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:

There are, perhaps, few men who can for any great length of time enjoy office and power without being more or less under the influence of feelings unfavorable to the faithful discharge of their public duties … [T]hey are apt to acquire a habit of looking with indifference upon the public interests and of tolerating conduct from which an unpracticed man would revolt. Office is considered a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.

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]

In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense.

Jackson went on to hone in on the absurd and despotic theory that government officials acquire a property right in the office:

No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal [from office], since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right … The proposed limitation [four years] would destroy the idea of property now so generally connected with official station, and although individual distress may be sometimes produced, it would, by promoting that rotation which constitutes a leading principle in the republican creed, give healthful action to the system.[45]

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:

In the field of actual politics, parties are a necessity and organization is essential. It is the duty of the citizen, therefore, to support the party that stands for right policies and to adhere closely to its official organization. Loyalty should be rewarded by positions within the gift of the party; and disloyalty should be looked upon as politician treason.

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

is only a little less despicable than he who, having been elected to an office through the energy and devotion of the party workers, is then so ungrateful as to refuse to appoint the workers to positions within his gift. Positions constitute the cohesive force that holds the organization intact.[49]

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:

Without firm political guidance, bureaucrats have weak incentives to provide good service, whatever their formal, pre-entry training and professional qualifications. They tend to use their effective control to safeguard their expedient bureaucratic interests — tenure, seniority rights, fringe benefits, toleration of poor performance, the right to violate official norms — rather than to advance the achievement of program goals.[50]

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:

From 1861 to 1865 the policy of [George] Washington, selection according to relative capacity and fitness [sic], was almost entirely forgotten … Lincoln left the bulk of the nominations for presidential as well as for subordinate offices to his political friends and advisors. The military forces as well as the civilian establishment were exploited freely, and political generals were notoriously numerous. With more offices at his disposal than any president up to that time, … Lincoln appears to have used — or permitted the use of — the appointing power at his command as deliberately as they could have been used for practical, and usually partisan, political purposes.[52]

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 devoted 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.[56] Still, Sumner was surprised to find his "little bill on the civil service" draw more support than he had expected: several of the leading newspapers of Washington and New York; several leading academics; Lincoln's Minister to Denmark, Bradford R. Wood, of Albany; William E. Dodge, Jr. of the important metal importers, Phelps, Dodge & Co., who obtained the backing of the Union League Club of New York; and E. B. Ward, Detroit businessman and secretary of the National Manufacturers Association.[57]

Notwithstanding Sumner's abortive effort, the Radicals were basically happy with Lincoln's policies as well as his patronage, and so reform did not really take wing until after the assassination of Lincoln in April, 1865. Vice-President Andrew Johnson was a Union Democrat rather than a Republican, and his moderate policies on Reconstruction deeply angered the Radicals. In December, 1865, Representative Thomas Allen Jenckes (R., RI.), one of the leaders of the Rhode Island bar, made himself the leader of Congressional Reform by introducing a civil service reform bill. Jenckes, a wealthy patent attorney, was in correspondence with British civil service reformers, and he patterned his bill after their program: life tenure on good behavior, open competitive examinations, and a three-man civil service commission to administer the program.

Thomas Jenckes professed to have been converted to reform by his own experience during his Civil War public service, and by study of the English system. And yet, his alleged opposition to spoils did not prevent him from wielding a great deal of patronage while in Congress. It seems more likely that his newfound zeal for reform came from the advent of the hated Johnson Administration. Jenckes had been a zealous Radical, but a pro-Lincoln loyalist, and he was now trying to block Johnson from using his own patronage powers to oust the Lincoln Radicals. Indeed, Jenckes was to write one of the articles of President Johnson's impeachment, and narrowly missed being elected by the anti-Johnson Radicals as House manager of the impeachment trial.[58]

During 1866, however, Jenckes's bill only picked up the support of the new and increasingly influential weekly, The Nation, a New York periodical founded by young British journalist Edwin Lawrence Godkin, who had emigrated to the United States in 1856 and launched The Nation in 1865. Inspired by the British model, Godkin devoted the rest of his life to free trade, hard money, and civil service reform. But most of the soon-to-be reformers had little interest in reform at this point, joining the other Radicals in trying to wrest the patronage power away from the President and into the hands of the Radical-dominated Senate. Johnson attempted to remove the Radicals from executive office, dismissing over one-third of the presidential appointees, over the fierce resistance of the Senate. Finally, in March 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act over Johnson's veto, providing in unprecedented fashion that the President could not remove any officer — including Cabinet members — without Senate approval. Indeed, it was Johnson's insistence on firing the Radical Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War that brought the House to impeach Johnson, and for the Senate to acquit him in his impeachment trial by one vote in May, 1868.

Representative Jenckes resubmitted a reform bill in December 1866, but while it picked up the support of the New York Times, Republican, including future reformer, efforts became concentrated on the Senate battle over patronage with the President. On the floor of Congress, Jenckes denounced the spoils system, and held up the example of Prussian bureaucratic efficiency as recently displayed in the Austro-Prussian War. Opposition to reform was led by Vermont Republican Frederick E. Woodbridge, attorney and railroad builder, who declared that periodic changes of civil service officers are wholesome and democratic, and attacked the Jenckes bill as "antidemocratic." Political changes, Woodbridge declared, "are the great safety-value of the republican form of government … The health of the nation requires that the stable shall be occasionally cleared out."[59] The proposed Civil Service Commission, Woodbridge charged, would be "this great traveling menagerie, this inquisitorial court." In the vote in the House in early 1861, Radical leader Thaddeus Stevens successfully moved to table the Jenckes bill. The bill lost by a vote of 71 to 67; the Republicans voted 56 to 49 in favor of reform whereas the Democrats voted 22 to 11 against. The urban East was far more favorable to the Jenckes bill than the rural West, while within New England, the most urbanized states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire voted unanimously in favor, while the more rural Maine and Vermont voted totally against.[60]

During 1867, however, increasing reformer disillusion with Johnson, coupled with the passage of the Tenure of Office Act, spurred greater interest in civil service reform. During the fall of 1866, Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton launched a campaign to make his dear friend George W. Curtis US Senator from New York. When Roscoe Conkling was selected instead, it took the disappointed office-seeker only three weeks to take the plunge and come out for civil service reform — a cause that would occupy him the rest of his life. Reformers were particularly disgusted at President Johnson's having the effrontery to fire one of their own — John Lothrop Motley — as minister to Austria, for being hostile to the Johnson Administration. Charles Sumner, a close friend of Motley's, and Godkin of The Nation, were particularly disturbed that Motley would be replaced by Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, a man who was not only in favor of Johnson's policies, but who dared to defend the virtues of rotation in office. Taking the typical high moral stance of the civil service reformers, The Nation threw down the moral gauntlet to the Johnson Administration:

Mr. Lincoln … put into office the best set of foreign ministers we have had in many a day, and all our representatives at first-class courts for the last six years have been men who were in every sense of the word an honor to the country …

But, alas, continued The Nation, "they are now being removed one by one to make room for the broken-down adherents of 'the [Johnson] policy,' and if anything can be done to stop the process, stopped it should be."[61]

Reform agitation centered in the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in the House, created in July 1866 to curtail government spending. The old Jenckes bill of 1866-67 had been reported out of the Joint Select Committee. In the spring of 1867, the mysterious Julius Bing, an impoverished immigrant who was acquainted with Senator Sumner, received an appointment as clerk of the Joint Select Committee. During 1867-68, Bing worked tirelessly and on all cylinders to promote the cause of civil service reform. Bing wrote no less than twenty articles for the New York weekly Round Table from the fall of 1867 to the following spring boosting reform, as well as articles in the Chicago Tribune, Putnam's Magazine, and a prominent article in the nation's most influential monthly, the North American Review, in 1867. In addition, Bing distributed pamphlets to congressmen and editors, lobbied members of Congress, and was Representative Jenckes's right arm in advancing the cause.

In May 1868, Julius Bing prepared and wrote the Jenckes report of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment, a massive and comprehensive report which was for many years to serve as the bible of civil service reform. In addition to including reports on the Chinese, European and English civil service, the report contained replies of several hundred supervisory US officers to the committee's thirty-seven-point questionnaire. Unsurprisingly, ninety-seven percent of the replies favored reform, i.e., being frozen into life tenure.

Julius Bing's outlook was candidly expressed in his North American Review article for October, 1867. "In the early days of the Republic," Bing recalled wistfully, civil service officers as well as the Presidents and the Cabinet, were "generally selected from well-known families." With the advent of the spoils system, however, this aristocratic principle had fallen into disuse, but now, with the Jenckes bill, things would be very different. Andrew Johnson, Bing snarled, would not have passed a test by a civil service commission:

it would not have required a profound psychological knowledge to arrive at the conclusion, that a man may rise from the tailor shop to … the gubernatorial chair, and yet be morally and intellectually incapable of presiding … over the destinies of a great nation.

Bing's only objection to the Jenckes bill was that it did not go far enough, that it did not apply to the foreign service from top to bottom.[62]

Finally, after a year of frenzied activity, Bing left the center of the reform movement to become Crete's diplomatic agent in the United States.[63]

IX. The Flirtation with Grant

The reformers looked forward with great expectations to the coming Presidency of General US Grant in early 1869. An indisputable Radical, General Grant was a military man, previously uncontaminated by politics, and not beholden to political machines. Surely Grant, who was reputed to favor the Jenckes bill, would see the wisdom of appointing the Best and the Brightest to office? Charles Eliot Norton trumpeted that "'Honesty & Grant,' 'Good Faith & Grant,' must succeed," and Julius Bing wrote to Rep. Jenckes that Grant's imminent election makes "the prospects of our success … brighter now than … at any previous time."

Grant's installation did not dim the reformers' enthusiasm. Norton burbled that "Grant grows daily in my respect and confidence," and he worshipfully described Grant, as "so simple, so sensible, so strong and so magnanimous." The Nation exulted that "we have in Grant a man who will break up the present system."[64]

A crucial aspect of the reformer enthusiasm for Grant was a conviction that they themselves, as clearly the best and brightest, would share in the boodle of the first Republican administration since Lincoln. Particularly active in scrambling for the spoils was none other than the leaders of the reformers, George William Curtis. Asked by his friend Norton to recommend him to Holland or Belgium, Curtis lobbied the new Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, on Norton's behalf. Curtis also asked Senator Sumner to obtain the nomination of two friends as consuls in France, and he recommended to the patronage post of surveyor for the Albany Customhouse a friend, the poet Alfred Billings Street. In defense of Street, Curtis avowed that the man was not a drunkard, as alleged, but rather was a man "enlivened" by alcohol.

In the meanwhile, the reformers, even The Nation, made it clear that competitive examinations were not really an end in themselves, but a means toward the true goal: of filling government posts with the most qualified people. And they were sure who those particularly qualified might be: men very much like themselves.

The Grant Cabinet soon disillusioned the Reformers, however, though not enough to precipitate a break. It turned out that Grant's loose ties with political machines was a mixed blessing, for Grant insisted on selecting wealthy non-party types who had donated ("subscribed") money to his campaign. The reformers began to complain that the President was too independent of party, i.e., of themselves. The only satisfying Cabinet appointments by Grant were young ex-Governor Jacob D. Cox of Ohio as Secretary of Interior, and particularly the quintessential Boston Brahmin, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, as Attorney General.[65]

The lesser appointments of the President soon confirmed the reformers' disenchantment. Apart from giving the coveted Minister of England post to the Boston Brahmin historian John Lothrop Motley, who had helped write Grant's campaign biography, Grant failed to acknowledge the Best and Brightest status for the reformers. The new Senator from Missouri, Carl Schurz, found to his consternation that the President had selected the postmaster for St. Louis without consulting him, capped by his telling Schurz that "I know Missouri a great deal better than you do." Charles Eliot Norton, finding himself out in the cold on a ministerial appointment, was no longer enchanted with President Grant by July of the president's inaugural year. By then, the reformers were no longer complaining that Grant was insufficiently political; quite the contrary. Norton wrote his friend, Curtis, of "Grant's surrender … to the politicians," who are about to "ruin the country." John Hay, a Boston Brahmin in the career foreign service, wrote angrily about "the herd of swine" whom Secretary of State Hamilton Fish "has commissioned." By late April, the gloomy reformer Henry Adams had washed his hands of the Grant administration:

My hopes of the new Administration have all been disappointed; it is far inferior to the last. My friends have almost all lost ground instead of gaining it as I hoped. My family is buried politically beyond recovery for years. I am becoming more and more isolated as far as allies go.

Adams wrote to his brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., lamenting their common political fate:

I can't get you an office. The only members of this Government that I have met are mere acquaintances, not friends, and I fancy no request of mine would be likely to call out a gush of sympathy.[66]

Not only were the Adamses, Curtis, Schurz and other reformers disgruntled by Grant's patronage policy, but so too were the media elite: the nation's editors who were peeved at not receiving lucrative appointments. No important editor or publisher was offered a post; and, by mid-April, only Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, was offered the picayune spot of appraiser for New York. All in all, it was easy for the reformers to see, with Julius Bing by mid-April, that Grant had acted "in apparent disregard of the principle of intrinsic fitness and qualification…"

If Grant was not to be relied upon, then the reformers must redouble their agitation for a professional civil service with life tenure. Henry Adams, who had not been particularly interested in reform before his disappointment, now plunged into the effort. By February, 1869, Adams had concluded that reform was fundamental, and by June he was writing what he described as a pro-civil service reform article "very bitter and abusive of the Administration." He expected that the article would get him in "hot water," but he felt that he had "nothing to lose." Disappointed in seeking office, the nation's editors stepped up their reform efforts. As Hoogenboom puts it, "Editors, always a vital part of the civil service reform movement, provided the driving force that eventually secured substantial legislation." But these were only the "respectable" editors: The Nation bitterly made it clear that the non-respectable press were not interested in reform since they were enough inside politics to get "their own hands and those of their friends into the public treasury."[67]

Stung by their own disappointment, the reformers were incensed when President Grant removed previous officeholders wholesale, and when he made room in the bureaucracy for all the Republican Congressmen defeated in the November elections of 1868. By June, The Nation complained that "few people — few of his supporters certainly — were prepared for the 'clean sweep' which he made." The scandals, charged The Nation, "have been enormous, and have been deeply felt by the whole community."[68]

In the meanwhile, agitation for the Jenckes Bill, which had escalated after Grant's election in the expectation that the new President would back reform, intensified further now that Grant had let the reformers down. Outgoing Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch called for the Jenckes bill, and the powerful Union League Club of New York unanimously called for reform. Moreover, in December 1868, the American Social Science Association, founded in Boston a few years earlier to oppose slavery, now added civil service reform to its agenda. German immigrant Henry H. Villard, secretary of the ASSA, and soon to be head of the Northern Pacific Railroad, brought Representative Jenckes in early January to Boston to meet with the society and its influential business and professional supporters. A large audience, including the Board of Trade, and several former mayors of Boston, unanimously signed a petition urging the Jenckes bill. The following week Villard held another meeting for Jenckes in New York, attended by 1,200 enthusiastic businessmen. From that base, Villard spread ASSA organizing for civil service reform to Washington and throughout the country. In June, Villard was able to establish a branch of the ASSA in Philadelphia, centering around the prominent anti-Catholic historian Henry Charles Lea, and fifty of the "best citizens of that city."[69]

In October 1869, George William Curtis took the lead of the reformers in addressing the annual meeting of the ASSA in New York, attacking the existing system and calling for the Jenckes bill. The Nation hailed the speech and claimed that the public owed a great debt to the ASSA for featuring the talk; it was also impressed by the fact that Curtis, one of the nation's most popular speakers on the lecture circuit, would stump the country for reform.

During the same month, Henry Adams published his "very bitter" article on "Civil Service Reform" in the North American Review. Taking the gloves off on Grant, he accused the president of carrying the spoils system to a new extreme. In particular, he pinpointed the politically powerful Civil War (North) veterans group, the Grand Army of the Republic, as aiding Grant in organizing a purge of administrative departments. Adams, however, was a fan neither of competitive examinations nor of the Jenckes bill; he wanted the President to impose civil service reform by executive fiat, and he wanted not so much competitive exams but permanence of the administrative oligarchy. Adams betrayed the reformers' overriding motives when he contrasted the alleged magnificence of Attorney-General Ebenezer Hoar with his fellow-Bostonian and Republican, the Radical Secretary of Treasury George S. Boutwell. Whereas Boutwell was a self-made man who rose to prominence, and "was the product of caucuses and party promotion" [Adams' sneer was almost visible], Hoar, coming from one of the top Brahmin families of Boston, was "by birth and by training a representative of the best New England school, indifferent to opposition whether in or out of his party." Adams added that

Judge Hoar belonged in fact to a class of men who had been gradually driven from politics, but whom it is the hope of reformers to restore. Mr. Boutwell [on the other hand] belonged to the class which has excluded its rival, but which has failed to fill with equal dignity the place it has usurped.[70]

This was a contrast that The Nation immediately applauded.

In the meanwhile, the Radical Republicans, coming into power with the Grant Administration, were not about to have their priorities upset. In the first place, with their man in the White House, they rapidly repealed (or amended out of existence) the Tenure of Office Act, which they had passed two years later so that the Radical Senate could take power from Andrew Johnson. With one of their own as president, they rushed to restore the sole presidential power to remove federal appointees from office.

Similarly, with their man in power, the Radicals had now lost their previous enthusiasm for civil service reform. What was the point, now that General Grant, and not an enemy like Johnson, was president? Taking the lead against the Jenckes bill immediately after the 1868 election, for example, was leader Radical Senator John A. ("Black Jack") Logan of Illinois. When the hated Andrew Johnson was in power, Logan, in December 1867, had introduced a civil service reform bill. Now that Grant was president, however, it was a very different story. Logan now denounced reform as unconstitutional, aristocratic, monarchical, anti-republican, and undemocratic. On the contrary, he who does not support an administration should not work in it. As Logan put it, "he who does not unite in its view is not to be intrusted with its employment."

Logan pointed out the importance of rotation in office: "It is by having their agents constantly before them that their acts may be denounced or confirmed that the people maintain their supremacy and enforce their will. This, sir, is the theory and practice of our Government. Immediate responsibility we all incur, and speedy settlements we all must render." Logan concluded that "the right to become for a time a portion of the administrative force of the government is one of the recognized rights of the people of which it is proposed by this bill, utterly and forever, to deprive them."[71]

The Jenckes bill was also effectively attacked by Pennsylvania Democratic Representative George W. Woodward. Harking back to Jacksonian Democracy, Woodward instead called for the Jacksonian virtues of rotation in office, hard money, no excise taxes on industry, free trade, cutting the budget, and repaying the public debt. Rotation in office, Woodward assured, would far more readily assure morality in office than would civil service reform.[72]

The opposition of Logan and other Radicals doomed the Jenckes bill for the duration of the lame-duck 70th Congress; the reformers would try again in the 71st Congress, coming in with the new Grant administration in the spring of 1869. Prospects were dimmed, however, by the fact that the Democrats, doomed to extreme minority status during the Civil War, had made considerable gains in the congressional elections of 1868.

President Grant's first annual message to Congress in December 1869 disappointed the reformers still further, by omitting any call for civil service reform; The Nation extravagantly called this omission the "great scandal of General Grant's administration." The reformers were further embittered when their admired Judge Hoar, appointed by President Grant to the Supreme Court, was rejected by the Radical-dominated Senate, angry at Hoar's refusal to tolerate political appointees in the Justice Department.

Jenckes reintroduced his bill in the next Congress, in May 1870. This time, Jenckes threw a sop to the principle of rotation in office, but not to political rotation, by providing that his proposed Civil Service Commission could make civil servants subject to reexamination every four years. Most of the popular support was still confined to the northeast.

While the Jenckes bill languished in Congress, the year 1870 saw a number of body blows administered to the reformers by Grant Administration. Their two beloved leaders in the administration were both summarily fired; Ebenezer Hoar as Attorney General and John Lothrop Motley as minister to England. Both men joined Senator Charles Sumner in opposing President Grant's scheme for the United States to annex Santo Domingo, and Hoar in particular was detested by Massachusetts Radical Representative Ben Butler, a champion of the "spoils system" and enemy of reform. Furthermore, the other reformer in the Cabinet, Secretary of Interior Jacob Dolson Cox, was fired by the president, largely for imposing civil service tests and refusing to make political appointments in the Interior Department. Cox, too, ran afoul of the powerful Butler, as well as tangling with Radical Michigan Senator and wealthy Detroit merchant, Zachariah Chandler.[73]

After his dismissal in October, Cox was urged to go public with the reasons by fellow Ohio reformer, Representative James A. Garfield, and the disclosure had the effect of demonstrating increasing disarray in Republican ranks. The ensuing elections of 1870 saw a Democratic gain of thirty seats in the House, as well as the carrying of critical states New York and Indiana. After the election, reform agitation continued, with Yale professors generating a New Haven meeting's "warm letter of sympathy" to Cox, denouncing the existing state of the civil service as "the root of much of our political corruption." Harvard quickly chimed in, a Republican "caucus" in Cambridge unanimously passing a pro-Cox resolution, and a group of young Harvard alumni talked of forming a civil service reform club.

During the election, however, reform lost its stoutest Congressional champion. Thomas A. Jenckes was defeated for reelection by an opponent backed by the powerful Republican Senator William Sprague, a wealthy textile manufacturer, railroad man, and real estate speculator. Having accused Sprague of all manner of corruption and then having lost the election, Jenckes went down howling fraud to the last, charging Sprague with having purchased the winning votes.

The 1870 election, indeed, saw the rise of a new faction within the national party, the Liberal Republicans, calling for free trade but devoted in particular to civil service reform. Carl Schurz bolted the Missouri Republican party, and managed to elect a Liberal Republican as governor. The Nation went to the length of calling for a new party devoted to civil service reform, lower tariffs, and, in particular, more representation in government of the "thoughtful, conscientious and intelligent" part of the population, "now excluded from all direct share in the government."

More prophetic was the call of the Bostonian American Free Trade League for an alliance of liberal or reform Republicans and Democrats, an idea seconded in the pro-reformer Chicago Tribune. Promptly after the election, the Free Trade League called a conference for a new alliance in New York. While Schurz, Cox and other Republican leaders refused to commit at this point on breaking with Grant, many leading pro-reform editors were in attendance, including Henry Adams of the North American Review, Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, and E.L. Godkin of The Nation. The conference endorsed both civil service reform and free trade, although Speaker of the House James G. Blaine was able to keep the reformers from calling for a new party by promising to make one of their own, James A. Garfield, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. George Curtis also rejected the idea of a new party as insuring the victory of the hated Democrats.

The severe election losses, as well as increasing disaffection from the party by the reformers, caused a shift on the part of the Grant Administration. President Grant, in his annual December, 1870 message to Congress, actually called for civil service reform; the existing patronage system, he said, "does not secure the best men, and often not even fit men, for public place."

During the lame duck session of the 41st Congress, various reform bills, even though approved by President Grant, failed to pass, until congressional reform leaders put through a joint resolution, authorizing the President to appoint a civil service commission to prescribe rules for examining applications. And despite the fact that this resolution was trickily driven through both houses of Congress at the last minute in March as a rider to an appropriation bill, the reformers hailed its passage without commenting on the hasty and devious way that the process was handled.

The Grant Administration's tactic managed to split the reformers. Most reformers, indeed, followed Carl Schurz, Jacob Cox, and E.L. Godkin in forming a powerful Liberal Republican faction dedicated to taking over the Republic Party and denying Grant renomination in 1872. The Liberals challenged the dominant Radicals on every level. Whereas the Radicals were devoted to continuing the Reconstruction of the South, high protective tariffs, continuing greenback inflation, and preserving the spoils system, the Liberals favored conciliating the South and ending Reconstruction now that slavery had been abolished, free trade, and resumption of the gold standard — in short, the platform of the minority Sumner wing of the old Radical faction. But their greatest zeal was not so much for the old laissez-faire creed of the Jacksonian Democracy, but for the doctrine especially detested by that fading group: civil service reform. When Jacob Cox formed his Central Republican Association in Cleveland in early 1871, standing on the above program, Carl Schurz cheered him on, stating that this was the creed of his Missouri Liberal Republicans, and calling for similar organizations across the country.

Out of step with most of his colleagues, George W. Curtis was so delighted with the Grant call for reform and with the ensuing Congressional rider, that he hailed Grant and backed his renomination, a conversion toward Grand possibly influenced by Curtis's belief that the President planned to make him Minister to England. Instead, Curtis got another call from the President; responding to the Congressional rider and to charges of corruption in the New York Customhouse, President Grant surprised and delighted reformers in June by appointing a seven-man Civil Service Commission (CSC) , with none other than Curtis as its chairman. The New York Times, now a solid Administration organ since Horace Greeley's rival New York Tribune was becoming increasingly Liberal, heralded the appointment of the Curtis CSC as offering "practical proof that the President is actively enlisted for reform, and that he has the sense and courage to call to his aid men who are in earnest beyond suspicion."[74]

Curtis succeeded, over the objections of many members of the Commission and over the reluctance of the President, in getting the CSC to promulgate, in mid-December, sweeping rules for all but a small handful of the top officials of the federal administration. He also got President Grant to promulgate the rules on January 1, 1872, to take effect in a mere two weeks. These draconian rules made the CSC the dictator of virtually the entire executive branch, with new entrants into each department coming in almost exclusively at the bottom, with jobholders to be selected by competitive open examination, and promotions from the ranks to be selected in the same way.

The CSC was supposed, however, to divide the civil service into grades, and clearly it was absurd to believe that it could accomplish this task in two weeks. On January 10, therefore, Grant suspended the new rules to give the CSC time to come up with a detailed classification into grades. It did so on March 12, 1872, dividing the entire administration into four classes, with all but the small fourth, or highest, class subject to the rules of examination, and their salaries determined by class. Grant quickly bowed to CSC wishes and promulgated the reform rules.

In a letter to the most reform-minded member of the CSC after Curtis, Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill, President Grant came down squarely on the side of reform: "The great defect in the past custom is that executive patronage has come to be regarded as the property of the party in power."[75]

The reformers, however, scarcely paused to celebrate their triumph. They had to battle against a hostile Congress, especially the Grantian Radicals for appropriations and to try to make the Grant rules permanent by statute; and they also arrogantly continued to press the president to extend the rules into the top category, even into those positions that had to be confirmed by the Senate.

In Congress, the Grantian Radicals struck hard. Senator Matthew Carpenter of Wisconsin denounced reform as unconstitutional, transferring the patronage from elected officials to a "board of schoolmasters." Carpenter also perceptively pointed out that not only were the new rules anti-republican, but that they favored the sons of the rich, who could afford a college education, and therefore do better at abstract written examinations than the practical fellow. Carpenter shrewdly identified the underlying class struggle involved in the agitation for and against reform:

So, sir, it comes to this at last, that … the dunce who had been crammed up to a diploma at Yale, and comes fresh from his cramming, will be preferred in all civil service appointments to the ablest, most successful, and most upright business man of the country, who either did not enjoy the benefit of early education, or from whose mind, long engrossed in practical pursuits, the details and niceties of academic knowledge have faded away as the headlands disappear when the mariner bids his native land good night.[76]

A battle ensued in Congress over appropriations for the CSC, which did not feel it could follow its true inclinations in an election year, and it grudgingly voted $25,000 in early May, a severe whittling down from the original proposal of $100,000, or even from the Senate's passage of $50,000. Again, biggest support for the bill was in the northeast, although this time the Grantian Radicals were even more opposed to the CSC than were the Democrats. Leading the anti-reform forces in the House, once again, was Massachusetts Representative Ben Butler, while James A. Garfield led the ranks of the reformers.[77]

It was characteristic of the reformers that they repaid President Grant's conversion to their cause by giving him nothing but grief. The bulk of the reformers, determined to destroy the prospects of a second term for Grant, formed a new party, the Liberal Republicans. Meeting under the aegis of Senator Carl Schurz in Missouri in January, 1872, they called for a national convention to meet in Cincinnati on May 1. The idea was to pick a candidate whom the Democrats could also support, and thereby sweep a Democratic-Liberal Republican president into power. Particularly prominent in the new party were the nation's leading media intellectuals — the editors of the most important newspapers. These included Horace Greeley and publisher Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune, The Nation, the New York Evening Post, Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican, Mural Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, and Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

The reformers were anxious to nominate for president one of their very own, Charles Francis Adams, but in order to broaden their base, they were forced to accept delegates not really devoted to reform, who were often simply spoilsmen disgruntled that they had lost out in the battle for President Grant's favor. Such a man was Horace Greeley, who was nominated over Adams and others on the sixth ballot. Greeley's nomination left Schurz, the party's founder, and other reformers embittered. For the elderly Greeley was the opposite of the beau ideal of a civil service reformer: a Fourierite socialist and long-time protectionist, Greeley believed that the protective tariff, in contrast to "selfish" laissez-faire individualism, embodied the Christian principle of "universal love." Not only that: but Greeley was really a spoilsman who joined the Liberals because he had backed the wrong Republican faction in New York, from the point of view of the Grant Administration. Carl Schurz was dismayed, writing Greeley frankly that "the first fruit of the great reform, so hopefully begun, was a successful piece of political huckstering and that the whole movement had been captured by politicians of the old stamp." E.L. Godkin was even more upset, writing furiously to Schurz that Greeley was a "conceited, ignorant, half-cracked, obstinate old creature," and charged that Greeley's "election … would be a national calamity of the first magnitude … the triumph of quackery, charlatanry and recklessness."[78]

The civil service reformers were now split into four mutually quarreling factions. The main camp, headed by Schurz and Horace White, after gaining a commitment by Horace Greeley to civil service reform, swallowed their pride by the end of June and supported Greeley. The second, embittered faction, headed by Godkin and Charles Eliot Norton, went back to support President Grant as the lesser of the two evils. A small group of reformers in late June, detesting both Grant and Greeley, nominated W.S. Groesbeck of Ohio for President, but was not heard from again. And finally, the fourth faction, headed by Curtis, was with Grant from the beginning, remained with Grant, and denounced Greeley with relish. Interestingly, Curtis's letters reveal that his support of Grant was not so much on the civil service question as on his Radical view of reconstruction. Curtis denounced Greeley as too soft on the South, accusing Greeley of being a veritable Copperhead. In the meanwhile, the embattled Democrats, anxious for allies, made the great mistake of nominating Greeley themselves, thereby abandoning all their old principles of Jacksonian Democracy. New York Irish Catholic lawyer Charles O'Conner, a devoted libertarian and Jacksonian Democrat, ran for president on a third, Straight Democratic Party ticket in behalf of the Democracy.

In the 1872 election, Horace Greeley was trounced, losing every state, and he died shortly thereafter. The reformers continued to be split, with the Godkin-Norton faction particularly bitter at those who stuck with Greeley, accusing the latter of selfish and sordid political motives for backing Greeley. After the election, the Schurz-White forces, as true pragmatists, tried to reconcile the factions, but Godkin would have none of it, declaring that "there is at present a slight odor of ridicule hanging around everybody who had anything to do" with the Cincinnati convention. Ideas for a Civil Service Reform League or a daily newspaper in New York devoted to reform faded away.

Despite the disarray of the reformers, President Grant continued to be committed to reform, but he reaped only aggravation from George Curtis. In August 1873, Grant agreed to promulgate CSC rules tightening the old regulations, actually making all personal solicitation of appointments by congressmen and others illegal. But Grant wanted some flexibility in the rules for high positions in the administration. After much backing and filling, Grant insisted on naming his own person for the post of surveyor of the customs in New York, technically within the civil service rules but actually always a leading political position confirmable by the Senate. Curtis stubbornly resisted, however, and when illness prevented him from holding a hearing or examination to find someone to fill the post, the president went ahead in mid-March and appointed the prominent politician George H. Sharpe to the post, without notifying Curtis. In a pique Curtis promptly resigned as chairman of the CSC.

Curtis's successor as head of the CSC had impeccable reform credentials. Dorman B. Eaton was a reform intellectual and erudite attorney, born and raised in New England and resident in New York. In 1870, Eaton gave up his flourishing law practice, and spent the rest of his life fighting for municipal and civil service reform, publishing a scholarly history, Civil Service in Great Britain, in 1880. It is characteristic of Curtis that he was bitter about Eaton betraying the cause, whereas Eaton felt that Curtis was endangering the reform movement by his precipitous action. In any case, it was Eaton who presided over the tighter rules put forth in August.

But Curtis was not to be appeased; after six months of rest, he was back in the fall of 1873, on the attack in his Harper's Weekly, denouncing Grant as not sticking to the "spirit of the rules" by not extending them upward to the important posts of post-masters and collectors of revenue. There is evidence that some of Curtis's bitterness was caused by the thwarting of his ambition for rising in the Grant administration — perhaps his failure to be made Minister to England. For his part, Eaton was willing to conciliate Grant and give up reform rules for collectors and surveyors of ports. Although eventually the reformers would be forced to retreat to this more sensible stance, Godkin's Nation attacked Eaton's concession, in the process revealing the true ambitions of reform. It is easy for the President and department heads, the Nation wrote, to favor reform, "because it takes disagreeable work off their hands, while as to the more important offices, they are almost openly hostile to the spirit of the innovation, because it takes power away from them." It was the top positions that the reformers were mainly interested in conquering and securing, not the jobs of the lowly clerks.[79]

The Radical Republican ranks in Congress were strengthened by the 1972 election, however, and they were ready for the reformers' blood. In addition, the reformers were increasingly distracted by the Panic of 1873, and by the Radicals' demand for monetary inflation to combat a panic that had been brought on by the Civil War and by post-Civil War inflationary expansion of bank credit. Since the reformers were generally hard-money opponents of inflation, the enmity of the Radicals was further redoubled. When President Grant, in his annual message of December 1873, suggested that Congress form a special committee to help the CSC devise enforceable rules, the House responded by naming a committee that featured the inflationist and spoils system champion Ben Butler and that failed to include reform leader James A. Garfield. After a fierce struggle over the existence of the CSC and over its funding, with Ben Butler leading the fight against both, Congress ended by leaving the CSC standing but depriving it of any appropriations.

In the Congressional elections of November 1874, the Democrats, spurred on by the damaging Panic of 1873, won a landslide majority of seventy votes in the House, capturing that body for the first time since the Civil War. The Republican majority in the Senate was reduced to a narrow one. Discouraged by the Democratic victories and by reformer complaints, President Grant finally threw in the towel. In his annual message of December 1874, he continued to endorse civil service reform, but stressed the absurdity of continuing the CSC and the regulations without Congressional funding or support. Grant threatened to abolish the competitive examination system if Congress failed to fund the CSC. Happy to kill the CSC through inaction, the lame duck 43rd Congress failed to appropriate funds, and Grant discontinued the competitive examinations in March 1875. The Civil Service Commission, and the first era of reform rules, 1871-1875, was ended. The reformer flirtation with Grant was over.

X. The Climax of Reform: The Pendleton Act

The abandonment by President Grant served to mobilize and unify the reformers. In February, 1875, Henry Adams called for a "consultation" of reformers, which was held in the form of a dinner honoring Schurz on his retirement from the Senate. The reformers resolved to unite and avoid the disastrous splits of '72, and they held a general meeting in New York in late April. The reformers concentrated their political fire that year in Ohio, where pro-reformer and hard-money advocate Rutherford B. Hayes managed to topple incumbent inflationist Democratic Governor William Allen. The campaigning for Hayes by Carl Schurz might have made a difference in the close race.

The reformers were also cheered when George W. Curtis was chosen chairman of the New York State Republican convention that year, and when the convention adopted a resolution against a third term for Grant. And in the Democratic party in New York, pro-reform Samuel Tilden was nominated — and later elected — for governor over Tammany opposition.

The reformers' political attention was now concentrated on the 1876 race. The reformers, now known as Independent Republicans, secretly cherished the pipe-dream of Charles Francis Adams, Sr. being nominated on both party tickets — which would have been the climax of their quiet belief in "democracy" guided by themselves. More realistically, they favored the popular Kentuckian Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow; at one point, Henry Adams contemplated buying the New York Evening Post as a Bristow organ with Schurz installed as editor. In April, the reformers held a large-scale New York conference at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in which they made clear that they would avoid the separate party route of 1872, and maintain an Independent stance, waiting to see how the presidential nomination came out. The platform adopted by the conference was written by Schurz, stressing the twin issues of civil service reform and sound currency, meaning a return to the gold standard. The Nation exulted that the attendees at the conference were largely the "'moral element' … ministers, professors, and respectable persons who do not believe politics should be pursued as a trade."[80]

Bristow failed to obtain the nomination at the June convention at Cincinnati, but the reformers were happy with the dark-horse choice, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, who was committed to reform, to return to gold and to conciliating the South.[81] Hayes had been corresponding with the reformers since February, and after his nomination he wrote happily in his diary: "The best people, many of them heretofore dissatisfied with the Republican party, are especially hearty in my support. I must make it my constant effort to deserve this confidence."[82] And while the reformers were happy to back Hayes, they were also pleased when the Democrats nominated their most ardent reformer, New York's Governor Tilden. Either way, the reformers couldn't lose. In his official letter of acceptance of the nomination in July, Hayes, after consulting with Curtis and Schurz, called strongly for abolition of the spoils system and for a "thorough, radical and complete" reform of the civil service.

As President, Hayes, as we might expect, met with little but complaining from the reformers. During the campaign, the reformers grumbled that Hayes was "waving the bloody shirt" against the "rebels" in his campaign, that he was whipping up anti-Catholic sentiment, and that he was giving campaign posts to opponents of reform. The reformers then complained about Hayes's gaining the presidency from Tilden by evident fraud, and then rewarding the fraudulent election returns-counters from the South with patronage positions. And even though the reformers were delighted that Schurz was named Secretary of the Interior, that he imposed the examination system in his department, and that other reform work was done in the New York Customhouse, nothing, as usual, was enough to satisfy them. Why weren't all the other departments in the hands of the reformers? Also, they found that Hayes was taking the reformers' goal of life tenured appointments too seriously; what he was supposed to do was to kick out all the evil Grant people, replace them with good reformers, and then freeze the reformers into civil service by reform.

Thus, in June 1877, Horace White wrote in exasperation to Schurz:

At the beginning, there should have been some heavy & decisive blows at the old system — for instance, the removal of the Collectors at Boston, NY. & Phila. followed by appointments of friends of reform. Known to the country as such, & fostered by unequivocal instructions for all officers & their subordinates.[83]

Poor President Hayes! He just never really got it, although he should have gladdened their hearts by pulling federal troops out of the South and by returning to the gold standard in 1879.

Hayes tried to make up to the reformers by putting the major emphasis on a call for civil service reform in his annual message of late 1879; furthermore, he requested Dorman Eaton, who was still nominally head of the CSC though without office space or funds, to report on the British civil service system, and Eaton was happy to comply, with his paean to the recently-imposed merit and life tenure system in England, Civil Service in Great Britain (1880).

The reformers were puzzled about their stance in the 1880 election. When he was nominated, Hayes, in a burst of what the reformers felt was misguided reforming zeal, pledged to be only a one-term candidate. So Hayes, their favorite, took himself out of the race for 1880. The major Republican candidates in 1880 were General Grant, for a third-term, and House Speaker James G. Blaine of Maine. The reformers detested Grant and were unhappy with Blaine, and so they felt it a divine "deliverance" when the June Republican convention at Chicago, after deadlocking between the two leaders, picked pro-reform James A. Garfield as the compromise, anti-Grant candidate. And even though the reformers preferred Garfield to the Democrat choice, General Winfield S. Hancock, they continually complained that Garfield was a waffler, that he now refused to commit to reform, and that he was too close to James Blaine. The reformers grumbled particularly when Garfield chose as Vice President Chester A. Arthur of the hated New York machine of spoilsman Senator Roscoe Conkling.

The decisive step taken by the reformers during the 1880 campaign was not the election of Garfield, but the establishment of a permanent, single-issue civil service reform organization to agitate for reform. It began in the form of a suggestion in August by the Nation, and in a response by Frederick William Holls of New York calling for Independent Republicans to organize a society stressing "education and enlightenment … accomplished by agitation, political, social and even religious." Holls suggested that the new society employ the methods which they and their forerunners had used in the struggle for the abolition of slavery: in particular, to seize and stress the high ground of morality and moral principle. Holls urged that the new society put the argument especially on the basis of "abstract moral right". Favorable response in letters to the Nation inspired the reformers to organize such a society.

In particular, Dorman Eaton had set up a New York Civil Service Reform Association in May, 1877, but the lack of interest had caused the association to remain dormant after 1878. Now, Curtis revived the association, which reorganized in September and October, and named Curtis as its president, a post which he was to continue to hold until his death twelve years later. The association was to be single-issue and non-partisan. It was to specialize in lobbying, in a committee headed by Eaton, and in publishing and distributing publications, in an effort headed by Godkin. The New York association formed the model and the nucleus of other local associations, which sprang up like wildfire: by May 1881, affiliated associations had been established in Brooklyn, Boston, Cambridge, West Newton, Massachusetts, and in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Providence and San Francisco, and in the process of formation in Buffalo, New Orleans, Pittsfield and Worcester, Mass. Pamphlets were widely distributed, and in May, a monthly periodical, The Civil Service Record, started being published by the Boston and Cambridge associations.

Professor Hoogenboom's study of the forty-five active members of the New York Association's executive committee, from its inception in 1877 until 1883, reveals the following: most members were born within ten years of 1832, making them in their upper forties and lower fifties in 1880; half were attorneys, nine were editors, three professors and five clergymen contributed to the group's high moral tone, and the one-third businessmen were not industrialists but rather upper-middle rank merchants and bankers. Almost all were Protestant; over half were born in New England and the rest in New York. All were Anglophiles. Almost all were highly educated, many gaining advanced degrees. Nine attended Harvard College and seven Harvard Law School. The typical New York reform leader was entrenched in blue-blood society, and was a clubman — especially the Union League, Century, University, and Harvard clubs. Patterns were similar in the Brooklyn, Boston and San Francisco Associations.[84]

Finally, on August 11, 1881, the New York Association called a general conference of local associations at Newport, to coordinate agitation and action for reform. Out of this conference came the umbrella national organiz