The Atlantic Monthly, of February, 1891, contains an article written by Theodore Roosevelt, on "An Object Lesson in Civil Service Reform." The object lesson was the campaign of 1890, and he said: "We have succeeded in getting such a number of applications from the Southern States to enter our examinations that these States have now received their full share of appointments in the departmental service at Washington; and the most gratifying feature about this is that the great bulk of the men and women thus appointed to position in the Government service from these States are politically opposed to the party in power." Touching the difficulties, there were named as particularly obstinate: First. "Facing the intense and interested hostility of the great mass of self-seeking politicians, and of the much larger mass of office-seekers, whose only hope of acquiring office rests in political influence, and is immediately cut off by the application of any, even the most modest, merit test." Second. "We have to overcome popular indifference or ignorance, and do constant battle with that spirit of mean and vicious cynicism which so many men, respectable enough in their private life, assume as their attitude. in public affairs." Third. "The slowness with which the popular mind takes to any new theory, and from its inability, by no means wholly unnatural, to discriminate between the branches of the service where the law does apply and those where it does not." And after some work was done, this is what happened: "In July, Louisiana was the farthest behind in its apportionment of all the States of the Union, having had only about half of the appointments she was entitled to. In November she stood among those States at the head of the list, having had two more than she was entitled to. In all, the South obtained nearly three hundred of the six hundred appointments, and the Southern States now stand almost exactly level with the Northern as regards their quotas. Everywas examined, marked, and certified without the least reference to anything but the record he himself made in the examination, and in nine cases out of the ten the appointing officers chose the men in the order of their standing. "Of the new appointees from the Southern States, a proportion-in the neighborhood of a fourth, I believe-were people of color; and, indeed, one merit of the system has been the utter disregard of color. The colored people thus appointed were mostly graduates of the different colored colleges; in a very few instances did a colored politician of the stamp so well known to the ordinary dispensers of government patronage secure a place. Hardly any men who were Northern by birth got on the lists of these States, and over two-thirds of the appointees were native-born Southern whites, who had lived practically all their lives in the districts from which they came. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these native-born Southern whites were Democrats." Commissioner Roosevelt, of the Civil Service, it will be observed, was always on the outside of the breastworks, when the enemy showed themselves; and instead of waiting for them to fire on him, he fired on them and charged straight for them. He was eager to put forward the incidents of Civil Service reformation that the opponents of the system held to be most alarming. There were two classes of Southern people he had special pleasure to see secure appointments under the rules of the classified service: First, Democrats under a Republican Administration; and second, colored men of the States of the South. A great many practical politicians beheld these things and read of them in Roosevelt's approving official reports with anger and a tendency to panic, but they made sure no man holding such deplorable principles could ever again be permitted to occupy a place of authority. The appearance of things was to that effect, for the Civil Service reformers as a rule, Roosevelt being the steadfast exception, were much more given to eloquence than to business. Roosevelt's early activities as a reformer were regarded effusions of his literary gifts that would soon extinguish themselves. However, he persevered, and seemed to have a faculty of picking up places according to his wish. When he got into a situation he expanded it, and the unexpected happened day after day. The astonishing feature of his proceedings was that they were based on calculation and took on business formations. This was a new style of reformation. Civil Service Reform had hard times. It was not tenderly treated in the houses of its friends. There was a queer game played by one eminent person after another of getting his own folks snugly fixed, and then raising obstacles through Civil Service classification, to their removal; but this was not Roosevelt's method. He desired to cover additional ground and elevate it, did not confine himself to personal matters, but rushed the fixed rules and regulations, in the advance of which those in the way had to look out for the reaping machinery. He was not an apologist. At the critical hour of the great new policy of getting the Government to do business instead of playing politics, of course the Commissioner of New York was at the storm centre. President Cleveland had views of reform in several directions, but his tendencies did not seem to his partisans auspicious, and the Civil Service was largely personal in its nature-Republicans going out, and Democrats in-but mathematics displayed in this a certain movement of equalization. The crisis arrived when Harrison was inaugurated, and the Democracy lifted up their voices to the effect that reformation of the Civil Service was their own favorite way of saving the country. President Harrison was not impetuous in seizing the thorny subject; and when two months elapsed and nothing remarkable occurred in the way of transformation, the country was just settled down to a calm condition when Roosevelt was appointed, and after four years, Cleveland continued him. This lap of Administration was the beginning of going into business on a legitimate basis. The most impressive exhibition of the Civil Service work that is recorded is the testimony of Theodore Roosevelt, examined by Senator Lodge in an inquiry made by the Senate. Senator Lodge, in October, 1900, contributed his views to the Century Magazine, presenting the point that patronage in offices was un-American, and giving this account of the Civil Service in the early days of the Republic: "In the interval between Jefferson and Jackson, political patronage subsided. Madison, long before his coming to the Presidency, had declared himself against removals without cause, which was the view of the younger Adams also, and probably of Monroe as well. The real cause, however, of the small number of changes during this period lay deeper than the personal views and characters of the Presidents. The long continuance of one party in power, followed by the disappearance of the Federalists and the merging of all parties-nominally at least-in one, was the efficient and obvious reason for the small number of changes under Madison, Monroe and Adams. The system, however, remained at bottom entirely unchanged, and when Jackson came into power with a new set of followers and a new set of ideas he merely put into active operation a practice which had slumbered for twenty years, but which had been the same from the beginning. Under Jackson the distribution of the offices for political purposes was extended and systematized, and the theory upon which it was done was thrown by Marcy into the famous formula, 'to the victors belong the spoils.' Dating the spoils system from Jackson's time, therefore, is dating it from the declaration of the formula, which has no real connection with either its origin or its practice. Since Jackson's day, as the Government has grown, political patronage has grown and spread, until it has assumed the enormous proportions with which the present generation is familiar. The effort to do away with it by an impersonal and disinterested machinery of appointment is a wholly modern idea, and not in any sense a reversion to the early practice of the Republic." Testimony of the operation of the Civil Service law was taken in the course of the inquiry as to the execution of the law by the Senate Committee on Civil Service and retrenchment, February 1st, 1898, Commissioner John R. Proctor on the stand was examined by Senator Lodge, and instances given of the methods by which Postmasters managed to move Republican incumbents and to appoint Democratic successors without examination and certification. There were cases cited at Portsmouth, Ohio, and Raleigh, North Carolina. One way of managing it was for a new Postmaster to bring with him from Washington a slip of paper prepared in one of the divisions of the Postoffice Department, which showed how the roster titles of his clerks could be changed to make it appear positions could be accepted because the occupants were custodians of money. In one case, an incumbent spent about half an hour a day in attending the money order window, and the rest of the time he was mailing clerk. In another case a registry and stamp clerk was rechristened as register and money order clerk, and then was discharged without offense and the successor was the son of the Postmaster and got into office without examination. Nothing was said about politics. The general delivery clerk was informed that he had been born again, and was styled the General Delivery and stamp clerk, upon which his services were dispensed with and he was succeeded by "a good and faithful Democrat without examination." This was in North Carolina, and a letter from the Postmaster dated July 13, 1894, contained this clause as to the Postmaster appointed to fill his place when Mr. Cleveland came in. The new Postmaster said he didn't like Republican clerks, and he shifted office several times "to the end ye Postmaster might bounce Republicans without charges and induct their Democratic successors without examination;" but he never said a word about politics. Mr. Proctor was on the stand giving statistics when Theodore Roosevelt came in, and was duly sworn and testified concerning his experiences in the Navy Department. He was held to be a very important witness because he had been Civil Service Commissioner, and was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and between times, for two years had been the President of the Police Board of New York. When asked what his experience had been as he had passed from the Civil Service Commission to an Executive Departmentwhat were his experiences with the classified service, Assistant Secretary Roosevelt's reply was that the application of what was called Civil Service Reform through those departments worked an improvement; and more than that "it is practically indispensable if really good work is to be gotten out," and if the law was abolished the Navy Department would in self-defense have to re-establish it so far as it might by departmental regulation. If the yards and the departments of the Navy were deprived of Civil Service regulations, it would mean that the great part of the time of every officer who ought to be engaged in the transaction of public business would be taken up in trying to reconcile conflicting claims to appointment. The Assistant Secretary produced what he called the little memorandum, saying the old system employing laborers in the navy yards in accordance with the wish of local politicians was in vogue when the new navy began to be built. The old system worked just about the same way under any secretary, and grew |