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“No Surrender”
U. S. G. "I am Determined to enforce those regulations."
With
the expansion of the federal government during the Civil War, and the
postwar struggle between Democratic President Andrew Johnson and
Congressional Republicans over control of Reconstruction, the civil
service reform movement began in earnest in the late 1860s. Reformers, such as cartoonist Thomas Nast, considered the
patronage system of government appointments based on partisan loyalty to
be corrupt and inefficient. They
wanted to replace it with a system of government service based on merit
appointments (through standardized examinations), promotion, and tenure.
In 1867, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly voted to
table a civil service reform bill, and with the election of Republican
Ulysses S. Grant as president in 1868, some Republican supporters of the
reform during the Johnson years suddenly decided that the patronage
system worked quite well. In
1871, however, President Grant created the nation’s first Civil
Service Commission, naming as its chairman George William Curtis, the
editor of Harper’s Weekly and president of the National Civil
Service Reform Association.
The featured cartoon presents a
scene following Grant’s reelection in November 1872.
In the glow of Republican victory, Senator Simon Cameron and
Governor John Hartranft, both of Pennsylvania, pressured the president
to suspend the civil service rules for the Philadelphia post office, an
important source of patronage for the Republican Party in that state.
Grant steadfastly refused, reaffirming his commitment to civil
service reform. Here,
Cameron (left) and Hartranft (right) are dressed as Italian bandits,
while their supporters in the background carry aloft a banner inscribed
with the battle cry of the patronage (“spoils”) system:
“To the Victors, Belong the Spoils.”
Grant expresses his determination to implement the new civil
service regulations, which are held by Columbia, and Uncle Sam appears
(behind the door) as a policeman ready to enforce the law.
The cartoon’s title—“No Surrender”—alludes to Grant's
commitment as Union commander during the Civil War to full Union victory
and the “Unconditional Surrender” (his nickname) of the Confederacy.
In March 1871, the lame-duck
session of the 41st Congress passed an appropriations bill
that included a rider authorizing the president to appoint a commission
to draft rules for civil service examinations.
Congress had defeated four civil service bills during that
session, and opponents called the appropriations rider a sneaky trick,
but it became the law of the land.
In June, President Grant named the seven members of the
commission, led by Curtis, and they began meeting in the sweltering
summer heat of Washington, D.C. In
December, Curtis presented the commission’s preliminary report, for
which he was primarily responsible, to Grant, who approved the document.
The initial civil service rules
were somewhat limited in scope in order to test the system and gain
broader political support. The
Civil Service Commission possessed no legal authority of its own, and
the president’s implementation of its rules was discretionary.
The regulations did not apply to current office holders, although
applicants for low-level positions (the most common appointments) would
be tested. Vacancies would be filled by choosing one of the three top
scorers on the competitive exams. The
rules outlawed the practice of collecting “assessments”—a
percentage of the salaries of patronage appointments, which was expected
to be turned over to the party. Reaction
in Congress was intense, with opponents labeling civil service reform
“impractical,” “humbug,” “a political delusion,” and
“unconstitutional.”
In January 1872, Grant asked
Congress to appropriate $100,000 to fund the Civil Service Commission.
In March, the Senate allocated $50,000, which in April the House
reduced to $10,000. A joint
House-Senate conference settled on $25,000, which both houses approved
in May. As the party in
power, many congressional Republicans opposed civil service reform, and
backers of President Grant were conspicuous among them (including
Senator Cameron and Governor Hartranft).
During the presidential campaign that year, a group of liberal
Republicans broke away from their party to
nominate
their
own candidate, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, and to
adopt a platform that included support for civil service reform.
Although they were liberal reformers, Curtis and Nast remained
loyal to Grant, as the featured cartoon indicates of the latter.
Curtis, though, had been
fighting an uphill battle with Congress and the Grant administration
over funding and implementation of civil service reform.
Curtis’s breaking point came in the spring of 1873.
In February, President Grant had appointed him to a three-member
committee that was assigned to find a suitable replacement for the
position of surveyor of the New York Customhouse, the most lucrative
source of patronage in the country.
Curtis wanted the position to be filled under the reform rules,
but when the new employee was chosen without Curtis’s input or
knowledge, the Harper’s Weekly editor resigned as chairman of
the Civil Service Commission. Curtis
continued to believe that Grant “saw the reason and necessity for
reform,” but was compelled to act against his instincts by unyielding
political forces. The
president’s action “was indeed a surrender, but it was the surrender
of a champion who had honestly mistaken both the nature and strength of
the adversary and his own power of endurance.”
Without
Curtis at its helm, the Civil Service Commission continued to struggle,
and its funding was discontinued in December 1875 with the acquiescence
of the Grant administration. On
March 27, 1876 (a presidential election year), the reform rules were
suspended indefinitely. It
would take years of relentless, organized effort on the part of
reformers before the federal government passed the Pendleton Civil
Service Reform Act of 1883 in the wake of President James Garfield’s
assassination by a disgruntled federal job-seeker.
It would take several more years before most states and cities
followed suit, and decades before the rules covered the majority of
federal positions.
Robert C. Kennedy
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