Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
consider exactitude of statement necessary when he was speaking as a
Congressman. Finally he rose with great dignity and said that it was his
"constitutional right" not to be questioned elsewhere as to what he said
on the floor of the House of Representatives; and accordingly he left
the delighted committee to pursue its investigations without further aid
from him.
A more important opponent was the then Democratic leader of the Senate,
Mr. Gorman. In a speech attacking the Commission Mr. Gorman described
with moving pathos how a friend of his, "a bright young man from
Baltimore," a Sunday-school scholar, well recommended by his pastor,
wished to be a letter-carrier; and how he went before us to be examined.
The first question we asked him, said Mr. Gorman, was the shortest route
from Baltimore to China, to which the "bright young man" responded that
he didn't want to go to China, and had never studied up that route.
Thereupon, said Mr. Gorman, we asked him all about the steamship lines
from the United States to Europe, then branched him off into geology,
tried him in chemistry, and finally turned him down.
Apparently Mr. Gorman did not know that we kept full records of our
examinations. I at once wrote to him stating that I had carefully looked
through all our examination papers and had not been able to find one
question even remotely resembling any of these questions which he
alleged had been asked, and that I would be greatly obliged if he would
give me the name of the "bright young man" who had deceived him.
However, that "bright young man" remained permanently without a name.
I also asked Mr. Gorman, if he did not wish to give us the name of
his informant, to give us the date of the examination in which he was
supposed to have taken part; and I offered, if he would send down a
representative to look through our files, to give him all the aid we
could in his effort to discover any such questions. But Mr. Gorman, not
hitherto known as a sensitive soul, expressed himself as so shocked
at the thought that the veracity of the "bright young man" should be
doubted that he could not bring himself to answer my letter. So I made
a public statement to the effect that no such questions had ever been
asked. Mr. Gorman brooded over this; and during the next session of
Congress he rose and complained that he had received a very "impudent"
letter from me (my letter was a respectful note calling attention to
the fact that, if he wished, he could by personal examination satisfy
himself that his statements had no foundation in fact). He further
stated that he had been "cruelly" called to account by me because he
had been endeavoring to right a "great wrong" that the Civil Service
Commission had committed; but he never, then or afterwards, furnished
any clue to the identity of that child of his fondest fancy, the bright
young man without a name.[*]
[*] This is a condensation of a speech I at the time made to
the St. Louis Civil Service Reform Association. Senator
Gorman was then the Senate leader of the party that had just
been victorious in the Congressional elections.
The incident is of note chiefly as shedding light on the mental make-up
of the man who at the time was one of the two or three most influential
leaders of the Democratic party. Mr. Gorman had been Mr. Cleveland's
party manager in the Presidential campaign, and was the Democratic
leader in Congress. It seemed extraordinary that he should be so
reckless as to make statements with no foundation in fact, which he
might have known that I would not permit to pass unchallenged. Then,
as now, the ordinary newspaper, in New York and elsewhere, was quite as
reckless in its misstatements of fact about public men and measures; but
for a man in Mr. Gorman's position of responsible leadership such action
seemed hardly worth while. However, it is at least to be said for
Mr. Gorman that he was not trying by falsehood to take away any man's
character. It would be well for writers and speakers to bear in mind
the remark of Pudd'nhead Wilson to the effect that while there are nine
hundred and ninety-nine kinds of falsehood, the only kind specifically
condemned in Scripture, just as murder, theft, and adultery are
condemned, is bearing false witness against one's neighbor.
One of the worst features of the old spoils system was the ruthless
cruelty and brutality it so often bred in the treatment of faithful
public servants without political influence. Life is hard enough and
cruel enough at best, and this is as true of public service as of
private service. Under no system will it be possible to do away with all
favoritism and brutality and meanness and malice. But at least we can
try to minimize the exhibition of these qualities. I once came across
a case in Washington which very keenly excited my sympathy. Under an
Administration prior to the one with which I was connected a lady had
been ousted from a Government position. She came to me to see if she
could be reinstated. (This was not possible, but by active work I did
get her put back in a somewhat lower position, and this only by an
appeal to the sympathy of a certain official.) She was so pallid and so
careworn that she excited my sympathy and I made inquiries about
her. She was a poor woman with two children, a widow. She and her two
children were in actual want. She could barely keep the two children
decently clad, and she could not give them the food growing children
need. Three years before she had been employed in a bureau in a
department of Washington, doing her work faithfully, at a salary of
about $800. It was enough to keep her and her two children in clothing,
food, and shelter. One day the chief of the bureau called her up and
told her he was very sorry that he had to dismiss her. In great
distress she asked him why; she thought that she had been doing her work
satisfactorily. He answered her that she had been doing well, and that
he wished very much that he could keep her, that he would do so if he
possibly could, but that he could not; for a certain Senator, giving his
name, a very influential member of the Senate, had demanded her place
for a friend of his who had influence. The woman told the bureau chief
that it meant turning her out to starve. She had been thirteen or
fourteen years in the public service; she had lost all touch with her
friends in her native State; dismissal meant absolute want for her and
her children. On this the chief, who was a kind man, said he would not
have her turned out, and sent her back to her work.
But three weeks afterwards he called her up again and told her he could
not say how sorry he was, but the thing had to be done. The Senator had
been around in person to know why the change had not been made, and had
told the chief that he would be himself removed if the place were not
given him. The Senator was an extremely influential man. His wants had
to be attended to, and the woman had to go. And go she did, and turned
out she was, to suffer with her children and to starve outright, or to
live in semi-starvation, just as might befall. I do not blame the bureau
chief, who hated to do what he did, although he lacked the courage to
refuse; I do not even very much blame the Senator, who did not know
the hardship that he was causing, and who had been calloused by long
training in the spoils system; but this system, a system which permits
and encourages such deeds, is a system of brutal iniquity.
Any man accustomed to dealing with practical politics can with
difficulty keep a straight face when he reads or listens to some of the
arguments advanced against Civil Service Reform. One of these arguments,
a favorite with machine politicians, takes the form of an appeal to
"party loyalty" in filling minor offices. Why, again and again these
very same machine politicians take just as good care of henchmen of
the opposite party as of those of their own party. In the underworld of
politics the closest ties are sometimes those which knit together the
active professional workers of opposite political parties. A friend
of mine in the New York Legislature--the hero of the alpha and omega
incident--once remarked to me: "When you have been in public life a
little longer, Mr. Roosevelt, you will understand that there are no
politics in politics." In the politics to which he was referring this
remark could be taken literally.
Another illustration of this truth was incidentally given me, at about
the same time, by an acquaintance, a Tammany man named Costigan, a good
fellow according to his lights. I had been speaking to him of a fight in
one of the New York downtown districts, a Democratic district in which
the Republican party was in a hopeless minority, and, moreover,
was split into the Half-Breed and Stalwart factions. It had been an
interesting fight in more than one way. For instance, the Republican
party, at the general election, polled something like five hundred
and fifty votes, and yet at the primary the two factions polled
seven hundred and twenty-five all told. The sum of the parts was thus
considerably greater than the whole. There had been other little details
that made the contest worthy of note. The hall in which the primary was
held had been hired by the Stalwarts from a conscientious gentleman. To
him the Half-Breeds applied to know whether they could not hire the hall
away from their opponents, and offered him a substantial money advance.
The conscientious gentleman replied that his word was as good as his
bond, that he had hired the hall to the Stalwarts, and that it must
be theirs. But he added that he was willing to hire the doorway to
the Half-Breeds if they paid him the additional sum of money they had
mentioned. The bargain was struck, and the meeting of the hostile hosts
was spirited, when the men who had rented the doorway sought to bar the
path of the men who had rented the hall. I was asking my friend Costigan
about the details of the struggle, as he seemed thoroughly acquainted
with them, and he smiled good-naturedly over my surprise at there having
been more votes cast than there were members of the party in the whole
district. Said I, "Mr. Costigan, you seem to have a great deal of
knowledge about this; how did it happen?" To which he replied, "Come
now, Mr. Roosevelt, you know it's the same gang that votes in all the
primaries."
So much for most of the opposition to the reform. There was, however,
some honest and at least partially justifiable opposition both to
certain of the methods advocated by Civil Service Reformers and to
certain of the Civil Service Reformers themselves. The pet shibboleths
of the opponents of the reform were that the system we proposed to
introduce would give rise to mere red-tape bureaucracy, and that the
reformers were pharisees. Neither statement was true. Each statement
contained some truth.
If men are not to be appointed by favoritism, wise or unwise, honest or
dishonest, they must be appointed in some automatic way, which generally
means by competitive examination. The easiest kind of competitive
examination is an examination in writing. This is entirely appropriate
for certain classes of work, for lawyers, stenographers, typewriters,
clerks, mathematicians, and assistants in an astronomical observatory,
for instance. It is utterly inappropriate for carpenters, detectives,
and mounted cattle inspectors along the Rio Grande--to instance
three types of employment as to which I had to do battle to prevent
well-meaning bureaucrats from insisting on written competitive entrance
examinations. It would be quite possible to hold a very good competitive
examination for mounted cattle inspectors by means of practical tests
in brand reading and shooting with rifle and revolver, in riding