Civil Service Reform
With the extension of democracy and the rise of mass-based political parties in the Jacksonian era, civil servants were expected to contribute time and money ("political assessments") to electioneering. For many of them, organizing the electorate and looking after the interests of their patrons were more important than their ordinary tasks. The party out of power recruited people who hoped success in the forthcoming election would lead to a government job, for to the victors belonged the spoils of office. When in the 1840s and 1850s the rival Whig and Democratic parties won every other election, the spoils system triumphed. Frequent rotation in and out of office decimated the career service, and efficiency suffered. The spoils system reached its zenith during the Civil War with incoming Republicans in 1861 dismissing Democrats both as political enemies and as possible traitors.
The Civil War both expanded and strained the civil service, and agitation for its reform began in December 1865 with legislation introduced by Representative Thomas A. Jenckes of Rhode Island. Borrowing heavily from British precedents, Jenckes proposed that appointments to nonpolicymaking positions be made from among those candidates who did best on a competitive examination open to all and impartially administered by a civil service commission. The bill also required that entrance to the service be at the lowest level and promotions be determined by competitive examinations. Congressmen, however, were reluctant to pass the Jenckes bill because they feared it would devastate party organization and eliminate executive dependence on them for recommendations of constituents for appointments.
Civil service reform lacked mass support but attracted a social and intellectual elite that thought of itself as "the best people." Many had joined the Republican party during the antislavery crusade and had been awarded patronage, primarily in the diplomatic corps. They tended to be lawyers, editors, clergymen, professors, and businessmen (with mercantile and financial rather than industrial interests), who came from established New England families, lived in the Northeast, and were laissez-faire in their outlook. By 1867 they felt excluded from politics and perceived post-Civil War America as indulging in an orgy of political corruption. They recognized that the Jenckes bill would enhance their influence while crippling the power of the spoils politicians. Farmers and laborers were indifferent to reforms, and politicians were usually hostile to them, although some politicians who were out of power embraced reform to cripple hostile party organizations.
President Ulysses S. Grant adopted but quickly abandoned civil service reform, whereas his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, consistently if pragmatically supported reform. Hayes depoliticized the New York Customhouse and encouraged reform in the New York Post Office.
Realizing that Hayes's innovations could be dropped by his successors, reformers in 1880 organized a Civil Service Reform Association to secure legislation to make reforms permanent. Their bill was adopted by Democratic senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio. President James A. Garfield actually began to dismantle Hayes's reforms before he was assassinated by a man said to be a deranged office seeker in 1881. Civil service reformers exploited his death by convincing the public that the spoils system was responsible for his murder.
Neither Chester A. Arthur, the new president, nor Congress backed the Pendleton bill until after the Republicans were decisively defeated in the election of 1882. Both parties then courted reformers and their votes. Republicans wished to use reform to freeze their partisans in office, and Democrats wanted to use it to neutralize the civil service. A bipartisan majority passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in January 1883, which established a merit system administered by a bipartisan Civil Service Commission in federal offices with more than 50 employees (about 14,000 out of 130,000 civil servants). The Democrats eliminated the restriction of entrance to the merit system at the lowest level, and westerners and southerners added a requirement that appointees be apportioned among the states according to population. The bill also outlawed political assessments of civil servants by other federal officers, although the Republicans preserved "voluntary" contributions.
The Pendleton Act transformed the civil service and profoundly affected the organization of political parties. The merit system expanded as presidents extended it in order to freeze their partisans in place. By 1900 workers were becoming professionalized, better educated people were being recruited, local political considerations were giving way to national concerns, and political influence was being replaced by business interests. Civil servants no longer financed political campaigns or did party work.
During the Progressive Era civil service reform efforts were directed at developing good management practices to achieve economy and efficiency. Extensive rule changes in 1903 and the adoption of a retirement system in 1923 accelerated the trend toward a career service, and by the 1920s, 80 percent of the service (560,000 in 1922) operated under merit system rules.
The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this trend. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal created many agencies, and their staffs, appointed outside the merit system, brought ideas and energy as well as chaos to the service. In 1938, however, new rules were adopted that set up personnel sections in all departments coordinated by the Civil Service Commission and extended the merit system to include 90 percent of the nation's 1.8 million employees. When World War II expanded the civil service (to 3.8 million by 1945) the merit system was virtually abandoned. But it was revived at the war's end, and administrators deplored the inflexibility and new procedures--primarily required by the Veterans Preference Act (1944)--that made it difficult to remove incompetents.
In 1949 a bipartisan commission headed by former president Herbert Hoover recommended that personnel matters be further decentralized but coordinated by the Civil Service Commission, that hiring procedures be simplified, and that workers receive higher, uniform salaries. These suggestions were adopted, but veterans' groups prevented any change in veterans' preference. Unfortunately the Hoover Commission's suggestion, also adopted, that the chair of the Civil Service Commission advise presidents and attend cabinet meetings weakened the watchdog function of the bipartisan Civil Service Commission.
The exposure of corruption in the Watergate scandal under Richard M. Nixon stimulated further reform. President Jimmy Carter's Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was the most sweeping reform legislation since 1883. It abolished the Civil Service Commission and split its functions among an Office of Personnel Management (handling 2.1 million of the 2.8 million civil servants), a Federal Labor Relations Authority to oversee labor-management relations, and an independent quasi-judicial Merit System Protection Board. Legislation, however, is only as effective as the people who administer it, and some of President Ronald Reagan's appointees had a devastating impact on the civil service, particularly in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where they were unsympathetic to needy citizens while lining the pockets of corrupt partisans.
Civil service reform is "unfinished business." Machinery to achieve a depoliticized civil service and a responsive bureaucracy has yet to be devised. With each succeeding administration disagreeing over the proper proportions of politics, security, and self-direction in the public service, there will always be a need for civil service reform.
Bibliography:
Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-1883 (1961); Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service (1958).
Author:
Ari Hoogenboom
See also Arthur, Chester A.; Hayes, Rutherford B.; Spoils System.
