do, investors are not allowed to experience profit or loss from investing in producing that service. Therefore, the consumers will simply have to allow the bureaucrats to bestow their services upon them, whether the consumers like it or not. In building and operating a dam, for example, the government is bound to be inefficient, to subsidize some citizens at the expense of others, to misallocate resources, and generally to be at sea without a rudder in supplying the service. Moreover, for some citizens, the dam may not be a service at all; in the jargon of economists, for some people, the dam may be a "bad" not a "good." Thus, for environmentalists who are philosophically opposed to dams, or to farmers and homeowners whose property may be confiscated and flooded by the Dam Authority, this "service" is clearly a negative one. What is to happen to their rights and properties? Thus, government action is not only bound to be inefficient, and coercive against taxpayers; it is also bound to be redistributive for some groups at the expense of others. The major group the bureaucrats benefit is, of course, themselves. Their entire income is extracted at the expense of taxpayers. As John C. Calhoun pointed out in his brilliant Disquisition on Government, bureaucrats pay no taxes; their alleged tax payments are a mere accounting fiction. The existence of government bureaucracy, Calhoun pointed out, creates two great conflicting classes in society: the net taxpayers, and the net tax-consumers. The greater the scope of taxes and of government, then, the greater the inevitable class conflict created in society. For, as Calhoun states:
How, then can the bureaucrats achieve their overriding goal of adding to the number of their employees and therefore of their income? Only by persuading the legislature or the planning board, or the mass of public opinion as a whole, that their particular government agency is worthy of an increase in its budget. But how can it do that, since it cannot sell services on the market, and since, moreover, its activities are necessarily redistributive and injure instead of benefit many of the consumers? What it must do is to "engineer consent," that is, it must falsely persuade the public or the legislature that its activities are a shining benefit instead of a bane to the consumers and the taxpayers. To engineer consent, it must use or employ intellectuals, the opinion-molding class in society, to persuade the public or the legislature of its function as a source of universal blessing. And when those intellectuals, or propagandists, are employed by the agency itself, this adds insult to the injury inflicted upon the taxpayers: for the taxpayers are forced to pay for their own deliberate miseducation. It is intriguing that left-liberals invariably castigate advertising on the market for being shrill, for being misleading, and for artificially "creating" consumer demand. And yet, advertising is the indispensable method by which vital information is conveyed to the consumer – about the nature and quality of the product, and about its price and where it is offered. Oddly enough, liberals never level their critiques on the one area where they do strongly apply: the propaganda, the public relations, the hokum, put out by government. The difference is that all market advertising is soon put to a direct test: does this radio or TV work? But with government, there is no such direct consumer test: there is no way in which the citizen or voter can figure out rapidly how a specific policy worked. Furthermore, in elections, the voter is not presented with a specific program to consider: he must choose between a package deal of a legislator or chief executive for X number of years, and he is stuck for that period of time. And since there is no direct policy test, we arrive at the commonly deplored failure of the modern democratic process to discuss issues or policy, but instead to concentrate on television demagogy.[6] II. The Structure and Goals of Bureaucracy Bureaucracy is necessarily hierarchical, first because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and secondly because bureaucracy grows by adding more subordinate layers. Since, lacking a market, there is no genuine test of "merit" in government's service to consumers, in a rule-bound bureaucracy seniority is often blithely adopted as a proxy for merit. Increasing seniority, then, leads to promotion to higher ranks, while expanding budgets take the form of multiplying the levels of ranks under you, and expanding your income and power. Bureaucratic growth occurs, then, by multiplying levels of bureaucracy.
The theory of hierarchical government bureaucracy is that information is collected in the lowest ranks of the organization, and that at each successive higher rank, the manager culls the most important information from his subordinates, separates the wheat from the chaff, and passes the culled information higher up, so that, in the end, the President, for example, dealing with intelligence operations, receives a two-page memo distilling the most important information gathered and culled from hundreds of thousands of intelligence agents. The President, then, knows more than anyone else, say, about foreign affairs. One problem with this rosy model, as Professor Gordon Tullock points out in his illuminating book, The Politics of Bureaucracy,[7] is that the model doesn't ask whether or not each bureaucrat has the incentive to pass the best distillate of truth on to his superiors. The problem is that bureaucratic favor, especially at the higher levels, depends on pleasing one's superiors, and pleasing them largely rests on telling the President and the higher bureaucrats what they want to hear. One of the great truths of human history is that one tends to shoot, or at least react badly, to the bearer of bad news. "Sire, your policy is working badly in Croatia," is not the sort of message that the President, say, wants to hear from his envoy, and, while the outcome in Croatia remains in doubt, the President and his aides want to continue to believe that their policy is doing well. Hence, the dissident is set down as a trouble-maker if not a subversive, and his career in the hierarchy is side-tracked, often permanently. In the meanwhile, the envoys or foreign service people who assure the President "things are going very well in Croatia," are hailed as perceptive fellows and their careers are advanced. And then, if years later, the dissident is proved correct, and the Croatian policy lies in shambles, is the president or any other ruler likely to turn in warm gratitude to the former dissident? Not hardly. Instead, he will still remember the dissident as a troublemaker, and he will not blame his aides, who, along with himself, have been proved wrong. For after all, didn't the great mainstream of experts make the same error? How common is sincere soul-searching and repentance for past errors among Presidents or other rulers? Those bureaucrats who are shrewd analysts of human nature, then, and who understand the way rulers operate, will, if they see that the cherished policy of their President is in grave error, tend to keep their mouths shut, and let some other sucker be the messenger of bad news and get shot down. Every human activity and institution will tend to reward those who are most able to adapt to the best route to success in that activity. Successful market entrepreneurs will be those who can best anticipate, and satisfy, consumer demands. Success in the bureaucracy on the contrary, will go to those who are most apt at (a) employing propaganda to persuade their superiors, the legislators, or the public about their great merits; and therefore (b) at understanding that the way to rise is to tell the President and the top bureaucrats what they want to hear. Hence, the higher the ranks of the bureaucracy, the more yes-men and time-servers there will tend to be. The President will often know less about what is going on than those in the lower ranks. Hence, for example, the phenomenon of President Nixon, thinking he knew more than anyone else about the Vietnam War and yet actually knowing less than the astute reader of the New York Times. For the CIA and other intelligence warnings of what was going on, developed by many of the lower officers, were screened out by the higher-ups, for being contrary to the President's preferred line, i.e., that all was going well.[8]
The standard explanation of why government grows is that, as time goes on, there is more work for government to do, and that therefore the public's "demand for government" rises. Far more accurate is the view that there is a case of an inverted Say's Law, where supply – or rather the suppliers of government "services," the bureaucracy – themselves constitute the "demand" for their own services, and that they engineer the consent of their superiors, or of the legislature, to provide the wherewithal in the form of increased taxation. Contrast the hilariously satirical, but all too perceptive account of "Parkinson's Law" of bureaucracy. Thus, Professor Parkinson asserted that, in a government bureaucracy, "there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned."[9] The continuing rise in the total of government employees "would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear."[10] Parkinson identifies two "axiomatic" underlying forces responsible for this growth: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals"; and (2) "Officials make work for each other." Parkinson begins his "model" with an official who feels himself overworked. The official could resign, but that is unthinkable; besides, he would lose his pension rights. To ask to divide his work in half with a new colleague on his own level is equally unthinkable; for his status would be cut, and he would bring in a dangerous rival for the job of his own boss when the latter retires. He could ask for one assistant under him; but that would be dangerous, because the new man might achieve something like equal status with himself. No, his preferred route is to ask for two assistants, who could then compete with each other for his favor; pretty soon, each of these new assistants will complain of overwork, and each one of these will get two assistants. The original bureaucrat now has the satisfaction of having six men under him, and he is now ready for a promotion and a substantial raise in pay. But how about the work to be done? Won't the original quantity of work be divided into seven parts, and won't each man now be absurdly and manifestly idle and underworked? No – and here is one of Parkinson's scintillating insights into the theory of bureaucracy – for one aspect of Parkinson's Law is that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Or, as Parkinson also puts it: "The thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in direct ratio with the time to be spent."[11] Here enters the second aspect of Parkinson's Law of Growth: that "officials make work for each other." For, says Parkinson, "these seven make so much work for each other that all are fully occupied," and the original man "is actually working harder than ever." Documents have to be sent to each man in turn, each has to comment on the document and send the comments to everyone else, they all have to confer on the document and the various amendments proposed, and the original man is now also wrapped up in problems of inter-personal relations between himself and his staff, and of each of his staff amongst the others. Finally, after a lengthy process of interaction, writes Parkinson, the original official produces the same reply to the document that he would have written if all his subordinates "had never been born." "Far more people," Parkinson concludes, "have taken far longer to produce the same result. No one has been idle. All have done their best."[12]
Parkinson then illustrates his law with delightful examples from the British Royal Navy. From 1914 to 1928, the number of ships in the Navy fell by 68 percent; the number of officers and men fell by 32 percent. And yet, during the same period, the number of dockyard officials and clerks in the Navy increased by 40 percent, while, even more outrageously, the number of Admiralty officials increased by over 78 percent. The annual rate of increase in the number of Admiralty officials, with little variation, was 5.6 percent. Parkinson takes another example from the British Colonial Office, from 1935 to 1954. In that period, the area and population of colonial territories remained about the same from 1935 to 1939, fell during the war until 1943, rose again until 1947, and then steadily decreased as Britain shed its Empire. And yet, in each of these two decades, the Colonial Office bureaucracy rose steadily in number by about 5.9 percent per year, regardless of what was happening in the scope of the alleged work to be done. Considering then the rate of increase each year in the Admiralty, and averaging the rates of increase of Admiralty and colonial officials, which is not, after all, more outlandish than many other statistical procedures, Parkinson triumphantly concludes that the number of officials will increase by an average of 5.75 percent per year, "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done."[13] A similar analysis was set forth earlier, in 1950, in a grievously neglected book by Connecticut attorney and farmer Thomas H. Barber, based on years of inquiry into government and on his observations of Washington bureaucracy during World War II. Barber writes that "there are two requisites for a bureaucrat's promotion, the first, the ability to get and hold votes, the second, the number of subordinates he is able to keep busy." Barber goes on:
Barber then goes on to relate a delightful example of bureaucracy in action that he had observed during World War II. He notes that there existed a department whose work, "supposing it was worth doing, which is doubtful," could have been done competently by about twenty people. It was run, as he puts it, "by a man with a bureaucratic soul." This man asked for written opinions from everyone on all sorts of subjects and had every one read and initial them:
His successor, Barber related, was a different kind of person; an old gentleman with little ambition and little regard for the taxpayer, but whose objective was to do the essential work, and keep himself and everyone else at the workplace contented. In contrast to the twelve hours a day spent in the office by his predecessor, this man spent only one-half an hour at work each morning. The rest of the day, he walked around the office, talking and joking with the employees, and played golf in the late afternoon. At the end of the first week, says Barber, "he fired about fifty of the two hundred people, apparently at random." As a result, "the work lessened considerably for the remaining ones." There was naturally a lot of discussion of this action, and "it was generally decided that he had fired the fifty he was sure he did not like." "Not a very scientific way of eliminating surplus help," adds Barber, "but it did lighten the work."
The following week, the new boss fired fifty more people, this time apparently dismissing those "he thought he did not like." In consequence, "the work for the remainder lightened enormously, though some of the essential work of those dismissed was apportioned around silently by those that remained." A few days later, another fifty people were dismissed, these being the people "he was not sure he did like." Barber notes: "With three-quarters of the force eliminated there was practically nothing left but the 'essential work', such as it was, to do." This work was done effectively in about half of each day by the fifty people remaining, "far more efficiently than it had been done by the original two hundred. The fifty did their stuff and devoted the time remaining – about half of it – to their own concerns." Barber concludes that "the old gentleman, being now surrounded only by those he knew he liked, felt he had done enough." He was in the office about an hour a day, and then he evaporated. "The 'work' was far better done than it had been, people had time to think and were not in each other's way." Barber adds that the work probably could have been done by half again of those remaining, but that then the half would "have had to work about as hard as the original two hundred had worked and there would have been no benefit to anyone but the taxpayers."[15] In addition to this keen treatment of bureaucracy, Thomas Barber was perhaps the first person to arrive at the essence of what is now called "public choice" analysis in the economics profession. Barber notes the "constant tendency for all governments to grow both in size and in authority." Why? Barber answers:
What public choicer has put it better? III. Limiting Terms of Office in the Original American States The great Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto stressed the importance for society of the "circulation of elites," that elites not become entrenched and solidified.[17] In the market, elites circulate rapidly and smoothly, in accordance with the most efficient service to meet the desires of consumers. But what of government? In the sphere of government, there is no built-in process for the circulation of elites, and so the natural tendency for the burgeoning, entrenching and rigidifying of bureaucracy tends to prevail. The Founding Fathers of the American republics – and it is important to stress that thirteen republican polities were founded in the several states years before the possibly misguided leap into the American Constitution – were very much alive to the problem of bureaucracy and of government power. Guided by a blend of libertarian and classical republican thought, they attempted, for the first time in human history, to construct deliberately a new political order in which government power would be decentralized, and be strictly confined to the task of keeping the peace, of insuring domestic tranquility. The program of at least the dominant libertarian-republican wing of the Founding Fathers consisted of ultra-minimal government: guarding the rights of private property, free markets, and free trade; freedom of speech, press, and religion; separation of government from money, banking, and the economy; allowing neither public debt nor public works; having no standing army but rather relying on popular militia in case of foreign invasion; keeping government revenue and expenditures so low as to be nearly invisible; and generally binding down governmental Power with chains of iron, and watching government like a hawk and with vigilance and deep suspicion, lest it resume its natural tendencies and extend Power beyond its strictest bounds. Nowhere was this more clearly put than in Trenchard & Gordon's Cato's Letters, English newspaper articles of the 1720s which were reprinted, bound, and proved highly influential in America throughout the eighteenth century. Cato's Letters, which were powerful expressions of libertarian thought, put it this way:
How did the libertarian republicans propose to accomplish this program and bind down government? There were two parts to this program. The first was to confine government, for the first time in history, by explicit written constitutions, consisting of severely limited grants of power to the government by the sovereign people, these grants to be strictly, narrowly, and harshly interpreted. Also within those constitutions were explicit bills of rights, warning that government may not transgress against the rights of person and property. The second and equally essential part of the libertarian-republican program of confining government was to make sure that entrenched oligarchies and bureaucracies would not develop. First, the various powers of government would be separated, and each branch would act as a check upon the others. But more important was a second device, which has fallen even more grievously into neglect than the idea of strict construction, bills of rights of person and property, and division of powers. That device was compulsory rotation in office – the idea that in order to keep a bureaucracy and a power elite from becoming entrenched, the terms of office be strictly and severely limited. Essentially, the Founding Fathers saw that government lacks the swift and smooth circulation of elites provided by the free market. They saw that the rough analog within government, was giving the public the maximum opportunity to vote out the incumbents, and, in the grand phrase of nineteenth century politics, to "throw the rascals out!" Therefore, the program of what might be called the "classical liberals" of the late eighteenth century, in England as well as in the new American republics, was frequent (usually annual) elections, and strict limitations upon the terms of office. It is noteworthy that the current, very popular term-limitation movement for legislators has been denounced for placing fetters on the scope of democratic choice. But that of course was precisely the idea of these libertarian republicans, who were just as aware of the tyranny of majorities as they were of the tyranny of elites, as noted in the case of bills of rights and other constitutional limitations imposed upon government.[19]
It is both curious and unfortunate that the term-limitation movement has so far been exclusively confined to state and federal legislatures, and has not moved on to include the executive and judicial branches of government. Before the Revolution, the judiciary had never been in the least independent in America. The colonial assemblies themselves exercised judicial functions, and in the seventeenth century the assemblies in Maryland, Virginia, and New England functioned as the supreme judicial arm in their respective colonies. By the eighteenth century, judges were appointed by the Crown and the royal governors, and therefore became an instrument of the British executive power. As part of their struggle for autonomy, the colonial assemblies began to advance the idea of life, or "on good behavior," terms for the higher provincial judiciary, as a means of obtaining some degree of independence for the judiciary from British executive control. The temptation, then, was simply to continue this practice after independence from Britain, even though there was now no British executive to struggle against. Even though the US Constitution established life, or good behavior, terms for the federal judiciary, state judges have generally been popularly elected to a multi-year term. It is high time, however, for those interested in checking the growth of centralized national power in Washington, to re-examine the idea of fixed terms for the federal judiciary. A fixed term for Supreme Court justices would reduce the despotic power rapidly accumulating into the hands of the nine absolute and unchecked oligarchs who constitute the Supreme Court of the United States. Not only would such term limits for judges subject the higher federal courts to some sort of check by the public. But, clearly, the hysteria and conflict now surrounding every Supreme Court nomination would be greatly reduced by the knowledge that the public would no longer be stuck with said oligarch for four decades; a fixed term, say of six or eight years, would mitigate the problem and greatly lower the stakes in each appointment. IV. The Civil Service vs. Rotation in Office But the sphere of government that is by far the most entrenched, by far the most insulated, and by far the most expansive, is the one we largely examine in this paper: the bureaucracy of the executive branch. If anger at the legislature has translated into the term-limitation movement, there has been no such channeling of anger into a movement to re-establish the equivalent of term-limitation for the executive branch: rotation-in-office. Such rotation in the executive branch of government is insured by carrying out as fully as possible the idea of "throwing the rascals out" at each change of elected administration. The system of radical change throughout an administration upon its defeat in an election was reversed and increasingly narrowed and marginalized after the adoption of civil service "reform" in the late nineteenth century, a "reform" which has been intensifying and expanding ever since. No system has been more savagely derided by right-thinkers and Establishment do-gooders than the system of rotation in office, pejoratively labeled "the spoils system." Opposition to civil service reform has almost invariably been denounced as merely the voice of corruption and of wicked political "machines." And yet, and despite the fact that the laissez-faire good-government men of the late nineteenth century were fanatically devoted to it, no measure of government has been more destructive of liberty and minimal government than civil service reform. For no measure has entrenched bureaucracy more deeply. There are two intertwined aspects to this entrenchment, and to the expansion of government as a result of the civil service system. In the first place, the civil servant cannot be removed and replaced by someone else. He enjoys, short of drastic budget cuts and job abolition, lifetime tenure. That entrenches the bureaucracy, and blazes the path for the sort of dysfunctional system outlined by Parkinson, Tullock, and Barber. But there is another, neglected reason why civil service, and its continuing expansion, leads inexorably to the growth as well as the entrenchment of the bureaucracy. Let us say that, in a certain year, incoming Republicans (or Democrats) appoint 10,000 people to political jobs. (They can either attain these posts by kicking out Democrats or by adding new jobs.) Before civil service reform, the Democrats, after being elected in their turn, could happily kick out the 10,000 Republican rascals and replace them by deserving Democrats.
But suppose, during this putative Republican term, the Republicans, succumbing to a fit of public-spiritedness and devotion to civil service reform, now expand civil service protection to those 10,000 jobs. Hence, the happy result, which perhaps was not overlooked by the Republicans in their reforming zeal: 10,000 Republicans have now been locked into their jobs permanently, courtesy of civil service "reform." Four years later, when the Democrats return to office, they find that they cannot simply resume their good old ways, eject the rascally 10,000 and replace them by 10,000 good Democrats. To find jobs for these 10,000, they have to expand the bureaucracy by 10,000. Later, of course, seized in their turn by a fit of reforming zeal, they expand the civil service reform to these new jobs, thereby freezing 10,000 good Democrats into lifetime appointments. And so, in the sweet-sounding name of removing the bureaucracy from the sordid process of politics, both parties in effect collaborate into fastening both sets of rascals onto the taxpayers permanently. The process, of course, only works by expanding the total number of government jobs. Or put it another way: regardless of how principled and ideological a political party may be, an essential point of party politics is to find jobs for the faithful of the winning party. If jobs cannot be found, the party system withers and dies, leaving only a self-perpetuating bureaucratic oligarchy behind. A system of minimal government can provide jobs for the winning party by throwing out the jobholders of the losing faction. But if civil service law freezes jobholders in place, the function of providing jobs for the winners can only occur by expanding the number of jobs: that is, at the expense of the taxpayers and of the productive, private sector. The "spoils system" allows all the costs to be imposed upon the losing party, and not at all on the body of the taxpayers. Surely a just and admirable system: who better to bear the costs of political defeat than the losing party? I have only seen this analysis of the propulsive effect of civil service upon the growth of government in the charming little book noted above by Thomas H. Barber. Thus, Barber writes:
After the advent of Civil Service reform, on the other hand, "once installed in the bureaucracy … the incumbent was there for life, or during good behavior." These laws meant that for the elected officials "to reward their political workers, they now had to devise new jobs for them instead of merely turning out the incumbents of the opposing party and filling their jobs. The result, of course, has been a great increase in the number of jobs, and thus in taxes…."[21] Barber adds another highly important point: with the advent of Civil Service reform, the once temporary set of bureaucrats are now converted into a permanent and self-conscious class or caste, set aside from, and in fundamental opposition to, the mass of the citizenry. Until the coming of the Civil Service laws, Barber notes, the bureaucrats had "held their positions temporarily, until a change of party at election threw them back to earn what living they could … as ordinary citizens." Before reform, in short, the job holders "had not been a class – merely a group of people temporarily doing the same kind of work." But the Civil Service law "gave them a life-tenure of their jobs – welded them into a class." When the class of bureaucrats began to get unpopular with the public, adds Barber, they "very quietly began organizing 'publicity bureaus', that is, propaganda bureaus, to 'educate the public' into believing in the divine wisdom and beneficence of the government (as represented by themselves) in managing everything and everybody." In other words, "the bureaucrats are given a strong incentive to organize and form a powerful bureaucratic lobby."[22] V. The United States Civil Service: The Federalist Beginnings Elections can only serve as a method of enforced circulation of bureaucratic elites if there exists more than one organized political party. Yet, so demoralized were the Anti-Federalists upon the adoption of the Constitution, and after their decision to accept a Bill of Rights in return for not insisting on a second constitutional convention, that the Federalists were allowed to assume power as a virtually unchallenged party. The Federalists therefore were allowed the scope to staff the nascent bureaucracy with their own conception of the Best and the Brightest – i.e., men of their own party, in contrast to the despised Anti-Federalists or the later Republicans. Starry-eyed historians have contended that George Washington staffed the administrative bureaucracy with a genuinely non-political and non-partisan array of the Best and the Brightest. Carl Prince has shown, however, that, guided by his distinguished theoretician and organizer Alexander Hamilton, Washington deliberately developed a highly partisan, Federalist party-oriented federal civil service. In the first place, all Anti-Federalists were from the beginning deliberately excluded from office. Secondly, Prince concludes that "the civil service … formed a haven for [Federalist] party cadre (party managers at state and local levels), thus virtually professionalizing secondary leadership by individually linking status and pecuniary rewards to the success of the national party." The over two thousand federal office holders named by Washington and Adams in the 1790s constituted the activist middle-class base for the elite leadership of the Federalist party; "partly because of its connection with the first federal service, the new party in most states matured rapidly into a highly professional, tightly knit cluster at the state and local levels, closely aligned with and led by the national leadership at Philadelphia."[23] Alexander Hamilton was perfectly suited to the role of building up an effective political machine in the civil service. His Treasury department contained three-quarters of the federal employees; and he was able to use that large base to penetrate other departments and to command the loyalty of the US attorneys and judges then employed in Jefferson's State Department.[24] Even before the end of the Revolutionary War, Hamilton was thinking along similar lines. In arguing for the new idea of having the central government appoint the customs and revenue collectors within each state, instead of allowing the respective states to continue exercising such functions, Hamilton wrote that the reason for such a change would be "to create in the interior of each State, a mass of influence in favor of the Federal Government." In that way, a number of people in each state would be created who would be loyal supporters of the federal government and its increased power. As Hamilton assumed his powerful post at the start of the new Constitutional government, he received congenial advice from prominent Massachusetts merchant Stephen Higginson, one of the leaders of the ultra-High Federalist Essex Junto. Federal officeholders, warned Higginson, must be limited to dedicated Federalists. Toleration of non-Federalists in appointments would "increase the Evil" of opposition to Federalist views: such softness "encourages others to act the same part," and the "number of opposers is by this means generally increased."[25]
The partisan appointment policy under President John Adams was much the same, but much more blatant, and devoid of the insincere protestations of non-partisanship by the first president. As the premier historian of federal administration put it, under Adams "direct reference to party attitude … became more common and less concealed."[26] Adams was far more concerned than Washington to direct personally the appointing process throughout his administration. During the second Washington administration, Washington and Hamilton had made sure to exclude members of the new Republican Party from office; and Adams not only continued this policy, but stepped up attempts to root out and summarily remove any Republicans from office. Thus, Adams, in justifying his removal of several Portsmouth, New Hampshire customs collectors from office, wrote the Customs Collector at Boston that the "daily language" of these federal officers was "so evincive of aversion, if not hostility, to the national Constitution and government, that I could not avoid making some changes." Adams concluded that "if the officers of government will not support it, who will?"[27] On another occasion, bitter at criticisms by William Duane's radical Jeffersonian Philadelphia Aurora, Adams had his Secretary of State pass the word of his displeasure to the US Attorney for Pennsylvania William Rawle, for not cracking down on the Aurora for seditious libel. "If Mr. Rawle does not think this paper libelous," thundered the President, "he is not fit for his office; and if he does not prosecute it, he will not do his duty."[28] The federal civil service during the Federalist administrations consisted of four parts: two, the customs and internal revenue service, were in the Treasury Department, and constituted three-fourths of the total bureaucracy; the post office, inherited from the Confederation days, came under a postmaster-general, who reported directly to the President; and legal and judicial officers, including the Supreme Court, district judges, district attorney, marshals, and court clerks, came under the nominal jurisdiction of the State Department. Apart from the legal and judicial officers, which remained level in number at about 63, all the other wings of the bureaucracy grew rapidly during the Federalist era. Customs officials doubled from 478 in 1792 to 944 at the end of the Federalist period; internal revenue officials, called into existence by the new federal excise tax of 1791, expanded two-and-a-half fold from 219 in 1795 to 533; and the Post Office, which doubled its number of postmasters from 100 at the end of the Confederation period to 200 in 1791, more than quadrupled again to 824 in 1801. The entire bureaucracy increased two-and-a-half fold from the middle of the two Washington Administrations until the end of the Federalist reign. John Adams as President not only maintained or accelerated the rate of growth of the bureaucracy, and politicized it even more blatantly; he also found ways to expand the politicized civil service into new areas. Thus, in the provisional army that Adams raised at the height of the undeclared war with France in 1798, Adams politicized the leadership by banning the appointment of Republicans from the upper ranks of the army. Also, Congress's enactment of a direct property tax in 1798, allowed Adams to appoint many good Federalists to the new openings at the lower reaches of the tax service. The Republicans charged that the Adams men had concluded that a direct tax "will make Roome for more officers; by this time all the yelpers was Nearly put into office with good Salaries."[29] The federal judiciary, unfortunately, enjoyed from the beginning the life tenure warned against by Thomas Barber, courtesy of the US Constitution. The Federalists had made sure, in Article III, Sect. 1, of the Constitution, that all the federal judges shall hold life tenure on good behavior. The federal judiciary, which then consisted of six Supreme Court justices and twenty-eight district court judges, was thoroughly politicized during the 1790's, the district courts even more than the Supreme Court.[30] Of the twenty-eight, fully three-quarters were partisans of ratification of the Constitution, and even the three doubters eventually supported ratification. Moreover, the bulk of the district judges were fierce Federalist partisans, campaigning for Federalist candidates, denouncing Republicans, and often going so far as making sure of partisan Federalist juries in important cases, such as trials of Republican editors for violation of the Alien and Sedition law. Thus, in one sedition case, Federalist District Court Judge John Lowell of Massachusetts took elaborate steps to make sure of obtaining "one panel of full blooded filtrated federalists, and from them the political verdict."[31] Pennsylvania District Judge Richard Peters took upon himself a personal crusade, during the period of the Alien and Sedition laws from 1798-1800, to root out "Seditious scoundrels." There are "some Rascals," Peters wrote ultra-Federalist Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, "whom he wanted to handle if he could do it legally." One critic noted that it has "become a regular practice of the federal judges to make political discourses to the grand jurors throughout the United States."[32] Overall, Professor Prince justly concludes that "both the first United States district and circuit courts were among the most thoroughly politicized federal judicial institutions in American history…. George Washington's 'independence' and 'integrity' and the obvious threat to constitutional liberties inherent in the situation notwithstanding."[33] VI. The Failed Jeffersonian Revolution The Republicans replaced the Federalists in what has justly been called "The Revolution of 1800." Unfortunately, Thomas Jefferson was not really the best man to lead that Revolution. A brilliant libertarian-republican theoretician before achieving power and after leaving it, Jefferson is a classic case of corruption of principle from being in power. The first Jefferson Administration, however, was certainly one of the finest libertarian moments in the history of the United States. Expenses were lowered, the army and navy were sharply reduced, the bureaucracy was cut, the public debt retired, and the federal excise tax, and the Alien and Sedition Acts, were repealed. In the second term, however, the course was reversed, as Jefferson began expanding government, and gearing up for economic war and eventually military conflict with England. But even in his libertarian-oriented first term, the militant Republicans – the Jeffersonians – were bitterly disappointed. Jefferson was faced with a critical problem: what to do with the bureaucracy, with the politicized civil service that the Federalists had built up. If Jefferson had followed circulation-of-elites, rotation in office principles, he would have booted out the Federalists and installed good Republicans. But as early as his First Inaugural, Jefferson began to temporize, began to yearn for unity, the healing of wounds, and the rest of the homilies that politicians prattle when they get ready to scuttle the principles which had brought them to their current status. In his First Inaugural, Jefferson assured his listeners that "We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists." Jefferson decided on a middle-of-the road course: to wait until vacancies occur, through death or retirement, and to fill them only with Republicans until they constitute about half of the civil service; and only to remove egregiously anti-Republican officials. Jefferson was particularly angered at the "midnight appointments," that Adams had made at the very last minute before Jefferson took office. During his first two years in office, Jefferson removed the forty major midnight appointments, along with seventy other anti-Republicans in the presidential class of officials, amounting to about one-fourth of the major federal officeholders. But that was it: Jefferson removed virtually no one after 1803, and his successors removed very few bureaucrats as well. Madison dismissed only twenty-seven major officials in his eight years in the White House; and Monroe only twenty-seven in his two terms. And even though John Quincy Adams was strongly critical of President Monroe as being "universally indulgent, and scrupulously regardful of individual feelings," and therefore firing virtually no one, Adams himself removed the fewest of all: only twelve in his four years in office. It's not that the Presidents lacked the legal power to remove office-holders. Indeed, they had the power to remove anyone at will. This power was established, albeit by narrow vote, in the first Congress, the fundamental administrative "Decision of 1789." The most extreme position in opposition was taken by Rep. William L. Smith of South Carolina (who would later change his mind.) Smith, absurdly, but foreshadowing modern labor union and civil service arguments, maintained that the office was "the property" of each bureaucrat, who could therefore only be removed by impeachment and trial for malpractice and improper behavior.[34]
And so, from Jefferson through Adams, the civil service, while theoretically removable at will, by custom and the desire of the successive presidents, had become entrenched and rigidified bureaucracy. Characteristically, it took John Quincy Adams, still a federalist at heart though technically a Republican, to put this custom into stringent ideological terms. Any removal from office except "for cause," i.e., for malfeasance in office, might be politically expedient but it violated Adams's conception of the "public good." Even though it was not ensconced in the law, lifetime tenure on good behavior for the federal bureaucracy had become enshrined in custom for forty years, from 1789 to 1829.[35] The most important defection of President Jefferson from militant Republican principle was his failure to challenge the entrenched Federalist judiciary. Not only did the judiciary enjoy life tenure under the Constitution; but, at the last minute, and shortly before they were forced to leave office, the lame duck Federalist Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which created six new circuit courts with sixteen quickly appointed Federalist judges; and expanded the jurisdiction of the circuit courts. Moreover, in one of his midnight appointments, President Adams appointed John Marshall of Virginia as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a Federalist Chief Justice who would plague libertarian Republicans with his decisions for over three decades. The radical libertarian, or Old Republican, position was led by Virginians such as John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, by Benjamin Austin, leader of Boston's artisans, and by William Duane, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora. Many of the Virginia Old Republicans were friends and kinsmen of Jefferson, but they soon realized that their leader was really not one of them, really not prepared to carry forth the "Jeffersonian" Revolution. Steeped in Anti-Federalist hostility to strong central government and self-perpetuating bureaucracy, the Old Republican sought fundamental revolution. Virginia Old Republican William Branch Giles put their judicial program to President Jefferson with clarity and force:
In the fall of 1801, the veteran Old Republican, Edmund Pendleton, in his tract, The Danger Not Over, proposed constitutional amendments that were soon endorsed by the Virginia legislature. The anti-oligarchic and pro-rotation of office nature of these proposed amendments should be clear: the President was to be ineligible for more than one term; the term of Senators was to be reduced; and severe limits were placed on the public debt. As for the federal judiciary, appointments to the courts were to be made by the Congress with no role for the President, and the judges were to be removed at will by a joint vote of House and Senate. The centrist Republicans, however, men like James Madison, Virginia's Wilson Cary Nicholas, Samuel H. Smith of Maryland, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and Alexander J. Dallas and Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania, took a very different tack. All of them except Gallatin had favored the adoption of the Constitution, and all of them favored strong central government shorn of Federalist excesses; in short, they were content with the existing system provided that one of their own such as Jefferson was installed in Power. Since they believed that with Jefferson in office, the Revolution was now over, and there was no need for further radical or constitutional change, they favored the Jeffersonian policy of conciliating the Federalist party. At least when he was in power, Jefferson took his stand with the centrists of his party. Hence, his failure to bring about fundamental structural or administrative reform. Indeed, with victory secured, the centrists now believed that their Old Republican colleagues, not the Federalists, were the main danger. To James Sullivan, Republican Governor of Massachusetts, the Old Republicans were "in opposition to all regular well established governments." They are possessed of a confidence stemming from "a frenzy," and "Having no idea of a solid rational government, they cannot be trusted with power…" Virginia Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas also denounced these Old Republicans whose libertarian "bias … is strongly against those who rule."[37] To Sullivan, the solution to this problem was "to destroy the lines of party distinctions" – a result that the centrists were finally to achieve in the one-party system during the Monroe and Adams administrations. But the lines of this conflict were blurred by the fact, as Professor Ellis points out, that Jefferson himself, even though a moderate in policy, was generally radically libertarian and Old Republican in rhetoric. Furthermore, unlike the centrists, he wanted to reconcile the Old Republicans rather than purge them from the party.[38] On the judiciary, Jefferson, early in his administration, removed the aggressively Federalist prosecuting attorneys and the marshals who selected the juries and executed the courts' sentences. On the judges themselves, while Jefferson did not try to touch their life tenure, he did manage to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801 the following year, and thereby to roll back the last minute tide of expansion of Federalist judges. Jefferson's defection from the principles of rotation in office was the most important event in the entrenching of the combined old Federalist and new Republican bureaucracy. From Jefferson on, the Republican party remained in power, and from Monroe through Adams the United States lived under a one-party state, the Federalists having withered away. With no party competition, there was virtually no pressure for throwing the rascals out.
But in 1820 came what Professor Leonard White, a typical academic enthusiast for a life tenure civil service, called "the cloud on the horizon," the harbinger of the dread "spoils system" wrought by the Jacksonian movement. Secretary of Treasury in the Monroe Administration, William H. Crawford of Georgia, pushed through Congress the Tenure of Office Act, which Monroe came to regret signing, and which was bitterly denounced by all the champions of the entrenched bureaucracy, including Thomas Jefferson. Madison and following him Monroe actually denounced the law as "unconstitutional." The Tenure of Office Act of May 1820 decreed that all presidential class officials, connected with the collection or disbursement of money, would henceforth serve, not indefinitely, but for fixed terms of four years, after which they would have to be reapproved by the US Senate after being renominated by the President. The covered officials included district attorneys, customs collectors, public land officials and registers, army and navy agents and paymasters. Not affected were postmasters, or any of the accounting and clerical employees. The Tenure of Office Act meant (a) that at least higher bureaucrats would be confronted with fixed terms, and (b) that the power to remove them would no longer be exclusively in the hands of the President, but that the US Senate could share in the removal process. The Act came as a shock to the previously contented oligarchy. Jefferson wrote to Madison in horror, charging that the law "saps the constitutional and salutary functions of the President, and introduces a principle of intrigue and corruption … This places, every four years, all appointments under their [the Senate's] power … It will keep in constant excitement all the hungry cormorants for office, render them, as well as those in place, sycophants to their Senators, engage these in eternal intrigue to turn out one and put in another…" There is, of course, another way to look at this law than this frenetic diatribe: that such a system would introduce a bracing wind of competition and of public accountability into the stolid and complacent ranks of the ruling bureaucracy.[39] It may not be an accident that Secretary Crawford was the author of this bill. A Georgian who was close to the Old Republicans, Crawford, in 1824, was the Presidential candidate of that group as well as of Martin Van Buren, the brilliant political tactician who had been inspired by a weekend with Jefferson at Monticello in May 1824 to spend his life forming a new political party – later to be the Democratic Party – dedicated to taking back America for the old cause, for the libertarian Old Republican ideals of 1776 and 1798.[40] By the election of 1824, Crawford had fallen ill and had little chance for the presidency, but the Old Republican ideals, including that of bringing accountability and rotation of office to the bureaucracy, would go on to be championed by the Jacksonian movement and the Democratic Party forged by Van Buren and others devoted to the Old Republican ideal. Under President John Quincy Adams, however, the Tenure of Office Act became a dead letter. Adams detested the law: "A more pernicious expedient could scarcely have been devised," and on principle renominated everyone upon his accession to office, and during his term. The Senate was persuaded to go along. So insistent was Adams on life tenure that, when his losing campaign for re-reelection was underway in 1828, he actually renominated James R. Pringle for collector of customs at Charleston, even though Pringle was frankly "devoted to the opposition." In his diary, Adams writes that "My system has been, and continues to be, to nominate for reappointment all officers for a term of years whose commissions expire, unless official or moral misconduct is charged and substantiated against them. This does not suit the Falstaff friends who 'follow for the reward'…."[41] VII. Andrew Jackson and the "Spoils System" The "spoils system," a derogatory term for rotation in administrative office,[42] was brought to the United States by President Andrew Jackson. Jackson, an ardent Jeffersonian and Old Republican, was, like other Jacksonian leaders, dedicated to a new Democratic Party that would restore original Jeffersonian Republican principles of laissez-faire and ultra-minimal government. Jackson followed Jefferson in managing, for the second and presumably the last time in American history, to repay the national debt; and he and his dedicated successors, Van Buren and Polk, roughly succeeded in establishing hard money and separating the federal government from the banking system, as well as eliminating the protective tariff. Jackson, a wealthy cotton planter and merchant in Nashville, had been energized by corruption in the Monroe administration and by the bank credit collapse in the Panic of 1819.[43] He had served in the House of Representatives and twice in the US Senate. One of the aspects of government that desperately needed reform, according to Jackson, was the life-tenured bureaucracy. The spoils system had been operating in New York and in Pennsylvania for a number of years, and had been formally incorporated into the Tenure of Office Act. But now Jackson, head of a new incoming party hungry for office, became the first president to sound the trumpet call, and provide an ideological justification for rotation in office. He wanted to change the civil service, as well as to shrink it. In his First Annual Message, Jackson denounced the entrenched bureaucracy:
As a result, Jackson went on, government is diverted from "its legitimate end" and made into "an engine for the support of the few at the expense of the many." Jackson then proceeded to attack the idea of special privileged offices to the few, and endorsed an adherence to an extension of the Tenure of Office Act:[44]
Jackson went on to hone in on the absurd and despotic theory that government officials acquire a property right in the office:
The Whig opposition, as the old, oligarchic, neo-Federalist as well as centrist Republicans now called themselves, lost no time in trying to block Jackson's reform, which threatened the longevity of their own people in office. Daniel Webster, a Federalist turned Whig, thundered that the government agencies, such as the armed forces, the Post Office, the Land Office, or the Customs-house, are "institutions of the country, established for the good of the people," and that therefore it threatened free institutions for these offices to be spoken of as but "the spoils of victory." Stronger in the courts and in the Senate than in the presidency, the Whigs continued to raise constitutional objections to the President's power of removal. But fortunately, the Supreme Court, in Ex parte Hennen (1839), its first case on the subject, ruled unequivocally that no government official, even in the federal judiciary below the Supreme Court, had a property right in his office, and that the President or any other statutory authority had the right to dismiss him at will.[46] Faced with fierce resistance in the Senate, Jackson had to move cautiously, but he succeeded in the heaviest removal rate until that date: during his administration, he removed 252 out of 610 presidential class employees, or over forty-one percent. Including all the lesser federal employees, however, the removal rate was less than twenty percent.[47] Van Buren, his successor and an ardent Jacksonian, had little reason to remove Jacksonian officials. In his last two years in office, he removed 364 postmasters, amounting to about three percent of 12,000, to tighten the officialdom a bit for the coming election campaign.
The true test of whether the spoils system would stay was what the Whigs would do when they ousted the Democrats from the Presidency in 1840. Would they stand by their allegedly fiercely held principles against rotation in office? Or would they succumb to the lure of kicking out the Democrats and replacing them by good Whigs? Fortunately, they abandoned their principles and succumbed to temptation, the Harrison and Tyler Administrations ousting fully fifty percent of the presidential class officials. When James K. Polk returned for the Democrats in 1844, he ousted thirty-seven percent of the presidential class employees, and also managed to appoint, during his four years, 13,500 out of the existing 16,000 postmasters, even though only 1,600 were removed from office while 10,000 filled vacancies caused by resignations. When Zachary Taylor came in for the second Whig administration, he settled the principle of rotation in office, ousting fifty-eight percent of the presidential class officeholders. Indeed, Taylor told his Secretary of the Treasury that "rotation in office, provided good men are appointed, is sound republican doctrine."[48] In the nineteenth century, especially after the emergence of the Democratic Party, the political parties in the United States were indispensable carriers of furiously clashing ideologies. Every American child or immigrant was socialized into a political party and its ideology, and as a result each American was fiercely loyal to his own party. In most states, elections were very close, and if one's party candidate dared to waffle in his ideological commitment, the party faithful punished him by staying away from the polls. In contrast to the current political scene, where parties have no particular ideology and command no particular loyalty, there were very few floating, independent voters. By being carriers and instruments of a party ideology, the political parties in nineteenth century America were the vitally important means by which ideology could dominate the narrow clash of special interest groups and seekers after government subsidies and privilege. The disappearance of ideological parties, starting in 1896, brought about the weak and fuzzy party politics we are familiar with today. It is clear that clashing ideological parties would be more willing to throw the rascals out, since they really believed that their opponents were rascals. The spoils system added the healthy incentive of occupying the offices for one's own party, so that party self-interest could be wedded to the pursuit of ideology. Both common party ideologies and the spoils system kept the political party system healthy and flourishing. What everyone now laments as the anemia and near-death of party organization and party loyalty was brought about by the twin blows of the demise of the spoils system and the disappearance of a fervently held party ideology. Writing later, in the 1920s, historian Charles R. Lingley well expressed the importance of the spoils system and its linkage with ideology:
Lingley adds that anyone who votes for other than party organization candidates and who "feels himself superior to the party" is "faithless to the great ideal." And he
In a thoughtful essay lamenting the demise of the spoils system as an important democratic check upon the growth and arrogance of bureaucracy, Professor Fred W. Riggs, an expert in Comparative Public Administration, first points to the untrammeled bureaucracy of Oriental Despotism, and of other examples where bureaucracy sped forward beyond any checks of competing political parties. He then goes on to point out that the much heralded "merit system" of promotion within a life-tenured bureaucracy, "cuts at the root of one of the strongest props of a nascent political party system, namely spoils." In the United States, "the spoils system played an important part in galvanizing the parties into action." While often seemingly more efficient in their tasks, Riggs points out, "the career bureaucracy can project greater political power on its own, resist more successfully the politician's attempts to assert effective control. What is lost in administrative efficiency through spoils may be gained in political development, especially if party patronage can also be used as a lever to gain control over administration." And even the edge in efficiency, notes Riggs, is often illusory:
VIII. The Johnson Administration and the Advent of "Reform" When the Democrats returned to power in 1853, the Pierce Administration summarily removed approximately 89 percent of the Whig presidential class appointees. But the most massive employment of the spoils system came with the Lincoln Administration, when the Republican Party came to power for the first time. Of the 1,520 presidential class appointees existing in 1859, Lincoln removed no less than 1,457, or 96 percent. Employees who were in subordinate categories, who usually fared better during removals, this time suffered to the same degree. Even military appointments were now made on a largely partisan basis.[51] Professor Van Riper, generally an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, concedes:
Yet, curiously enough, the insufferable self-righteous group of civil service Reformers, many of whom would concentrate the rest of their lives on attacking spoils and calling for life tenure and open examinations on "merit" for the civil service, and who began their agitation at the end of the Lincoln reign, made no complaint whatever at President Lincoln's maximal use of the spoils system. Perhaps the reason was that the reformers, almost all Republicans themselves, benefited hugely from Mr. Lincoln's patronage. Indeed, the men who would soon become leading reformers reveled in plush positions in the foreign service during the Lincoln Administration. Leading Boston Brahmin patrician, Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy, gained the coveted appointment of Minister to the Court of St. James in Great Britain.[53] Boston Brahmin historian, John Lothrop Motely, was selected as minister to Austria. Novelist William Dean Howells became minister to Italy, a payoff for writing a puff campaign biography for Abraham Lincoln. New York's John Bigelow was Consul-General to France, while the man who was to become the leading spokesman for civil service reform, Boston-reared George William Curtis, editor of the influential Harper's Weekly, was offered but refused appointment as minister to Egypt. German immigrant Carl Schurz, a leading Republican in the German-American community in Missouri and throughout the Midwest, who helped win the election for Lincoln, was rewarded with the post of Minister to Spain. Restless at being far from the action, Schurz came back to the United States, where he became one of the many lackluster Union generals.[54] The civil service Reformers were a remarkably homogeneous group. Concentrated almost exclusively in the urban Northeast, including New York City and especially Boston, the Reformers virtually constituted an older, highly educated and articulate elite. From families of old patrician wealth, mercantile and financial rather than coming from new industries, these men despised what they saw as the crass materialism of the nouveau riche, as well as their lack of good breeding or education at Harvard or Yale. Not only were the Reformers merchants, attorneys, and educators, but they virtually constituted the most influential "media elite" of the day: editors, writers, and scholars. Even though many of them favored laissez-faire in trade and in monetary affairs, they were shaped by the cultural and religious values of their neo-Puritan Yankee culture. In religion, the Reformers were either mainstream post-millennial pietist Protestants, attempting to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth, or, especially in Boston, Unitarians who secularized in moral terms the quest for the millennial Kingdom. During the 1850s, their moral and religious urge to get rid of slavery, either as frank abolitionists or merely by blocking slavery in the new western states and territories, led all of them into the Radical wing of the Republic Party. Underlying their religious thrust was a coercive Yankee temperament and moral doctrine that had brought the first public schools to the United States long before the rest of the country, in order to inculcate the region's children with the value of obedience to the State as well as in the Protestant religion. In keeping with their religious and moral concerns, their emphasis in civil service reform, from the beginning, was more on morality than efficiency. For them, such structural changes as life-tenure and competitive open examinations were mere means to an end, their overall goal being to put "good men" into office. And, all too often, those "good men" were simply themselves and their kind. The civil service reform movement began when Senator Charles Sumner (R., Mass), a Boston Brahmin and a leader of the Radical Republicans, introduced a bill for tenure and open examinations, to be administered by a federal civil service commission. Sumner's bill was introduced in April, 1864, as an expression of some of the Radicals' opposition to the renomination of Abraham Lincoln, whom they considered far too soft on slavery and on the South.[55] The bill was a warning shot across Lincoln's bow, but it got little public support, and Sumner himself did not strongly back the bill, and asked that it be tabled. Sumner had long fulminated against the spoils system, and repeated these charges when he introduced the bill, but, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he did not hesitate to use his influence to win offices for his friends. Neither did George William Curtis, soon to become the leading champion of reform, scruple to urge his own friends upon Sumner. |
One
of the most important sociological laws is the "Iron Law of Oligarchy":
every field of human endeavor, every kind of organization, will
always be led by a relatively small elite. This condition will hold
sway everywhere, whether it be a business firm, a trade union, a
government, a charitable organization, or a chess club. In every
area, the persons most interested and able, those most adaptable
to or suited for the activity, will constitute the leading elite.
Time and again, utopian attempts to form institutions or societies
exempt from the Iron Law have fallen prey to that law: whether it
be utopian communities, the kibbutz in Israel, "participatory
democracy" during the New Left era of the late 1960s, or the vast
"laboratory experiment" (as it used to be called) that constituted
the Soviet Union. What we should try to achieve is not the absurd
and anti-natural goal of eradicating such elites, but, in Pareto's
term, for the elites to "circulate." Do these elites circulate or
do they become entrenched?