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 “Malconduct 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