Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
financial interest it is to take this necessary time and trouble. They
are paid for so doing, and they are paid out of the public chest.
Under the spoils system a man is appointed to an ordinary clerical or
ministerial position in the municipal, Federal, or State government, not
primarily because he is expected to be a good servant, but because he
has rendered help to some big boss or to the henchman of some big boss.
His stay in office depends not upon how he performs service, but upon
how he retains his influence in the party. This necessarily means that
his attention to the interests of the public at large, even though real,
is secondary to his devotion to his organization, or to the interest of
the ward leader who put him in his place. So he and his fellows attend
to politics, not once a year, not two or three times a year, like the
average citizen, but every day in the year. It is the one thing that
they talk of, for it is their bread and butter. They plan about it and
they scheme about it. They do it because it is their business. I do not
blame them in the least. I blame us, the people, for we ought to make
it clear as a bell that the business of serving the people in one of the
ordinary ministerial Government positions, which have nothing to do
with deciding the policy of the Government, should have no necessary
connection with the management of primaries, of caucuses, and
of nominating conventions. As a result of our wrong thinking and
supineness, we American citizens tend to breed a mass of men whose
interests in governmental matters are often adverse to ours, who are
thoroughly drilled, thoroughly organized, who make their livelihood
out of politics, and who frequently make their livelihood out of
bad politics. They know every little twist and turn, no matter how
intricate, in the politics of their several wards, and when election
day comes the ordinary citizen who has merely the interest that all good
men, all decent citizens, should have in political life, finds himself
as helpless before these men as if he were a solitary volunteer in the
presence of a band of drilled mercenaries on a field of battle. There
are a couple of hundred thousand Federal offices, not to speak of State
and municipal offices. The men who fill these offices, and the men who
wish to fill them, within and without the dominant party for the time
being, make a regular army, whose interest it is that the system
of bread-and-butter politics shall continue. Against their concrete
interest we have merely the generally unorganized sentiment of the
community in favor of putting things on a decent basis. The large number
of men who believe vaguely in good are pitted against the smaller but
still larger number of men whose interest it often becomes to act
very concretely and actively for evil; and it is small wonder that the
struggle is doubtful.
During my six years' service as Commissioner the field of the merit
system was extended at the expense of the spoils system so as to include
several times the number of offices that had originally been included.
Generally this was done by the introduction of competitive entrance
examinations; sometimes, as in the Navy-Yards, by a system of
registration. This of itself was good work.
Even better work was making the law efficient and genuine where it
applied. As was inevitable in the introduction of such a system, there
was at first only partial success in its application. For instance,
it applied to the ordinary employees in the big custom-houses and
post-offices, but not to the heads of these offices. A number of the
heads of the offices were slippery politicians of a low moral grade,
themselves appointed under the spoils system, and anxious, directly
or indirectly, to break down the merit system and to pay their own
political debts by appointing their henchmen and supporters to the
positions under them. Occasionally these men acted with open and naked
brutality. Ordinarily they sought by cunning to evade the law. The Civil
Service Reformers, on the other hand, were in most cases not much used
to practical politics, and were often well-nigh helpless when pitted
against veteran professional politicians. In consequence I found at the
beginning of my experiences that there were many offices in which the
execution of the law was a sham. This was very damaging, because it
encouraged the politicians to assault the law everywhere, and, on the
other hand, made good people feel that the law was not worth while
defending.
The first effort of myself and my colleagues was to secure the genuine
enforcement of the law. In this we succeeded after a number of lively
fights. But of course in these fights we were obliged to strike a large
number of influential politicians, some of them in Congress, some of
them the supporters and backers of men who were in Congress. Accordingly
we soon found ourselves engaged in a series of contests with prominent
Senators and Congressmen. There were a number of Senators and
Congressmen--men like Congressman (afterwards Senator) H. C. Lodge, of
Massachusetts; Senator Cushman K. Davis, of Minnesota; Senator Orville
H. Platt, of Connecticut; Senator Cockrell, of Missouri; Congressman
(afterwards President) McKinley, of Ohio, and Congressman Dargan,
of South Carolina--who abhorred the business of the spoilsman, who
efficiently and resolutely championed the reform at every turn, and
without whom the whole reform would certainly have failed. But there
were plenty of other Senators and Congressmen who hated the whole reform
and everything concerned with it and everybody who championed it;
and sometimes, to use a legal phrase, their hatred was for cause,
and sometimes it was peremptory--that is, sometimes the Commission
interfered with their most efficient, and incidentally most corrupt and
unscrupulous, supporters, and at other times, where there was no such
interference, a man nevertheless had an innate dislike of anything
that tended to decency in government. These men were always waging war
against us, and they usually had the more or less open support of a
certain number of Government officials, from Cabinet officers down. The
Senators and Congressmen in question opposed us in many different ways.
Sometimes, for instance, they had committees appointed to investigate
us--during my public career without and within office I grew accustomed
to accept appearances before investigating committees as part of
the natural order of things. Sometimes they tried to cut off the
appropriation for the Commission.
Occasionally we would bring to terms these Senators or Congressmen
who fought the Commission by the simple expedient of not holding
examinations in their districts. This always brought frantic appeals
from their constituents, and we would explain that unfortunately the
appropriations had been cut, so that we could not hold examinations in
every district, and that obviously we could not neglect the districts
of those Congressmen who believed in the reform and therefore in the
examinations. The constituents then turned their attention to the
Congressman, and the result was that in the long run we obtained
sufficient money to enable us to do our work. On the whole, the
most prominent leaders favored us. Any man who is the head of a big
department, if he has any fitness at all, wishes to see that department
run well; and a very little practical experience shows him that
it cannot be run well if he must make his appointments to please
spoilsmongering politicians. As with almost every reform that I have
ever undertaken, most of the opposition took the guise of shrewd
slander. Our opponents relied chiefly on downright misrepresentation of
what it was that we were trying to accomplish, and of our methods, acts,
and personalities. I had more than one lively encounter with the authors
and sponsors of these misrepresentations, which at the time were full of
interest to me. But it would be a dreary thing now to go over the record
of exploded mendacity, or to expose the meanness and malice shown by
some men of high official position. A favorite argument was to call
the reform Chinese, because the Chinese had constructed an inefficient
governmental system based in part on the theory of written competitive
examinations. The argument was simple. There had been written
examinations in China; it was proposed to establish written examinations
in the United States; therefore the proposed system was Chinese. The
argument might have been applied still further. For instance, the
Chinese had used gunpowder for centuries; gunpowder is used in
Springfield rifles; therefore Springfield rifles were Chinese. One
argument is quite as logical as the other. It was impossible to answer
every falsehood about the system. But it was possible to answer certain
falsehoods, especially when uttered by some Senator or Congressman of
note. Usually these false statements took the form of assertions that
we had asked preposterous questions of applicants. At times they also
included the assertion that we credited people to districts where they
did not live; this simply meaning that these persons were not known to
the active ward politicians of those districts.
One opponent with whom we had a rather lively tilt was a Republican
Congressman from Ohio, Mr. Grosvenor, one of the floor leaders. Mr.
Grosvenor made his attack in the House, and enumerated our sins in
picturesque rather than accurate fashion. There was a Congressional
committee investigating us at the time, and on my next appearance before
them I asked that Mr. Grosvenor be requested to meet me before the
committee. Mr. Grosvenor did not take up the challenge for several
weeks, until it was announced that I was leaving for my ranch in Dakota;
whereupon, deeming it safe, he wrote me a letter expressing his ardent
wish that I should appear before the committee to meet him. I promptly
canceled my ticket, waited, and met him. He proved to be a person of
happily treacherous memory, so that the simple expedient of arranging
his statements in pairs was sufficient to reduce him to confusion. For
instance, he had been trapped into making the unwary remark, "I do not
want to repeal the Civil Service Law, and I never said so." I produced
the following extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to
strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law." To
this he merely replied that there was "no inconsistency between those
two statements." He asserted that "Rufus P. Putnam, fraudulently
credited to Washington County, Ohio, never lived in Washington County,
Ohio, or in my Congressional district, or in Ohio as far as I know."
We produced a letter which, thanks to a beneficent Providence, he had
himself written about Mr. Rufus P. Putnam, in which he said: "Mr. Rufus
P. Putnam is a legal resident of my district and has relatives living
there now." He explained, first, that he had not written the letter;
second, that he had forgotten he had written the letter; and, third,
that he was grossly deceived when he wrote it. He said: "I have not
been informed of one applicant who has found a place in the classified
service from my district." We confronted him with the names of eight. He
looked them over and said, "Yes, the eight men are living in my district
as now constituted," but added that his district had been gerrymandered
so that he could no longer tell who did and who didn't live in it. When
I started further to question him, he accused me of a lack of humor in
not appreciating that his statements were made "in a jesting way," and
then announced that "a Congressman making a speech on the floor of the
House of Representatives was perhaps in a little different position
from a witness on the witness stand"--a frank admission that he did not