Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
the Senate, and he made one of the best marshals in the entire service,
exactly as he had already made one of the best soldiers in the regiment;
and I never wish to see a better citizen, nor a man in whom I would more
implicitly trust in every way.
When, in 1900, I was nominated for Vice-President, I was sent by the
National Committee on a trip into the States of the high plains and the
Rocky Mountains. These had all gone overwhelmingly for Mr. Bryan on
the free-silver issue four years previously, and it was thought that I,
because of my knowledge of and acquaintanceship with the people, might
accomplish something towards bringing them back into line. It was
an interesting trip, and the monotony usually attendant upon such a
campaign of political speaking was diversified in vivid fashion by
occasional hostile audiences. One or two of the meetings ended in riots.
One meeting was finally broken up by a mob; everybody fought so that the
speaking had to stop. Soon after this we reached another town where we
were told there might be trouble. Here the local committee included an
old and valued friend, a "two-gun" man of repute, who was not in the
least quarrelsome, but who always kept his word. We marched round to
the local opera-house, which was packed with a mass of men, many of them
rather rough-looking. My friend the two-gun man sat immediately behind
me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded, looking at the audience; fixing
his gaze with instant intentness on any section of the house from which
there came so much as a whisper. The audience listened to me with
rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which
proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the
chairman: "I held that audience well; there wasn't an interruption." To
which the chairman replied: "Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had
sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he'd kill him!"
There was one bit of frontier philosophy which I should like to see
imitated in more advanced communities. Certain crimes of revolting
baseness and cruelty were never forgiven. But in the case of ordinary
offenses, the man who had served his term and who then tried to make
good was given a fair chance; and of course this was equally true of
the women. Every one who has studied the subject at all is only too
well aware that the world offsets the readiness with which it condones
a crime for which a man escapes punishment, by its unforgiving
relentlessness to the often far less guilty man who _is_ punished,
and who therefore has made his atonement. On the frontier, if the man
honestly tried to behave himself there was generally a disposition to
give him fair play and a decent show. Several of the men I knew and whom
I particularly liked came in this class. There was one such man in my
regiment, a man who had served a term for robbery under arms, and who
had atoned for it by many years of fine performance of duty. I put him
in a high official position, and no man under me rendered better service
to the State, nor was there any man whom, as soldier, as civil officer,
as citizen, and as friend, I valued and respected--and now value and
respect--more.
Now I suppose some good people will gather from this that I favor men
who commit crimes. I certainly do not favor them. I have not a
particle of sympathy with the sentimentality--as I deem it, the
mawkishness--which overflows with foolish pity for the criminal and
cares not at all for the victim of the criminal. I am glad to see
wrong-doers punished. The punishment is an absolute necessity from the
standpoint of society; and I put the reformation of the criminal second
to the welfare of society. But I do desire to see the man or woman
who has paid the penalty and who wishes to reform given a helping
hand--surely every one of us who knows his own heart must know that he
too may stumble, and should be anxious to help his brother or sister who
has stumbled. When the criminal has been punished, if he then shows a
sincere desire to lead a decent and upright life, he should be given the
chance, he should be helped and not hindered; and if he makes good, he
should receive that respect from others which so often aids in creating
self-respect--the most invaluable of all possessions.
CHAPTER V
APPLIED IDEALISM
In the spring of 1899 I was appointed by President Harrison Civil
Service Commissioner. For nearly five years I had not been very
active in political life; although I had done some routine work in the
organization and had made campaign speeches, and in 1886 had run for
Mayor of New York against Abram S. Hewitt, Democrat, and Henry George,
Independent, and had been defeated.
I served six years as Civil Service Commissioner--four years under
President Harrison and then two years under President Cleveland. I
was treated by both Presidents with the utmost consideration. Among my
fellow-Commissioners there was at one time ex-Governor Hugh Thompson, of
South Carolina, and at another time John R. Proctor, of Kentucky. They
were Democrats and ex-Confederate soldiers. I became deeply attached to
both, and we stood shoulder to shoulder in every contest in which the
Commission was forced to take part.
Civil Service Reform had two sides. There was, first, the effort to
secure a more efficient administration of the public service, and,
second, the even more important effort to withdraw the administrative
offices of the Government from the domain of spoils politics, and
thereby cut out of American political life a fruitful source of
corruption and degradation. The spoils theory of politics is that
public office is so much plunder which the victorious political party is
entitled to appropriate to the use of its adherents. Under this system
the work of the Government was often done well even in those days, when
Civil Service Reform was only an experiment, because the man running an
office if himself an able and far-sighted man, knew that inefficiency
in administration would be visited on his head in the long run, and
therefore insisted upon most of his subordinates doing good work; and,
moreover, the men appointed under the spoils system were necessarily
men of a certain initiative and power, because those who lacked these
qualities were not able to shoulder themselves to the front. Yet there
were many flagrant instances of inefficiency, where a powerful chief
quartered friend, adherent, or kinsman upon the Government. Moreover,
the necessarily haphazard nature of the employment, the need of
obtaining and holding the office by service wholly unconnected with
official duty, inevitably tended to lower the standard of public
morality, alike among the office-holders and among the politicians who
rendered party service with the hope of reward in office. Indeed, the
doctrine that "To the victor belong the spoils," the cynical battle-cry
of the spoils politician in America for the sixty years preceding my own
entrance into public life, is so nakedly vicious that few right-thinking
men of trained mind defend it. To appoint, promote, reduce, and
expel from the public service, letter-carriers, stenographers, women
typewriters, clerks, because of the politics of themselves or their
friends, without regard to their own service, is, from the standpoint of
the people at large, as foolish and degrading as it is wicked.
Such being the case, it would seem at first sight extraordinary that
it should be so difficult to uproot the system. Unfortunately, it was
permitted to become habitual and traditional in American life, so that
the conception of public office as something to be used primarily for
the good of the dominant political party became ingrained in the mind
of the average American, and he grew so accustomed to the whole process
that it seemed part of the order of nature. Not merely the politicians
but the bulk of the people accepted this in a matter-of-course way as
the only proper attitude. There were plenty of communities where the
citizens themselves did not think it natural, or indeed proper, that
the Post-Office should be held by a man belonging to the defeated
party. Moreover, unless both sides were forbidden to use the offices for
purposes of political reward, the side that did use them possessed
such an advantage over the other that in the long run it was out of the
question for the other not to follow the bad example that had been set.
Each party profited by the offices when in power, and when in opposition
each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it
itself had done and intended again to do.
It was necessary, in order to remedy the evil, both gradually to change
the average citizen's mental attitude toward the question, and also to
secure proper laws and proper administration of the laws. The work is
far from finished even yet. There are still masses of office-holders
who can be used by an unscrupulous Administration to debauch political
conventions and fraudulently overcome public sentiment, especially in
the "rotten borough" districts--those where the party is not strong,
and where the office-holders in consequence have a disproportionate
influence. This was done by the Republican Administration in 1912, to
the ruin of the Republican party. Moreover, there are numbers of States
and municipalities where very little has as yet been done to do away
with the spoils system. But in the National Government scores of
thousands of offices have been put under the merit system, chiefly
through the action of the National Civil Service Commission.
The use of Government offices as patronage is a handicap difficult
to overestimate from the standpoint of those who strive to get good
government. Any effort for reform of any sort, National, State, or
municipal, results in the reformers immediately finding themselves face
to face with an organized band of drilled mercenaries who are paid out
of the public chest to train themselves with such skill that ordinary
good citizens when they meet them at the polls are in much the position
of militia matched against regular troops. Yet these citizens themselves
support and pay their opponents in such a way that they are drilled
to overthrow the very men who support them. Civil Service Reform is
designed primarily to give the average American citizen a fair chance in
politics, to give to this citizen the same weight in politics that the
"ward heeler" has.
Patronage does not really help a party. It helps the bosses to get
control of the machinery of the party--as in 1912 was true of the
Republican party--but it does not help the party. On the average, the
most sweeping party victories in our history have been won when the
patronage was against the victors. All that the patronage does is
to help the worst element in the party retain control of the party
organization. Two of the evil elements in our Government against which
good citizens have to contend are, 1, the lack of continuous activity
on the part of these good citizens themselves, and, 2, the ever-present
activity of those who have only an evil self-interest in political
life. It is difficult to interest the average citizen in any particular
movement to the degree of getting him to take an efficient part in it.
He wishes the movement well, but he will not, or often cannot, take
the time and the trouble to serve it efficiently; and this whether
he happens to be a mechanic or a banker, a telegraph operator or a
storekeeper. He has his own interests, his own business, and it is
difficult for him to spare the time to go around to the primaries, to
see to the organization, to see to getting out the vote--in short, to
attend to all the thousand details of political management.
On the other hand, the spoils system breeds a class of men whose