Political Order and Political Decay (26 page)

The first group seeking reform was the business community, which wanted more efficient government. American capitalism was changing dramatically in this period, with the growth of large interstate corporations like the railroads, manufacturing that was dependent on foreign trade, and an agricultural sector that was shifting from subsistence farming to commercial cash cropping. Within this group of players were a number of diverse interests. Some, like the railroads, found it perfectly easy to make use of the patronage system to buy off state legislatures and protect their interests. By contrast, supporters of reform tended to be urban merchants and manufacturers whose interests were hurt more by the poor quality of government services that the old system produced. “Reformers harped on reports of post offices where bags of undelivered mail lay forgotten in locked rooms, and they lectured local chambers of commerce about customhouses in Prussia and Britain that were four and five times more cost efficient per volume of work done.”
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City merchants wanted clean streets, public transportation, and police and fire protection, all of which were jeopardized by party control of municipal government. One of the big controversies leading up to the Pendleton Act was an investigation of the New York Custom House through which a large volume of trade passed and from which the U.S. government derived nearly 50 percent of all its revenues. The Custom House was under the control of Republican boss Roscoe Conkling and a prime source of patronage. Conkling's ultimate defeat reflected a power struggle between the Stalwart and Half-Breed factions of the Republican Party, and the final outcome—merit-based recruitment into the Custom House—suited the interests of New York's business community.
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A second group in favor of reform was the stratum of middle-class professionals that emerged by the late nineteenth century. Demand for educated professionals was created by the growing private sector and its need for technical expertise, while supply was expanding through the efforts of federal and state governments as well as private funders to build a network of new colleges and universities across the country. This professional class had an elevated view of its own status and importance, and tended to resent the fact that the bosses controlling municipal politics were cruder and less educated than they were. They were also taxpayers who didn't like the fact that their hard-earned dollars were going into the pockets of machine politicians.
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A final group that formed part of the Progressive coalition were urban social reformers who dealt directly with the conditions of the contemporary city—people like Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, who exposed the conditions of the urban poor, and William Allen, leader of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, who attacked the Tammany machine's mismanagement of public resources.
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Social mobilization will not take place in the absence of ideas. New social classes may exist de facto—that is, groups of people with similar backgrounds, needs, and status—but they will not act collectively if they are not conscious of themselves as a group. In this respect, intellectuals play a critical role in interpreting the world, explaining to the public the nature of its own self-interest, and positing a different world that alternative public policies might make possible. Individuals like Dorman Eaton, Woodrow Wilson, and Frank Goodnow, author of a series of influential books on public administration, cast existing American institutions in a very negative light and suggested European models as alternatives.
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These intellectuals then organized or legitimated a series of new civil society organizations, such as the New York Municipal Research Bureau, which generated policy proposals for reform, the American Social Science Association, which made civil service reform on a “scientific” basis a top priority, and the Bar Association of the City of New York, formed in 1870 to defend the professional integrity of its members.
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They would come to invoke the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor's “scientific management,” an approach that was seen as the cutting edge of modern business organization, as guidelines for a revamped American public sector.
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Much as the self-interest of the reformers was a basis of their activism, there was an important ethical dimension to this struggle as well. The attack on patronage and bossism took on a highly moralistic tone, with individuals across the country arguing passionately against the evils of the existing system. As described by Edmund Morris, Theodore Roosevelt's biographer,

It is difficult for Americans living in the last quarter of the twentieth century to understand the emotions which Civil Service Reform aroused in the last quarter of the nineteenth. The movement's literature has about it all the faded ludicrousness of Moral Rearmament. How could intellectuals, politicians, socialites, churchmen, and editors campaign so fervently on behalf of customs clerks, Indian school superintendents, and Fourth-Class postmasters?… The fact remains that thousands, even millions, lined up behind the banner, and they were as evangelical (and as strenuously resisted) as any crusaders in history.
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Part of the answer to Morris's question as to why people became so impassioned on the question of civil service reform has to do with recognition, that is, the desire of people to have their status and dignity publicly acknowledged by other human beings. The civil service reform movement was led by professionals of various sorts—lawyers, academics, journalists, and the like. In Stephen Skowronek's words, they represented the “key link between America's old patrician elite and its new professional sector. Their roots lay in established American families and high New England culture.”
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This new middle-class elite sought reforms against the interests of a political class that had succeeded in mobilizing the vast mass of nonelite voters into the patronage system. The reformers tended to be upper-crust Protestants resentful of the barely literate Catholics and Jews who were flooding into the country, unfamiliar with American values and practices. They were trying, in a certain sense, to recoup the social status their predecessors had held in the period before the onset of Jacksonian populism. They saw themselves differently, of course, as leaders of modernization in a backward society.
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They bitterly resented the fact that less-educated politicians held real political power and that they did not; their education and technical knowledge got little respect from the existing political class. So while many of them sought advancement of their material interests, the passionate moralism of the movement was generated by the demand for recognition of the values of education, merit, organization, and honesty that this class of individuals believed they themselves embodied.
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LEADERSHIP

The effort to eliminate clientelism from the federal civil service progressed slowly in the two decades after the passage of the Pendleton Act, since enforcement of the Civil Service Commission's edicts was dependent on the often nonexistent willingness of presidents to exert authority over their own cabinet departments. All of this changed, and a much stronger merit-based service emerged, only after two events that occurred shortly after the turn of the twentieth century.

The first was the election of 1896 that brought William McKinley to the presidency and gave the Republican Party a dominating majority in Congress. The previous two decades saw the two parties evenly matched, with power in Congress shifting from one to the other or being split between them every two years from 1875 to 1896.
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The 1896 defeat of Democrat/Populist William Jennings Bryan was a so-called realigning election that shifted the balance of electoral power for the next generation to a Republican majority based on business interests in the Northeast, and the splitting off of a solidly Democratic South from the rest of the populist movement.
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The second development was the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and the subsequent redefinition of executive leadership in the United States. The forgettable presidents of the late nineteenth century often acted as no more than clerks for decisions being made by the two parties in Congress. Teddy Roosevelt was an extraordinarily energetic individual who took the Hamiltonian view that the executive branch needed to exert independent authority, stretching existing views of the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency to a breaking point. Roosevelt had been a member of the Civil Service Commission for six years, and he used his presidential powers to greatly expand and strengthen the merit-based part of the federal government—something that was easier to do because his predecessor had been a Republican and had already filled the government with patronage appointments. Roosevelt came into office initially in 1901 on McKinley's assassination, but he and his party won a decisive majority in the 1904 election, a mandate that he used to great effect. He worked closely with the Civil Service Commission to strengthen its supervisory authority over federal agencies and to sever the ties between the protected service and the political parties. The commission was given more resources and, critically, control over recruitment and promotions all the way down to the local level.
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The reform effort flagged after Roosevelt's departure from office in 1909. His successor, William Howard Taft, was not nearly as energetic as a reformer and had to make peace with the Old Guard of the Republican Party that his predecessor had alienated. He appointed a Commission on Economy and Efficiency that recommended centralization of control over the budget through creation of a Bureau of Efficiency, plans he could not realize while still in office. Though Woodrow Wilson had been vice president of the National Civil Service Reform League and was regarded as the father of American public administration, he too had great difficulty pushing through a reform program when elected in 1912 as the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. Congress was in the process of reclaiming the powers that Roosevelt had usurped, and Wilson had to bargain hard with his own party, now anchored in a southern bloc that had little interest in reform. While Wilson was given special executive powers related to the mobilization effort for World War I, he did not oversee a lasting expansion of bureaucratic capacity. The Republican presidents who followed Wilson were in a sense throwbacks to the nineteenth-century system who showed very little interest in strengthening the bureaucracy.
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The end of the patronage system at a federal level did not arrive until the middle of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal oversaw an enormous expansion of the scope and functions of the federal government, the president himself used patronage appointments early on in his first term to ensure that the government was staffed by loyalists. The percentage of classified positions in the federal bureaucracy, which had risen to 80 percent by the late 1920s, fell back to about 60 percent by the mid-1930s. This trend was corrected by the end of the decade after the work of the Brownlow Commission, which regularized the process of personnel management throughout the federal government and comprehensively rewrote civil service rules.
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Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the United States gradually dismantled the clientelistic system of party government and laid the foundations of a professional bureaucracy comparable to the ones that had been operating in Europe for several generations. The fact that the United States had a clientelistic system in the first place had to do with the fact that it was democratic earlier than most European countries, and that it had not already created a strong, autonomous state at the point when the franchise was first opened up. A coalition in support of an autonomous bureaucracy eventually emerged, but it had to be put together under strong leadership over an extended period of time, both at a national level and in each city and state that was subject to machine politics.

The process of public-sector reform took far longer in America than in Britain because of differences at the level of institutions and in the broader society. Britain's Westminster system allows for rapid decision making by whatever party holds a majority in Parliament. In the United States, by contrast, power is divided between the president and Congress; Congress itself has a powerful upper house, and its two chambers can be held by different political parties. The federal system that distributes power to states and local governments means that reforms taken at a national level do not necessarily spread across the country. Some states began reform of their patronage systems before the federal government; others lagged well behind. Finally, the two nations were very different socially. In Britain, a rising middle class got early access to elite educational institutions like Oxford and Cambridge and negotiated reform in the clubs and back rooms of London. There was a comparable American elite in the graduates of Harvard and Yale who led the civil service reform movement, but they were dominant only in the Northeast and had to seek allies outside their social class over a geographically vast and diverse country.

The American experience contains some important lessons for contemporary developing countries that want to reform clientelistic political systems and create modern, merit-based, technically competent governments. The first is that reform is a profoundly political process, not a technical one. There are of course technical characteristics of a modern bureaucratic system such as job classifications, examination requirements, promotion ladders, and the like. But clientelistic systems do not exist because the officials staffing them, or the politicians who stand behind them, somehow don't understand how to organize an efficient agency. Clientelism exists because incumbents benefit from the system, either as political bosses who get access to power and resources, or as their clients who get jobs and perks. Dislodging them requires more than the formal reorganization of the government. The experience of public-sector reform mandated by international aid agencies for developing countries at the turn of the twenty-first century demonstrates the futility of a purely technical approach.
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