Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (1883)
The spoils system of political appointments, in which a presidential
administration gave out positions within the civil service to individuals who had helped
the president’s party, first became a national phenomenon under Andrew Jackson. While
Jackson did not create the spoils system, it expanded significantly under his watch.
While this system promoted greater participation in politics by providing incentives for
helping in party activities, it also placed numerous incompetent and corrupt individuals in
positions of power. A new administration would remove nearly the entire civil service
positions and assign its political allies to these jobs, making a career in the civil service
almost impossible to maintain. In addition, much of the President’s time was consumed
with filling hundreds of civil service posts. Calls for civil service reform persisted
throughout the nineteenth century, but gained momentum in the 1870s when progressives
in the Republican party successfully pushed the issue.
The assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 by the deranged,
“disappointed office seeker” Charles Giteau gave reformers an opportunity to place the
blame for the president’s murder on the civil service system. After the Democratic
victory in the election of 1882, President Chester A. Arthur lent his support to reform,
hoping that passage of civil service legislation would secure Republican appointments in
case of a Democratic victory in the 1884 presidential election. Reform came with the
Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, written by Dorman B. Eaton, the Secretary
of the National Civil Service Reform League. Senator George H. Pendleton sponsored
the bill, which set up a three person, bipartisan Civil Service Commission and established
the rules for a merit-based civil service system under which posts would be filled through
competitive examinations.
The Pendleton Act was designed to “neutralize” the civil service by removing any
partisan influence from federal appointments. It was not initially successful in this
regard, however, because the Act only affected low-level positions – bringing a mere ten
percent of the civil service under the new regulations. But the Pendleton Act gave the
president the authority to expand the number of positions filled on the basis of merit,
which President Cleveland did by bringing 40% of the civil service under the purview of
the law. In the years following the Pendleton Act, the civil service would become more
efficient and less corrupt, attracting more professional employees and making the
government bureaucracy more effective. At the same time, the Act changed the daily
activities of the president by relieving him of the burden of filling hundreds of jobs in the
federal bureaucracy.
Sources:
Justus D. Doenecke, The Presidencies of James A. Garfield & Chester A. Arthur
(Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1981)
Herbert Kaufman, “The Growth of the Federal Personnel System,” The Federal
Government Service, Ed. Wallace S. Sayre (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965)
Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age (New York: New York University
Press, 1993)
Richard E. Welch, Jr., The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1988)
Paul P. Van Ripper, "Civil Service," Dictionary of American History, vol. II
ed. Harold W. Chase, Thomas C. Cochran et. al. (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1976)