Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography — Ch 05-Applied Idealism, pt 1

APPLIED IDEALISM

In the spring of 1899 I was appointed by President Harrison Civil Service Commissioner.

For nearly five years I had not been very active in political life; although I had done some routine work in the organization and had made campaign speeches, and in 1886 had run for Mayor of New York against Abram S. Hewitt, Democrat, and Henry George, Independent, and had been defeated.

I served six years as Civil Service Commissioner--four years under President Harrison and then two years under President Cleveland.

I

was treated by both Presidents with the utmost consideration.

Among my fellow-Commissioners there was at one time ex-Governor Hugh Thompson, of South Carolina, and at another time John R. Proctor, of Kentucky.

They were Democrats and ex-Confederate soldiers.

I became deeply attached to both, and we stood shoulder to shoulder in every contest in which the Commission was forced to take part.

Civil Service Reform had two sides.

There was, first, the effort to secure a more efficient administration of the public service, and, second, the even more important effort to withdraw the administrative offices of the Government from the domain of spoils politics, and thereby cut out of American political life a fruitful source of corruption and degradation.

The spoils theory of politics is that public office is so much plunder which the victorious political party is entitled to appropriate to the use of its adherents.

Under this system the work of the Government was often done well even in those days, when Civil Service Reform was only an experiment, because the man running an office if himself an able and far-sighted man, knew that inefficiency in administration would be visited on his head in the long run, and therefore insisted upon most of his subordinates doing good work; and, moreover, the men appointed under the spoils system were necessarily men of a certain initiative and power, because those who lacked these qualities were not able to shoulder themselves to the front.

Yet there were many flagrant instances of inefficiency, where a powerful chief quartered friend, adherent, or kinsman upon the Government.

Moreover, the necessarily haphazard nature of the employment, the need of obtaining and holding the office by service wholly unconnected with official duty, inevitably tended to lower the standard of public morality, alike among the office-holders and among the politicians who rendered party service with the hope of reward in office.

Indeed, the doctrine that "To the victor belong the spoils," the cynical battle-cry of the spoils politician in America for the sixty years preceding my own entrance into public life, is so nakedly vicious that few right-thinking men of trained mind defend it.

To appoint, promote, reduce, and expel from the public service, letter-carriers, stenographers, women typewriters, clerks, because of the politics of themselves or their friends, without regard to their own service, is, from the standpoint of the people at large, as foolish and degrading as it is wicked.

Such being the case, it would seem at first sight extraordinary that it should be so difficult to uproot the system.

Unfortunately, it was permitted to become habitual and traditional in American life, so that the conception of public office as something to be used primarily for the good of the dominant political party became ingrained in the mind of the average American, and he grew so accustomed to the whole process that it seemed part of the order of nature.

Not merely the politicians but the bulk of the people accepted this in a matter-of-course way as the only proper attitude.

There were plenty of communities where the citizens themselves did not think it natural, or indeed proper, that the Post-Office should be held by a man belonging to the defeated party.

Moreover, unless both sides were forbidden to use the offices for purposes of political reward, the side that did use them possessed such an advantage over the other that in the long run it was out of the question for the other not to follow the bad example that had been set.

Each party profited by the offices when in power, and when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.

It was necessary, in order to remedy the evil, both gradually to change the average citizen's mental attitude toward the question, and also to secure proper laws and proper administration of the laws.

The work is far from finished even yet.

There are still masses of office-holders who can be used by an unscrupulous Administration to debauch political conventions and fraudulently overcome public sentiment, especially in the "rotten borough" districts--those where the party is not strong, and where the office-holders in consequence have a disproportionate influence.

This was done by the Republican Administration in 1912, to the ruin of the Republican party.

Moreover, there are numbers of States and municipalities where very little has as yet been done to do away with the spoils system.

But in the National Government scores of thousands of offices have been put under the merit system, chiefly through the action of the National Civil Service Commission.

The use of Government offices as patronage is a handicap difficult to overestimate from the standpoint of those who strive to get good government.

Any effort for reform of any sort, National, State, or municipal, results in the reformers immediately finding themselves face to face with an organized band of drilled mercenaries who are paid out of the public chest to train themselves with such skill that ordinary good citizens when they meet them at the polls are in much the position of militia matched against regular troops.

Yet these citizens themselves support and pay their opponents in such a way that they are drilled to overthrow the very men who support them.

Civil Service Reform is designed primarily to give the average American citizen a fair chance in politics, to give to this citizen the same weight in politics that the "ward heeler" has.

Patronage does not really help a party.

It helps the bosses to get control of the machinery of the party--as in 1912 was true of the Republican party--but it does not help the party.

On the average, the most sweeping party victories in our history have been won when the patronage was against the victors.

All that the patronage does is to help the worst element in the party retain control of the party organization.

Two of the evil elements in our Government against which good citizens have to contend are, 1, the lack of continuous activity on the part of these good citizens themselves, and, 2, the ever-present activity of those who have only an evil self-interest in political life.

It is difficult to interest the average citizen in any particular movement to the degree of getting him to take an efficient part in it.

He wishes the movement well, but he will not, or often cannot, take the time and the trouble to serve it efficiently; and this whether he happens to be a mechanic or a banker, a telegraph operator or a storekeeper.

He has his own interests, his own business, and it is difficult for him to spare the time to go around to the primaries, to see to the organization, to see to getting out the vote--in short, to attend to all the thousand details of political management.

On the other hand, the spoils system breeds a class of men whose financial interest it is to take this necessary time and trouble.

They are paid for so doing, and they are paid out of the public chest.

Under the spoils system a man is appointed to an ordinary clerical or ministerial position in the municipal, Federal, or State government, not primarily because he is expected to be a good servant, but because he has rendered help to some big boss or to the henchman of some big boss.

His stay in office depends not upon how he performs service, but upon how he retains his influence in the party.

This necessarily means that his attention to the interests of the public at large, even though real, is secondary to his devotion to his organization, or to the interest of the ward leader who put him in his place.

So he and his fellows attend to politics, not once a year, not two or three times a year, like the average citizen, but every day in the year.

It is the one thing that they talk of, for it is their bread and butter.

They plan about it and they scheme about it.

They do it because it is their business.

I do not blame them in the least.

I blame us, the people, for we ought to make it clear as a bell that the business of serving the people in one of the ordinary ministerial Government positions, which have nothing to do with deciding the policy of the Government, should have no necessary connection with the management of primaries, of caucuses, and of nominating conventions.

As a result of our wrong thinking and supineness, we American citizens tend to breed a mass of men whose interests in governmental matters are often adverse to ours, who are thoroughly drilled, thoroughly organized, who make their livelihood out of politics, and who frequently make their livelihood out of bad politics.

They know every little twist and turn, no matter how intricate, in the politics of their several wards, and when election day comes the ordinary citizen who has merely the interest that all good men, all decent citizens, should have in political life, finds himself as helpless before these men as if he were a solitary volunteer in the presence of a band of drilled mercenaries on a field of battle.

There are a couple of hundred thousand Federal offices, not to speak of State and municipal offices.

The men who fill these offices, and the men who wish to fill them, within and without the dominant party for the time being, make a regular army, whose interest it is that the system of bread-and-butter politics shall continue.

Against their concrete interest we have merely the generally unorganized sentiment of the community in favor of putting things on a decent basis.

The large number of men who believe vaguely in good are pitted against the smaller but still larger number of men whose interest it often becomes to act very concretely and actively for evil; and it is small wonder that the struggle is doubtful.

During my six years' service as Commissioner the field of the merit system was extended at the expense of the spoils system so as to include several times the number of offices that had originally been included.

Generally this was done by the introduction of competitive entrance examinations; sometimes, as in the Navy-Yards, by a system of registration.

This of itself was good work.

Even better work was making the law efficient and genuine where it applied.

As was inevitable in the introduction of such a system, there was at first only partial success in its application.

For instance, it applied to the ordinary employees in the big custom-houses and post-offices, but not to the heads of these offices.

A number of the heads of the offices were slippery politicians of a low moral grade, themselves appointed under the spoils system, and anxious, directly or indirectly, to break down the merit system and to pay their own political debts by appointing their henchmen and supporters to the positions under them.

Occasionally these men acted with open and naked brutality.

Ordinarily they sought by cunning to evade the law.

The Civil Service Reformers, on the other hand, were in most cases not much used to practical politics, and were often well-nigh helpless when pitted against veteran professional politicians.

In consequence I found at the beginning of my experiences that there were many offices in which the execution of the law was a sham.

This was very damaging, because it encouraged the politicians to assault the law everywhere, and, on the other hand, made good people feel that the law was not worth while defending.

The first effort of myself and my colleagues was to secure the genuine enforcement of the law.

In this we succeeded after a number of lively fights.

But of course in these fights we were obliged to strike a large number of influential politicians, some of them in Congress, some of them the supporters and backers of men who were in Congress.

Accordingly we soon found ourselves engaged in a series of contests with prominent Senators and Congressmen.

There were a number of Senators and Congressmen--men like Congressman (afterwards Senator) H. C.

Lodge, of Massachusetts; Senator Cushman K. Davis, of Minnesota; Senator Orville H.

Platt, of Connecticut; Senator Cockrell, of Missouri; Congressman (afterwards President) McKinley, of Ohio, and Congressman Dargan, of South Carolina--who abhorred the business of the spoilsman, who efficiently and resolutely championed the reform at every turn, and without whom the whole reform would certainly have failed.

But there were plenty of other Senators and Congressmen who hated the whole reform and everything concerned with it and everybody who championed it;

and sometimes, to use a legal phrase, their hatred was for cause, and sometimes it was peremptory--that is, sometimes the Commission interfered with their most efficient, and incidentally most corrupt and unscrupulous, supporters, and at other times, where there was no such interference, a man nevertheless had an innate dislike of anything that tended to decency in government.

These men were always waging war against us, and they usually had the more or less open support of a certain number of Government officials, from Cabinet officers down.

The Senators and Congressmen in question opposed us in many different ways.

Sometimes, for instance, they had committees appointed to investigate us--during my public career without and within office I grew accustomed to accept appearances before investigating committees as part of the natural order of things.

Sometimes they tried to cut off the appropriation for the Commission.

Occasionally we would bring to terms these Senators or Congressmen who fought the Commission by the simple expedient of not holding examinations in their districts.

This always brought frantic appeals from their constituents, and we would explain that unfortunately the appropriations had been cut, so that we could not hold examinations in every district, and that obviously we could not neglect the districts of those Congressmen who believed in the reform and therefore in the examinations.

The constituents then turned their attention to the Congressman, and the result was that in the long run we obtained sufficient money to enable us to do our work.

On the whole, the most prominent leaders favored us.

Any man who is the head of a big department, if he has any fitness at all, wishes to see that department run well; and a very little practical experience shows him that it cannot be run well if he must make his appointments to please spoilsmongering politicians.

As with almost every reform that I have ever undertaken, most of the opposition took the guise of shrewd slander.

Our opponents relied chiefly on downright misrepresentation of what it was that we were trying to accomplish, and of our methods, acts, and personalities.

I had more than one lively encounter with the authors and sponsors of these misrepresentations, which at the time were full of interest to me.

But it would be a dreary thing now to go over the record of exploded mendacity, or to expose the meanness and malice shown by some men of high official position.

A favorite argument was to call the reform Chinese, because the Chinese had constructed an inefficient governmental system based in part on the theory of written competitive examinations.

The argument was simple.

There had been written examinations in China; it was proposed to establish written examinations in the United States; therefore the proposed system was Chinese.

The argument might have been applied still further.

For instance, the Chinese had used gunpowder for centuries; gunpowder is used in Springfield rifles; therefore Springfield rifles were Chinese.

One argument is quite as logical as the other.

It was impossible to answer every falsehood about the system.

But it was possible to answer certain falsehoods, especially when uttered by some Senator or Congressman of note.

Usually these false statements took the form of assertions that we had asked preposterous questions of applicants.

At times they also included the assertion that we credited people to districts where they did not live; this simply meaning that these persons were not known to the active ward politicians of those districts.

One opponent with whom we had a rather lively tilt was a Republican Congressman from Ohio, Mr. Grosvenor, one of the floor leaders.

Mr. Grosvenor made his attack in the House, and enumerated our sins in picturesque rather than accurate fashion.

There was a Congressional committee investigating us at the time, and on my next appearance before them I asked that Mr. Grosvenor be requested to meet me before the committee.

Mr. Grosvenor did not take up the challenge for several weeks, until it was announced that I was leaving for my ranch in Dakota;

whereupon, deeming it safe, he wrote me a letter expressing his ardent wish that I should appear before the committee to meet him.

I promptly canceled my ticket, waited, and met him.

He proved to be a person of happily treacherous memory, so that the simple expedient of arranging his statements in pairs was sufficient to reduce him to confusion.

For instance, he had been trapped into making the unwary remark, "I do not want to repeal the Civil Service Law, and I never said so."

I produced the following extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law."

To this he merely replied that there was "no inconsistency between those two statements."

He asserted that "Rufus P. Putnam, fraudulently credited to Washington County, Ohio, never lived in Washington County, Ohio, or in my Congressional district, or in Ohio as far as I know."

We produced a letter which, thanks to a beneficent Providence, he had himself written about Mr. Rufus P. Putnam, in which he said: "Mr. Rufus P.

Putnam is a legal resident of my district and has relatives living there now."

He explained, first, that he had not written the letter;

second, that he had forgotten he had written the letter; and, third, that he was grossly deceived when he wrote it.

He said: "I have not been informed of one applicant who has found a place in the classified service from my district."

We confronted him with the names of eight.

He looked them over and said, "Yes, the eight men are living in my district as now constituted," but added that his district had been gerrymandered so that he could no longer tell who did and who didn't live in it.

When I started further to question him, he accused me of a lack of humor in not appreciating that his statements were made "in a jesting way," and then announced that "a Congressman making a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives was perhaps in a little different position from a witness on the witness stand"--a frank admission that he did not consider exactitude of statement necessary when he was speaking as a Congressman.

Finally he rose with great dignity and said that it was his "constitutional right" not to be questioned elsewhere as to what he said on the floor of the House of Representatives; and accordingly he left the delighted committee to pursue its investigations without further aid from him.

A more important opponent was the then Democratic leader of the Senate, Mr. Gorman.

In a speech attacking the Commission Mr. Gorman described with moving pathos how a friend of his, "a bright young man from Baltimore," a Sunday-school scholar, well recommended by his pastor, wished to be a letter-carrier; and how he went before us to be examined.

The first question we asked him, said Mr. Gorman, was the shortest route from Baltimore to China, to which the "bright young man" responded that he didn't want to go to China, and had never studied up that route.

Thereupon, said Mr. Gorman, we asked him all about the steamship lines from the United States to Europe, then branched him off into geology, tried him in chemistry, and finally turned him down.

Apparently Mr. Gorman did not know that we kept full records of our examinations.

I at once wrote to him stating that I had carefully looked through all our examination papers and had not been able to find one question even remotely resembling any of these questions which he alleged had been asked, and that I would be greatly obliged if he would give me the name of the "bright young man" who had deceived him.

However, that "bright young man" remained permanently without a name.

I also asked Mr. Gorman, if he did not wish to give us the name of his informant, to give us the date of the examination in which he was supposed to have taken part; and I offered, if he would send down a representative to look through our files, to give him all the aid we could in his effort to discover any such questions.

But Mr. Gorman, not hitherto known as a sensitive soul, expressed himself as so shocked at the thought that the veracity of the "bright young man" should be doubted that he could not bring himself to answer my letter.

So I made a public statement to the effect that no such questions had ever been asked.

Mr. Gorman brooded over this; and during the next session of Congress he rose and complained that he had received a very "impudent" letter from me (my letter was a respectful note calling attention to the fact that, if he wished, he could by personal examination satisfy himself that his statements had no foundation in fact).

He further stated that he had been "cruelly" called to account by me because he had been endeavoring to right a "great wrong" that the Civil Service Commission had committed; but he never, then or afterwards, furnished any clue to the identity of that child of his fondest fancy, the bright young man without a name.

[*] [*] This is a condensation of a speech I at the time made to the St. Louis Civil Service Reform Association.

Senator Gorman was then the Senate leader of the party that had just been victorious in the Congressional elections.

The incident is of note chiefly as shedding light on the mental make-up of the man who at the time was one of the two or three most influential leaders of the Democratic party.

Mr. Gorman had been Mr. Cleveland's party manager in the Presidential campaign, and was the Democratic leader in Congress.

It seemed extraordinary that he should be so reckless as to make statements with no foundation in fact, which he might have known that I would not permit to pass unchallenged.

Then, as now, the ordinary newspaper, in New York and elsewhere, was quite as reckless in its misstatements of fact about public men and measures; but for a man in Mr. Gorman's position of responsible leadership such action seemed hardly worth while.

However, it is at least to be said for Mr. Gorman that he was not trying by falsehood to take away any man's character.

It would be well for writers and speakers to bear in mind the remark of Pudd'nhead Wilson to the effect that while there are nine hundred and ninety-nine kinds of falsehood, the only kind specifically condemned in Scripture, just as murder, theft, and adultery are condemned, is bearing false witness against one's neighbor.

One of the worst features of the old spoils system was the ruthless cruelty and brutality it so often bred in the treatment of faithful public servants without political influence.

Life is hard enough and cruel enough at best, and this is as true of public service as of private service.

Under no system will it be possible to do away with all favoritism and brutality and meanness and malice.

But at least we can try to minimize the exhibition of these qualities.

I once came across a case in Washington which very keenly excited my sympathy.

Under an Administration prior to the one with which I was connected a lady had been ousted from a Government position.

She came to me to see if she could be reinstated.

(This was not possible, but by active work I did get her put back in a somewhat lower position, and this only by an appeal to the sympathy of a certain official.

) She was so pallid and so careworn that she excited my sympathy and I made inquiries about her.

She was a poor woman with two children, a widow.

She and her two children were in actual want.

She could barely keep the two children decently clad, and she could not give them the food growing children need.

Three years before she had been employed in a bureau in a department of Washington, doing her work faithfully, at a salary of about . It was enough to keep her and her two children in clothing, food, and shelter.

One day the chief of the bureau called her up and told her he was very sorry that he had to dismiss her.

In great distress she asked him why; she thought that she had been doing her work satisfactorily.

He answered her that she had been doing well, and that he wished very much that he could keep her, that he would do so if he possibly could, but that he could not; for a certain Senator, giving his name, a very influential member of the Senate, had demanded her place for a friend of his who had influence.

The woman told the bureau chief that it meant turning her out to starve.

She had been thirteen or fourteen years in the public service; she had lost all touch with her friends in her native State; dismissal meant absolute want for her and her children.

On this the chief, who was a kind man, said he would not have her turned out, and sent her back to her work.

But three weeks afterwards he called her up again and told her he could not say how sorry he was, but the thing had to be done.

The Senator had been around in person to know why the change had not been made, and had told the chief that he would be himself removed if the place were not given him.

The Senator was an extremely influential man.

His wants had to be attended to, and the woman had to go.

And go she did, and turned out she was, to suffer with her children and to starve outright, or to live in semi-starvation, just as might befall.

I do not blame the bureau chief, who hated to do what he did, although he lacked the courage to refuse; I do not even very much blame the Senator, who did not know the hardship that he was causing, and who had been calloused by long training in the spoils system; but this system, a system which permits and encourages such deeds, is a system of brutal iniquity.

Any man accustomed to dealing with practical politics can with difficulty keep a straight face when he reads or listens to some of the arguments advanced against Civil Service Reform.

One of these arguments, a favorite with machine politicians, takes the form of an appeal to "party loyalty" in filling minor offices.

Why, again and again these very same machine politicians take just as good care of henchmen of the opposite party as of those of their own party.

In the underworld of politics the closest ties are sometimes those which knit together the active professional workers of opposite political parties.

A friend of mine in the New York Legislature--the hero of the alpha and omega incident--once remarked to me: "When you have been in public life a little longer, Mr. Roosevelt, you will understand that there are no politics in politics."

In the politics to which he was referring this remark could be taken literally.

Another illustration of this truth was incidentally given me, at about the same time, by an acquaintance, a Tammany man named Costigan, a good fellow according to his lights.

I had been speaking to him of a fight in one of the New York downtown districts, a Democratic district in which the Republican party was in a hopeless minority, and, moreover, was split into the Half-Breed and Stalwart factions.

It had been an interesting fight in more than one way.

For instance, the Republican party, at the general election, polled something like five hundred and fifty votes, and yet at the primary the two factions polled seven hundred and twenty-five all told.

The sum of the parts was thus considerably greater than the whole.

There had been other little details that made the contest worthy of note.

The hall in which the primary was held had been hired by the Stalwarts from a conscientious gentleman.

To him the Half-Breeds applied to know whether they could not hire the hall away from their opponents, and offered him a substantial money advance.

The conscientious gentleman replied that his word was as good as his bond, that he had hired the hall to the Stalwarts, and that it must be theirs.

But he added that he was willing to hire the doorway to the Half-Breeds if they paid him the additional sum of money they had mentioned.

The bargain was struck, and the meeting of the hostile hosts was spirited, when the men who had rented the doorway sought to bar the path of the men who had rented the hall.

I was asking my friend Costigan about the details of the struggle, as he seemed thoroughly acquainted with them, and he smiled good-naturedly over my surprise at there having been more votes cast than there were members of the party in the whole district.

Said I, "Mr. Costigan, you seem to have a great deal of knowledge about this; how did it happen?"

To which he replied, "Come now, Mr. Roosevelt, you know it's the same gang that votes in all the primaries."