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