Chester Arthur was a machine politician who gave America its civil service

The train station in Washington, D.C., was crowded on the morning of July 2, 1881. President James A. Garfield, four months into his term, was on his way out of town for a summer trip. He walked into the waiting room of the Baltimore and Potomac depot, and a man stepped up behind him and shot him twice. The man was Charles Guiteau, a failed lawyer and preacher who had decided that he deserved a diplomatic post in Paris as a reward for helping the Republican campaign, and who had not gotten it. As officers seized him, he announced that he was a Stalwart and that Chester Arthur was now President.

That last sentence is the one that turned a crime into a national crisis. Guiteau thought the shooting would help the faction of the party that wanted the jobs. Instead it did the reverse. It put a man in the White House whom the reformers distrusted, and that man did the thing nobody expected: he signed a law that began dismantling the system that had made the shooter possible.

I want to tell you that story in order, because it is one of the best true tales in American politics about a man who rose to a job and then outgrew his own reputation. And because it frames a question every conservative should be able to answer: how do you hold the government accountable to voters without turning it back into a prize for the winners?

The machine

Start with the system. In 1832, Senator William Marcy of New York, defending the appointment of a political ally, said that "to the victor belong the spoils." The line stuck, because it described how things worked. When a party won the presidency, it fired the other side's officeholders and replaced them with its own supporters. Postmasters, customs inspectors, clerks, lighthouse keepers: all of them were political jobs, and they changed hands with each election. By the 1870s and 1880s, with the federal workforce growing, the system had become a machine for politics. Jobholders were expected to kick back a portion of their pay to the party, in what were called assessments, and to work in campaigns. If they didn't, they could lose their positions.

Among the most valuable pieces of patronage in the country was the New York Custom House. It collected a large share of the federal government's revenue, since customs duties were the main source of federal money at the time, and it employed many people who owed their places to the political boss who had put them there. In New York the boss was Senator Roscoe Conkling, the leader of the faction called the Stalwarts. They believed in party loyalty and the spoils. Their rivals, the Half-Breeds, were led by James G. Blaine of Maine and were somewhat more willing to listen to reformers, though the two groups differed as much in personality as in principle.

Chester Arthur, loyal lieutenant

Chester Alan Arthur was born in Vermont in 1829, grew up partly in upstate New York, and became a lawyer in New York City. During the Civil War he served as the state's Quartermaster General, running supply for New York's troops, and by all accounts did it competently and honestly. After the war he became a leading figure in Conkling's organization. In 1871, President Grant appointed him Collector of the Port of New York, the head of the Custom House.

He was a good administrator and a party man. He held the job for seven years. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes, a reformer who had been trying to clean up the customs service, removed him. Hayes thought Arthur was a symbol of the spoils system, and Conkling thought the dismissal was an insult. That is the man who was nominated for Vice President in 1880.

How did that happen? At the Republican convention in Chicago that June, the Stalwarts wanted Ulysses Grant back for a third term, and the Half-Breeds wanted Blaine. Neither could win, and on the thirty-sixth ballot the delegates settled on James Garfield, a Half-Breed congressman from Ohio. To soothe the Stalwarts, Garfield's friends offered the vice presidency to Arthur. Conkling told Arthur not to accept; Arthur did. That decision tells you something about him. He saw an opportunity, and he took it.

The fight that preceded the shooting

Once Garfield took office in March 1881, a bitter patronage fight broke out over the Custom House. Garfield nominated William H. Robertson, a Conkling enemy, to be the new Collector of the Port of New York, and Conkling was furious. When the Senate went ahead and confirmed Robertson in May, Conkling and the other New York senator, Thomas Platt, resigned their seats in protest, expecting the New York legislature to send them back to Washington as a show of strength. The legislature did not. Both men lost, and Conkling's career in the Senate was over.

Arthur, in this episode, was caught in the middle. He had traveled to Albany to support the two senators while the legislature weighed their fate. A Vice President taking the side of the senators fighting the President's nominee did not help his reputation. And when Garfield was shot on July 2, many Americans felt a chill at the thought of Arthur in charge.

Garfield lingered for seventy-nine days. Count it: July 3 through July 31 is 29 days, August is 31, and September 1 through 19 is 19. Twenty-nine plus 31 plus 19 is 79. He died on September 19, 1881, at a seaside cottage in Elberon, New Jersey. Arthur took the oath of office in his New York home in the early hours of September 20, and was sworn in again publicly in Washington two days later.

The surprise

Offices change men, and Arthur was the proof. Those who had known him as a Custom House politician found a dignified, careful President who kept his own counsel. He did several things that surprised the machine.

He used his first annual message to Congress, in December 1881, to call for civil service reform. He backed the bill sponsored by Senator George Pendleton of Ohio, a Democrat, which would end the spoils system for a part of the federal workforce. He vetoed a large rivers and harbors bill in August 1882 that he considered a pork-barrel handout, and Congress overrode him. Defenders of limited government should enjoy that veto. (He also vetoed a bill barring Chinese laborers for twenty years in April 1882, then signed a ten-year version that May, a record that deserves criticism. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a harsh law, and his fingerprints are on it.)

The decisive political moment came in the midterm elections of November 1882. Republicans took a beating, in part because many voters were disgusted with patronage and the scandals that came with it. In the lame-duck session that followed, Congress passed the Pendleton Act. Arthur signed it on January 16, 1883.

What the Pendleton Act did

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act did five things.

1. It created the United States Civil Service Commission, a three-member body, no more than two of whom could belong to the same party, to administer the system.
2. It required competitive examinations for a specified list of positions, so that jobs would go to the most qualified applicants rather than the best-connected ones.
3. It barred requiring federal employees to contribute to political campaigns, and barred firing anyone for refusing.
4. It put the new system in the hands of the executive branch, so that the President could extend its coverage by order.
5. It applied at first to only about ten percent of federal jobs, roughly one in ten.

The first chairman of the Commission, appointed by Arthur, was Dorman B. Eaton, a New York lawyer and a leading reformer. Notice that Arthur chose a reformer to run it. Notice also that the act was a start. The President could add positions to the classified list, and over the following decades Presidents of both parties did. Theodore Roosevelt served as a Civil Service Commissioner from 1889 to 1895, working to enforce the law; you can read about his own record in Theodore Roosevelt busted trusts and saved forests, and the GOP forgot half.

The strongest argument for the spoils

Now give the other side its due, because it deserves a fair statement, and because it has never fully gone away.

The defender of the spoils system would say this. One, the people elect a President to carry out a program. Two, to do it he needs subordinates who share his purposes. Three, a permanent class of career officials who cannot be fired may resist him, slow him down or simply do things their own way, and no voter can touch them. The result is a government that answers to nobody. Four, in a democracy, the winner should get to govern, and if that means replacing the previous administration's people, so be it.

That is not a silly argument. The Constitution vests the executive power in the President, and a President who cannot direct the people who execute the laws does not have much executive power. The question of how far that goes is a live one in the law. In Myers v. United States in 1926, Chief Justice Taft's opinion held that Congress could not require Senate approval before the President removes an executive officer; in Humphrey's Executor v. United States in 1935, the Court allowed limits on removal of members of independent commissions. You will find the story of the man who wrote Myers in William Howard Taft lost the White House and then got the job he wanted. For a framework to analyze any claim of presidential power, try Justice Jackson's Three-Box Test for Presidential Power, Put to Work.

Why the reformers won anyway

The answer to the spoils defender is not that elected officials should have no control. It is that the spoils system produced bad government, and that there is a way to get accountability without it.

Think about what the spoils system really meant. It meant that when a new party took over, thousands of experienced clerks and inspectors lost their jobs, whatever their competence. It meant that people took jobs because they were loyal rather than skilled. It meant that officeholders paid part of their salaries to the party and spent time on campaigns instead of their duties. And it meant that the people with the most to gain from a job were the people with the most to gain from corrupting it. The Custom House in particular was investigated in 1877 by a commission that found padded payrolls and political hiring.

And it meant something else, which Guiteau demonstrated in the worst possible way: if government jobs are prizes, then the hunt for them becomes a force in itself. The man who shot the President was, in his own mind, a disappointed applicant for patronage.

The reformers' answer was to divide the government into two. For policymaking posts, the President should be able to choose and remove. For the ordinary work of government, such as delivering mail, inspecting cargo and processing claims, jobs should go to the competent and the system should protect them from political firing. Today we call the first group political appointees, and Congress's own Plum Book, published after each presidential election, lists the positions open to them. It is a few thousand jobs out of a federal workforce in the millions.

The balance, and the cost

I'd be a poor guide if I told you the story ended happily. Merit systems have their own problems, and conservatives have been pointing them out for a century. Civil service protections can make it very hard to remove an employee who is bad at the job. They can insulate officials from the voters. They can slow reform. In 1939 Congress passed the Hatch Act, limiting the political activity of federal employees, and in 1978 the Civil Service Reform Act abolished Arthur's Commission and replaced it with new bodies, in an effort to balance protection with accountability. The argument over where the line should sit is permanent.

Any plan to reshape the federal workforce, whether it freezes hiring, shrinks agencies or changes which jobs can be filled at will, has to answer the question Arthur's law raised: how do you get accountability without bringing back the spoils? Notice that the answer is not either-or. A President should be able to put his own people in the jobs that set policy. A mail carrier should not be fired because he voted for the wrong candidate. The hard cases lie between those two, and every administration has to decide where.

What happened to him

Arthur turned out to be a man who surprised everyone, including himself. He had learned in 1882 that he was seriously ill, kept it quiet, and did not campaign hard for the nomination in 1884, which went to Blaine. He left office in March 1885 and died on November 18, 1886, not yet fifty-eight. His friends, and even some of his old critics, said he had risen to the office. A machine man, they said, had become President of the whole country.

For the larger arc of the Republican story, see how Grant's administration, which appointed Arthur to the Custom House, fought a different kind of battle in How Ulysses Grant used a brand-new Justice Department against the Klan. And for the principle of checks on power that Arthur's veto of the rivers and harbors bill illustrated, Five vetoes Congress overrode and what each showed about presidential power collects other cases where a veto was overridden.

The bottom line

• Arthur was Conkling's lieutenant and a product of the machine, yet he signed the Pendleton Act on January 16, 1883, the first major step away from the spoils system.
• The law was a reaction to a President's assassination and a rebuke at the 1882 polls. Voters can force reform when the system disgusts them.
• Read the argument for the spoils fairly: voters should be able to direct the executive branch. The answer is not to give that up, but to separate policy jobs, where the President should have a free hand, from ordinary government work, where competence should count.
• Before you pick a side in any fight over federal jobs, ask who is being protected from what, and who is accountable to whom.
• Look up the Plum Book, and judge for yourself how many jobs are open to political appointment.