Civil service removal

“ The pressure then came upon me and gave me a great deal of trouble until it was generally understood that I would not yield to it. The extension of the civil service rule would obviate all this and, withal, furnish the most efficient men considering that the power of removal remains unimpaired. ”

“ If you think, sir, that the existing civil service system has defects which should be remedied, then I ask you, in all candor, do you see no other way to accomplish that object than this sure method utterly to ruin and destroy the system? Must you needs burn down the whole house to make a chimney draw? ”

“ They find the advanced positions tacitly abandoned, and the cause of administrative reform driven back into the last line of defense within the narrow entrenchment of the civil service law,—and even that entrenchment in spots by no means impregnable. They see no longer an advancing, but a retreating cause; and let us not forget that while a strong, aggressive movement commands esteem and acquiescence, a halting, retreating one invites contempt and attack. ”

“ If it is true, and I am profoundly convinced of that truth, that under the spoils system it is simply impossible to keep up a reasonably efficient and honest civil service, and that the service will grow the more corrupt the longer the spoils system exists, then nothing can be clearer than that we must have a change which is genuine—thorough reform, including the abolition of that system. What is civil service reform? ”

“ Consequently, removal would be always and justly regarded as a stigma upon character, and a man removed from a position in a public office would be virtually branded as a convicted criminal. Removal for cause, therefore, if the cause were to be decided by any authority but that of the responsible superior officer, instead of improving, would swiftly and enormously enhance the cost, and ruin the efficiency, of the public service, by destroying subordination, and making every lazy and worthless member of it twice as careless and incompetent as he is now. ”

“ With a new administration, Civil Service Reform came in, crude and ill-digested, as all sudden and sweeping reforms must be; cruel to the individual, as all crude reforms will ever be; and among the list of helpless men and women, incapacitated for other work by long service in the dull routine of federal office, who were decapitated, the weak, foolish, emaciated head of Expectant Dobbs went to the block. ”

“ It is for such reasons mainly that I am so strongly in favor of destroying what is called patronage, and of a civil service reform which is not only to give the country a more efficient class of public servants, but, above all things, to remove from our political life a most dangerous element of demoralization. ”

“ The decree of the Conseil expressly declared that a strike of civil servants is an "illegal act," and added that a State official "has accepted all the obligations arising from the necessities of the public service and has renounced all privileges incompatible with the essential continuity of the national life," that civil servants who declare a strike place themselves collectively outside the pale of the laws and regulations which guarantee the exercise for them of the rights which they normally possess as servants of the State. ”

“ Even its enemies are at heart recognizing its virtues.
This has become so widely understood by people of all classes in all parts of the country, that the propagation of correct knowledge of the objects and the means of civil service reform is becoming from day to day an easier task to the advocates of the merit system. Their foremost duty is now to baffle the efforts of the opposing forces, which, seeing the futility of attacking civil service reform on its general merits, strive to cripple or pervert it in the detail of its operation. ”

“ It is not the purpose of this study to detail minutely the workings of the system, — the reports of the Civil Service Commission are too candid and too easily available to make that necessary, — but certain plausible methods of evading restrictions must be mentioned. One of the most dangerous is reinstatement. It seems just that, if a man be dismissed without just cause or because of a reduction in force, he should be readmitted without having to run the gantlet as a novice. ”

“ In my judgment it is the duty of Congress, while respecting to the utmost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen, to prohibit within its jurisdiction all criminal practices, especially of that class which destroy family relations and endanger social order. Nor can any ecclesiastical organization be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the National Government.
“The Civil Service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law, for the good of the service itself. ”

“ But that the reformed system so effectively repels the demoralizing touch of political favor, that it so thoroughly takes away from the office the character of spoil, that it does not tolerate public place to be a means of bribery and an article of barter—this the spoils politician will never forgive us, for it destroys his trade. The very democracy of civil service reform makes the spoilsman's heart sore with sorrow, and in the bitterness of his soul he wildly denounces it as an aristocratic notion imported from England, and as a thoroughly un-American contrivance. ”

“ And well might they say so, for never was there a civil service system invented so utterly absurd and barbarous in conception, so ruinous in operation and so universally demoralizing in effect.
Is there a sensible man who believes that the corrupting influence of such a system can be remedied by merely sweeping out one set of officers and putting in another set in the same way? Every honest citizen cordially applauds and honors the efforts made by brave men of either party to expose corrupt officials and to bring them to justice. ”

“ There are politicians enough in each burning to repeal the Civil Service Law, and periodically such attempts are made in Congress, as well as attempts merely to disturb its operation, or to filch a few places from its domain. ”

“ It is now admitted by every well-informed man that the exemption from the civil service rules of the chiefs of division in the great offices is not only not in any sense demanded by the public interest, but that it has a demoralizing effect upon the service. ”

“ It is a scandal and reproach upon free institutions, and breeds a demoralization dangerous to the perpetuity of republican government. We therefore regard a thorough reform of the civil service as one of the most pressing necessities of the hour; that honesty, capacity, and fidelity constitute the only valid claims to public employment; that the offices of the government cease to be a matter of arbitrary favoritism and patronage and that public station shall become again a post of honor. To this end it is imperatively required that no President shall be a candidate for re-election. ”

“ Our civil-service reform may be imperfect in some of its details; it may be misunderstood and opposed; it may not always be faithfully applied; its designs may sometimes miscarry through mistake or willful intent; it may sometimes tremble under the assaults of its enemies or languish under the misguided zeal of impracticable friends; but if the people of this country ever submit to the banishment of its underlying principle from the operation of their Government they will abandon the surest guaranty of the safety and success of American institutions. ”

“ During the years 1897 and 1898 this force, and every man seeking to become a member of it, was taught by city officials, and by none more energetically than by the chief law officer of the city administration, that the civil service law was an especial enemy of theirs, inasmuch as it abridged their privileges and immunities as citizens of the United States, and was, therefore, a menace to their rights, wholly unwarranted by the Constitution of the United States. ”

“ Of the thousands of officers, therefore, in the United States, a very few individuals only, probably not twenty, will be removed, and those only for doing what they ought not to have done. I know that in stopping thus short in the career of removals I shall give great offence to many of my friends. ”

“ In the opinion of the Executive, nothing is better calculated to strengthen the social and political bonds which should unite the members of a community, one with another, than the maintenance of an able, honest, and independent judiciary. If the Congress resolves upon the prosecution of active war, it might be well, where individuals were actually engaged in the service, to suspend civil process as to them, so long as they are absent in the discharge of public or official duty, but no longer. ”

“ But as to the falsehoods you have uttered with regard to the civil service law I cannot permit you to escape as easily. The enemies of civil service reform are at present gathering for a general assault upon the merit system. Their campaign has already begun all over the country, and their principal weapon consists in the unscrupulous misrepresentation of facts. ”

“ We all know that, as we owe to our legislative bodies the enactment of the existing Civil Service Laws, so it is in the legislative bodies that the most dangerous attempts are made to circumvent or subvert them. ”

“ Nor will any fair-minded man deny that, despite such isolated delinquencies as we witness at present in the Treasury Department, the Civil Service Law has under the national Government on the whole been faithfully enforced—more faithfully perhaps than any law ever was enforced that had so much of adverse interest and popular habit to encounter. ”

“ The dangers threatening civil service reform come no longer from open assault upon the merit system, but from insidious attempts to destroy its substance, while preserving its forms. You may hear many a politician who all his life has trained with the old spoils guard, now deliver himself in this wise: “Civil service reform? ”

“ Doubts may well be entertained whether our Government could survive the strain of a continuance of this system, which upon every change of Administration inspires an immense army of claimants for office to lay siege to the patronage of Government, engrossing the time of public officers with their importunities, spreading abroad the contagion of their disappointment and filling the air with the tumult of their discontent. ”

“ Every public servant who has violated the trust placed in him has been proceeded against with all the rigor of the law. If bad men have secured places, it has been the fault of the system established by law and custom for making appointments, or the fault of those who recommend for Government positions persons not sufficiently well known to them personally, or who give letters indorsing the characters of office seekers without a proper sense of the grave responsibility which such a course devolves upon them. A civil-service reform which can correct this abuse is much desired. ”

“ It leads to the usurpation, in a large measure, of the executive power of appointment by members of the legislative branch, substituting their irresponsible views of personal or party interest for the judgment as to the public good, and the sense of responsibility of the executive. It subjects those who exercise the appointing power, from the President of the United States down, to the intrusion of hordes of office-hunters and their patrons, who rob them of the time and strength they should devote to the public interest. ”

“ All these tendencies are observable, and civil service reform is to be studied in connection with them and with all other political reform movements. Eternal vigilance, and not merely the mechanical selection of public officers, is the price of liberty. ”

“ In whatever way this question may be decided there is ample ground for demanding the application of the most thoroughgoing civil service reform rules to our police establishments. It is well known that the rank and file of our police forces despise the dirty work forced upon them by the political wretches “higher up.” No man capable [Pg 191] of the heroic deeds which are commonplace in the annals of the police service rings the doors of bawdy houses and collects a tithe from the sorrowful wages of shame except under the compulsion of the sternest bread and butter necessity. ”

“ The people demand reform in the administration of the Government and the application of business principles to public affairs. As a means to this end, civil-service reform should be in good faith enforced. Our citizens have the right to protection from the incompetency of public employees who hold their places solely as the reward of partisan service, and from the corrupting influence of those who promise and the vicious methods of those who expect such rewards ”

“ With the politicians who advocate a return to the spoils system it has become a favorite argument that civil service reform as embodied in the existing law is not popular, and that if the question whether it should be sustained or abandoned were submitted to a vote of the people, there would be a large majority adverse to it. ”

“ At bottom, the present attack on the merit system is, in large part, a reappearance of the old jealousy of the executive so many times illustrated in the history of the patronage. [26]
What has enabled civil service reform to progress, unpopular as it has been because of its foreign origin, and interfering, as it has done, with our established political institutions? Why have not the congressmen, who have been deprived of the means of sustaining their political machines, and more than half of whom are probably hostile to the system, risen in successful revolt? ”