Time to Bring Back the Spoils System

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Why can’t a president appoint his supporters to staff the federal bureaucracy? Because of a long-ago assassination of a president.

The term “spoils system” is today practically synonymous with government corruption, but President Andrew Jackson began it in the 1830s as a blow against corruption, preventing the establishment of an entrenched bureaucracy that would oppose the president. The first administration of Donald Trump has made it clear that such a bureaucracy determined to thwart the president at every turn is a genuine concern; it is time for a reconsideration of the spoils system.

As Rating America’s Presidents explains, the spoils system prevailed for fifty years, but the election of James A. Garfield as president in 1880 was its death knell. Garfield was a champion of civil service reform; to mollify the Stalwarts, or Republicans who favored the spoils system, the vice-presidential nod went to Chester Alan Arthur, the man whom Garfield’s predecessor, Rutherford B. Hayes, had fired from his job as Collector of the Port of New York for ignoring Hayes’s civil service reform executive order forbidding forcing federal officers to make campaign contributions. No one was concerned about the disagreement between the running mates: Garfield was only forty-eight and in perfect health, and the Civil War, which led to the assassination of Lincoln, had been over for fifteen years.

Garfield had only been president for four months when, on July 2, 1881, he and Secretary of State James G. Blaine were walking through the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, on their way to board a train to spend part of the summer in New Jersey, away from the heat of the capital. Just then, a man stepped up behind Garfield and fired his gun twice at the president, hitting him in the back and arm, and crying, “I am a Stalwart and now Arthur is President!”

That man was Charles Guiteau, who has been described in so many history books as a “disappointed office seeker” that the label has practically become a Homeric epithet. A disappointed office seeker Guiteau undeniably was, but he was much more than that. After repeatedly pressing Chester Arthur for a chance to campaign for the Garfield/Arthur ticket during the 1880 campaign, Arthur relented, likely just to end his harassment, and Guiteau delivered his speech a single time. Guiteau thought he was owed a federal office as a result and had pestered White House officials repeatedly for a chance to see Garfield, who did meet with him at least once, and then Blaine in order to make his case for an appointment as consul to France.

Guiteau was, however, not an ordinary office seeker. He wanted a position in France but did not speak French. His sister recounted that in 1875, six years before the assassination, he had raised an axe to her with a look on his face “like a wild animal.” She explained: “I had no doubt then of his insanity. He was losing his mind.” In 1881, before the assassination, he also pressured Senator John Logan of Illinois for a federal job; Logan recounted: “I must say I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization.”

There was. As he bought a pistol and hatched his plan to murder Garfield, Guiteau wrote: “The Lord inspired me to attempt to remove the President in preference to someone else, because I had the brains and the nerve to do the work. The Lord always employs the best material to do His work.”

The wounds he gave to Garfield were not mortal, and the president lingered through the summer. This was, however, the age before sanitary practices were known to be necessary. On September 19, 1881, Garfield died of infections his doctors had given him in probing the wound.

Although Guiteau thought that by elevating Arthur to the presidency he was protecting the spoils system, his crime had the opposite effect: national revulsion over the killing of Garfield made civil service reform the most pressing issue of the day. The time for that reform had come at last, even as the Stalwart Arthur took the oath of office. When he became president, Arthur proceeded to shock the entire nation by supporting civil service reform. His determination that he had a responsibility to do what Garfield would have done outweighed his commitment to the Stalwarts. He declared his support for civil service legislation, explaining that not he, but Garfield, had been elected president, and that he consequently had a responsibility to carry out his policies.

Arthur demonstrated immense personal courage and honor in choosing to carry out the wishes of his slain predecessor rather than implement his own contrary agenda. His decision to do this effectively ended his political career, as he almost certainly knew it would, and yet he stood firm.

Whether his stance was entirely wise in the long run is a separate question. Historians take for granted that civil service reform was good for the country, and there has been no significant indication that it wasn’t until quite recently, when a president has been thwarted in numerous endeavors by an army of unelected bureaucrats within the various departments and agencies of the government, who are deter- mined to impede his agenda in every way possible.

The proponents of civil service reform never envisioned a situation in which deeply entrenched opponents of a sitting president in the FBI, the Justice Department, and elsewhere would be determined to destroy the president — or at very least make it impossible for him to carry out his policies — and could not be removed from their jobs because of civil service regulations.

Would not government work more smoothly, and the executive branch be able to operate more effectively in the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it would, if the president were able to clear out the employees of these agencies who opposed him and replace them with people more in line with his vision?

The spoils system has no defenders today and has had none for over a century. It should have more.