Political Order and Political Decay (25 page)

This type of government was appropriate to the agrarian society the United States had been in the first half of the century. But by the final two decades of the nineteenth century, the nature of the American economy had changed enormously. Most important was a revolution in transportation and communications technology; railroads and the telegraph now united the country on a continental scale and vastly increased the size of markets. As Adam Smith explained, the division of labor is limited by the size of the market. Americans began leaving their farms and rural communities in increasing numbers, moving to cities and settling the country's new western territories. Economic growth was increasingly linked to the institutional application of science and technology to industrial processes. The expanding division of labor, in other words, was producing massive changes in the social dimension of development: trade unions, professional societies, and urban middle classes began to appear; educational institutions such as the land-grant colleges initially established under the Morrill Act during the Civil War were producing a new generation of university-educated elites; railroads and other new industries were escaping the confines of local-level regulation.

Change in the economic and social dimensions of development thus created a demand for change in the political dimensions, particularly with respect to the state. The United States needed something that looked like a European, Weberian state in place of the party-dominated clientelistic system that had run the country up to that point. This shift began to accelerate in the early 1880s.

BIRTH OF BUREAUCRACY

Prior to the landmark 1883 Pendleton Act, there were a number of efforts at public-sector reform. A career service track requiring examinations was created in technical agencies including the Naval Observatory and the Navy Medical Corps before the Civil War, with the development of more secure tenure for some job categories. However, this was meant less to protect excellence than to prevent the removal of political appointees. President Grant signed a law authorizing an Advisory Board for the Civil Service and the beginnings of a formal merit system in 1871, but Congress defunded this body two years later because of the threat it posed to patronage.
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As is often the case with reform movements, it took an external event to knock the system off of its equilibrium and move it toward a different institutional order. On July 2, 1881, the newly elected president James A. Garfield was shot by a mentally unbalanced individual named Charles Guiteau, an office seeker who thought he should have been appointed U.S. consul to France. It took more than two painful months for Garfield to die,
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and the furor over the assassination created a public movement in favor of eliminating the spoils system. Although the new president, Chester A. Arthur, and the Republican-dominated Congress resisted reform, the Democrats and a faction of the Republican Party known as the Mugwumps began agitating for change. Soon after Garfield's death, the National Civil Service Reform League was founded and a bill was introduced by Senator George H. Pendleton proposing a makeover of the public sector. The 1882 midterm elections brought the Democrats to power, with many incumbents being defeated on the basis of their continuing support for the patronage system. Reading the handwriting on the wall, the old Congress passed the Pendleton Act by overwhelming majorities in January 1883, even before the new members could take their seats.
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The Pendleton Act's intellectual roots lay in Europe, and in particular the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms that had been enacted in Britain a decade previously. In 1879, Dorman Eaton, a well-known New York lawyer and founder of the National Civil Service Reform League, published a study of the British civil service at the request of President Rutherford Hayes.
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The most famous advocate of European-style bureaucracy was, however, future president Woodrow Wilson, who in the 1880s had just completed a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in political science, and published an article in 1887 titled “The Study of Administration.”
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The science of administration, Wilson argued, had grown up in Europe and did not exist in America, where “not much impartial scientific method is to be discerned in our administrative practices. The poisonous atmosphere of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration, the confusion, sinecurism, and corruption ever and again discovered in the bureaux at Washington forbid us to believe that any clear conceptions of what constitutes good administration are as yet very widely current in the United States.”

The kind of administrative system Wilson argued for was basically the one that Max Weber would later describe; anticipating the principal-agent framework, he argued in favor of a strict separation between politics and administration.
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Administrators were simply agents whose only job would be effective implementation, like the bureaucracy in one of the modern corporations that were just beginning to appear. Wilson, who had learned German, referred to Hegel and the bureaucratic models of Prussia and France, whose governments “made themselves too efficient to be dispensed with.” These were also too autocratic to fit America's democratic condition, but they nonetheless served as goalposts for reform. Most important, he followed in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton by arguing that strong centralized government was necessary for a whole host of purposes, from regulation of railroads and telegraph to control of large corporations that in many cases were seeking to monopolize the markets in which they operated. In a statement that perfectly summarizes the dilemma of American government, he said, “The English race, consequently, has long and successfully studied the art of curbing executive power to the constant neglect of the art of perfecting executive methods. It has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government. It has been more concerned to render government just and moderate than to make it facile, well-ordered and effective.”
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As we will see, the father of American public administration found it very difficult to put his theories into effect when he became president.

The Pendleton Act was drafted by the reformer Dorman Eaton and incorporated the major features of the British reform.
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The act revived the Civil Service Commission (whose second chairman Eaton would be) and created a classified (merit-based) service whose posts would no longer be the prerogative of the parties and Congress. It ended the practice of federal appointees being required to hand back a portion of their salary to the party that had appointed them. It did not create a higher civil service in the manner of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, given the egalitarian proclivities of American politics. It did, however, establish a requirement for civil service examinations and the principle of merit, though with less rigorous standards than those adopted in Britain. The British reform was deliberately aimed at pulling elite graduates of Oxford and Cambridge into the civil service. There was no parallel intention of restaffing the U.S. government with Harvard and Yale alumni, but rather with qualified people of more modest educational backgrounds.
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The American reforms were put into place very slowly. In 1882, only 11 percent of the civil service was classified; the number grew to 46 percent by 1900. (This figure was to reach 80 percent under Franklin D. Roosevelt and 85 percent in the immediate post–World War II period, declining thereafter.)
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Congress continued to hold on to its patronage powers and agreed to an expansion of classification only when a change of administration allowed the outgoing party to use the system to protect its own political appointees. The unclassified service remained the domain of patronage. As administrations changed hands between Presidents Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and Cleveland, anywhere from 68 to 87 percent of fourth-class postmasters across the country turned over.
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The power of the Civil Service Commission varied with the energy of its chairman and the backing it received from the White House. Dorman Eaton was cautious in the use of the commission's powers, and his successors tended to be even more timid.

This changed only with President Harrison's appointment in 1889 of an up-and-coming young politician from New York named Theodore Roosevelt to the commission's leadership, who made civil service reform a centerpiece of his political ambitions. But when Roosevelt left this position in 1895, the number of patronage appointments once again increased. The Civil Service Commission's own bureaucracy was often not responsive; orders it issued to follow uniform rules for promotion were not actually enforced by many federal departments.
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A parallel reform process unfolded in each American city dominated by a boss and a political machine. For example, the Republican machine in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century was run by William Lorimer, a congressman and later senator who handed out food, coal, pensions, scholarships, licenses, and jobs to political supporters. When testifying before a senate committee investigating his behavior, he said, “I got that patronage from the sheriff, the county clerk, the county treasurer, all the clerks of the different courts, the State administration … It rarely happened … that any appointments of any kind, big or little, were made in the section of the city in which I lived without my recommendation.” Lorimer also owned a number of businesses that did contracting for the city, and through a process of what he suggested was “honest graft” managed to accumulate considerable wealth. His machine, like those in other cities, catered to the interests of the huge number of immigrants and working-class voters who were flocking into the city to work in its new industries.
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Lorimer and his machine were opposed by a coalition of businessmen, professionals, and social reformers who banded together in organizations like the Municipal Voters' League and the Legislative Voters League. They tended to be highly educated middle- and upper-middle-class individuals who lived in the new suburbs surrounding downtown Chicago. Out of a sample of fifty members of the Municipal Voters' League, thirty were professionals, with lawyers constituting the great majority. These groups began agitating against corruption through reports and publicity about the backgrounds of candidates published in sympathetic newspapers; they sought to professionalize government by making it nonpartisan. Ironically, while this group spoke in the name of democracy, it actually represented the upper crust of Chicago society, an overwhelmingly Protestant group that looked down on the way that Lorimer was empowering the city's new Catholic and Jewish immigrants. Lorimer for his part was contemptuous of the municipal reformers, calling them hypocrites who were using the reform cause as a means of increasing their own power and influence. Lorimer's political career ended when an investigation uncovered fraud in his election to the Senate; he was censured and his election invalidated. Lorimer's demise was not the end of machine politics in Chicago, of course. Richard J. Daley would go on to dominate the city's politics up through the 1960s, when the mayor could still “deliver” the city for candidate John F. Kennedy.

The Chicago case demonstrates that clientelism in American municipal politics often served a fundamentally democratizing function. The Lorimer machine was not under the control of local elites; they were indeed its opponents and forced its ultimate demise. The machine's ability to distribute resources performed an integrating and stabilizing function in a rapidly growing and ethnically diverse city, just as clientelism serves to integrate and balance ethnic and religious groups in contemporary India.

The situation was different in state-level politics in neighboring Wisconsin, where powerful railroad interests and lumber corporations dominated the state legislature. Robert La Follette was elected governor in 1900 based on a coalition that included farmers, university alumni, public officials, and ethnic Scandinavian voters. He then proceeded to build his own political machine to increase taxation of the railroads, a system of primaries to replace the boss-dominated convention system to nominate candidates, and a range of social legislation backed by the labor unions that supported him. He used his connections to the University of Wisconsin as a source of staffing and ideas, and even used the school's alumni to act as “intimidators” to counteract party stalwarts at the Republican convention. The fact that La Follette had to use machine tactics to beat the machine suggests that machines themselves are in some way intrinsic to politics—that is, all political leaders must assemble coalitions whose members do not always share the same goals, and must often be brought along with bribery, inducements, threats, and argument. Woodrow Wilson would learn this lesson when he became president.
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ECONOMIC GROWTH AND POLITICAL CHANGE

The political system of the United States in the 1880s appeared to constitute a stable equilibrium, in which all the major political actors benefited from their ability to distribute patronage. Why, then, did the system change?

The first explanation lies in the changes that were taking place in the underlying society as a result of economic development. We saw how the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms were driven by the demands of the British middle class for access to a civil service dominated by aristocratic patronage. The middle classes in the United States played a similar role in pushing for change; the difference was that their opponent was not an aristocracy but an entrenched party system. The new actors created by industrialization had little stake in the old clientelistic system. They were mobilized into interest groups that could challenge the status quo from within the old party system.

A second explanation is a change in ideas that occurred at the same time, which challenged the legitimacy of the old system, denounced it as corrupt, and posited a vision of a modernized American state that would be much closer to contemporaneous European models. Change on the level of ideas was related to change in society: reformers of the Progressive Era tended to come from precisely the strata of educated, professional, and middle-class people the modernization process was creating. But ideas are never simply “superstructure” or justifications for class interests; they have an internal logic of their own that makes them independent causes of political change.