Civil service reform was both an ideal—an integral symbol of a larger national effort to establish a new form of more responsive government; and an institutional effort—a series of internal reforms intent on creating new bureaucratic authority structures. Historians have sought to capture how the “Progressive Era” reflected the interplay between reform movements at the federal level and state and local governments in the context of political and social changes occurring after the Civil War. Civil service reform was integral to that vision for change and viewed as embracing, in the words of one of the early reform champions, Dorman Eaton, “certain great principles which embody a theory of polit-cal morality, of official obligation, of equal rights, and common justice in government.”