Writings on public administration go back to ancient civilization.1 the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians left considerable advice on the techniques of management and administration. So did the civilizations of China, Greece, and Rome. Modern management techniques can be traced from Alexander the Great’s use of staff 2 to the assembly-line methods of the arsenal of Venice;3 from the theorizing of Niccolo Machiavelli on the nature of leadership4 to Adam Smith’s advocacy of the division of labor;5 and from Robert Owen’s assertion that “vital machines” (employees) should be given as much attention as “inanimate machines”6 to Charles Babbage’s contention that there existed “basic principles of management.”
The history of the world can be viewed as the rise and fall of public administrative institutions. Those ancient empires that rose and prevailed were those with better administrative institutions than their competitors. Brave soldiers have been plentiful in every society but they were ultimately wasted if not backed up by administrators who can feed and pay them. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman orator is usually credited with first saying that “the sinews of war are infinite money.”
Rome, like Egypt, Persia, and other empires before it, conquered much of the ancient world (well,at least that centered around the Mediterranean) because it had an organizational doctrine that made its soldiers far more effective than competing forces—and because its legions were backed up by a sophisticated administrative system of supply based on regular if not equitable taxes. The Roman Empire only fell when its legions degenerated into corps of mercenaries and when its supply and tax bases were corrupted. Napoleon was wrong. Armies do not “march on their stomachs,” as he said; they march on the proverbial backs of the tax collectors and on the roads built by administrators. Regular pay allows for discipline. Strict discipline is what makes a mob an army. And a disciplined military, obedient to the leaders of the state, is a precondition for civilization. This is the classic chicken and egg problem. Which comes first—effective public administration or an effective military? The rise and fall of ancient Rome proved that you could not have one without the other.
Early bureaucrats in ancient Rome and modern Europe literally wore uniforms that paralleled military dress. After all, the household servants of rulers traditionally wore livery. It indicated that the wearer was not free but the servant of another. Government administrators are still considered servants in this sense; they are public servants because they, too, have accepted obligations that mean they are not completely free. Indeed, until early in the twentieth century many otherwise civilian public officials in Europe—most notably diplomats—had prescribed uniforms.
Both victorious soldiers and successful managers tend to be inordinately admired and disproportionately rewarded as risk takers. True, the specific risks and rewards are different; but the phenomenon is the same. They both may have to put their careers, and sometimes significant parts of their anatomy as well, “on the line” to obtain a goal for their state or organization. Notice again the military language for “the line” originally referred to the line of battle where they faced the enemy. This is why line officers today are still those who perform the services for which the organization exists. This is the direct link between the Roman centurion and the fire chief, hospital director, or school principal. Life on the line is still a daily struggle.
It is possible to find most of the modern concepts of management and leadership stated by one or another of the writers of the classical, medieval, and pre-modern world. However, our concern is not with this prehistory of modern management but with the academic discipline and occupational specialty that is U.S. public administration.
American public administration did not invent the concept of a creating a public service that would be based on merit. Would-be reformers of American government in the late nineteenth century not only borrowed from the European experience but also were fond of noting that possessing such systems was an essential step in “enlightenment” for the United States if it was to develop as a civilized nation. The first real steps toward creating a modern state of public administration in the United States were taken following the Civil War and at the heart was the struggle to limit the spoils system of rewarding political party members with government job appointments as opposed to establishing a civil service system where appointments and tenure were based on merit.8
While federal civil service reform is generally dated from the post–Civil War period, the political roots of the reform effort go back much earlier—to the beginning of the republic. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to face the problem of a philosophically hostile bureaucracy. While sorely pressed by his supporters to remove Federalist officeholders and replace them with Republican partisans, Jefferson was determined not to remove officials for political reasons alone. He maintained in a letter in 1801 to William Findley that “Misconduct is a just ground of removal, mere difference of political opinion is not.” With occasional defections from this principle, even by Jefferson himself, this policy was the norm rather than the exception down through the administration of Andrew Jackson. President Jackson’s rhetoric on the nature of public service was far more influential than his administrative example. In claiming that all men, especially the newly enfranchised who did so much to elect him, should have an equal opportunity for public office, Jackson played to his plebeian constituency and put the patrician civil service on notice that they had no natural monopoly on public office. The spoils system, used only modestly by Jackson, flourished under his successors. The doctrine of rotation of office progressively prevailed over the earlier notion of stability in office.
Depending on your point of view, the advent of modern merit systems is either an economic, political, or moral development. Economic historians would maintain that the demands of industrial expansion—a dependable postal service, a viable transportation network, and so on—necessitated a government service based on merit. Political analysts could argue rather persuasively that it was the demands of an expanded suffrage and democratic rhetoric that sought to replace favoritism with merit. Economic and political considerations are so intertwined that it is impossible to say which factor is the true origin of the merit system. The moral impetus behind reform is even more difficult to define. As moral impulses tend to hide economic and political motives, the weight of moral concern undiluted by other considerations is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, the cosmetic effect of moral overtones was of significant aid to the civil service reform movement, because it accentuated the social legitimacy of the reform proposals.
With the ever-present impetus of achieving maximum public services for minimum tax dollars, business interests were quite comfortable in supporting civil service reform, one of a variety of strategies they used to have power pass from the politicos to themselves. The political parties of the time were almost totally dependent for financing on assessments made on the wages of their members in public office. With the decline of patronage, the parties had to seek new funding sources, and American business was more than willing to assume this new financial burden—and its concomitant influence.
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.9 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 political morality, of official obligation, of equal rights, and common justice in government.”
Dorman B. Eaton had been appointed chair of the first Civil Service Commission established by President Grant in 1871. When the commission concluded unsuccessfully in 1875, Eaton went to England at the request of President Rutherford Hayes to undertake a study of the British civil service system. His report—published as a book in 1880 with the title Civil Service in Great Britain: A History of Abuses and Reforms and their Bearing upon American Politics—obviously advocated the adoption of the merit system in America. His book enumerated the principles the civil service system would entail, as the listing of brief excerpts illustrate:
1. “Public office creates a relation of trust and duty of a kind which requires all authority and influence pertaining to it to be exercised with the same absolute conformity to moral standards, to the spirit of the constitution and the laws, and to the common interest of the people . . . .
2. In filling offices, it is the right of the people to have the worthiest citizens in the public service for the general welfare . . .
3. The personal merits of the candidate—are in themselves the highest claim upon an office . . . .
4. Party government and the salutary activity of parties are not superseded, but they are made purer and more efficient, by the merit system of office which brings larger capacity and higher character to their support” . . . .
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