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Theodore Roosevelt and His Times
Chapter III. The Champion of Civil Service Reform
by Howland, Harold
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The four years after the Cleveland-Blaine campaign were divided
into two parts for Roosevelt by another political experience,
which also resulted in defeat. He was nominated by the
Republicans and a group of independents for Mayor of New York.
His two opponents were Abram S. Hewitt, a business man of
standing who had been inveigled, no one knows how, into lending
respectability to the Tammany ticket in a critical moment, and
Henry George, the father of the Single Tax doctrine, who had been
nominated by a conference of some one hundred and seventy-five
labor organizations. Roosevelt fought his best on a personal
platform of "no class or caste" but "honest and economical
government on behalf of the general wellbeing." But the
inevitable happened. Tammany slipped in between its divided
enemies and made off with the victory.
The rest of the four years he spent partly in ranch life out in
the Dakotas, partly in writing history and biography at home and
in travel. The life on the ranch and in the hunting camps
finished the business, so resolutely begun in the outdoor
gymnasium on Twentieth Street, of developing a physical equipment
adequate for any call he could make upon it. This sojourn on the
plains gave him, too, an intimate knowledge of the frontier type
of American. Theodore Roosevelt loved his fellow men. What is
more, he was always interested in them, not abstractly and in the
mass, but concretely and in the individual. He believed in them.
He knew their strength and their virtues, and he rejoiced in
them. He realized their weaknesses and their softnesses and
fought them hard. It was all this that made him the thoroughgoing
democrat that he was. "The average American," I have heard him
say a hundred times to all kinds of audiences,"is a pretty good
fellow, and his wife is a still better fellow." He not only
enjoyed those years in the West to the full, but he profited by
them as well. They broadened and deepened his knowledge of what
the American people were and meant. They made vivid to him the
value of the simple, robust virtues of self-reliance, courage,
self-denial, tolerance, and justice. The influence of those
hard-riding years was with him as a great asset to the end of his
life.
In the Presidential campaign of 1888, Roosevelt was on the firing
line again, fighting for the Republican candidate, Benjamin
Harrison. When Mr. Harrison was elected, he would have liked to
put the young campaigner into the State Department. But Mr.
Blaine, who became Secretary of State, did not care to have his
plain-spoken opponent and critic under him. So the President
offered Roosevelt the post of Civil Service Commissioner.
The spoils system had become habitual and traditional in American
public life by sixty years of practice. It had received its first
high sanction in the cynical words of a New York politician, "To
the victor belong the spoils." Politicians looked upon it as a
normal accompaniment of their activities. The public looked upon
it with indifference. But finally a group of irrepressible
reformers succeeded in getting the camel's nose under the flap of
the tent. A law was passed establishing a Commission which was to
introduce the merit system. But even then neither the politicians
nor the public, nor the Commission itself, took the matter very
seriously. The Commission was in the habit of carrying on its
functions perfunctorily and unobtrusively. But nothing could be
perfunctory where Roosevelt was. He would never permit things to
be done--or left undone unobtrusively, when what was needed was
to obtrude the matter forcibly on the public mind. He was a
profound believer in the value of publicity.
When Roosevelt became Commissioner things began swiftly to
happen. He had two firm convictions: that laws were made to be
enforced, in the letter and in the spirit; and that the only
thing worth while in the world was to get things done. He
believed with a hot conviction in decency, honesty, and
efficiency in public as in private life.
For six years he fought and infused his fellow Commissioners with
some of his fighting spirit. They were good men but easy-going
until the right leadership came along. The first effort of the
Commission under the new leadership was to secure the genuine
enforcement of the law. The backbone of the merit system was the
competitive examination. This was not because such examinations
are the infallible way to get good public servants, but because
they are the best way that has yet been devised to keep out bad
public servants, selected for private reasons having nothing to
do with the public welfare. The effort to make these examinations
and the subsequent appointments of real service to the nation
rather than to the politicians naturally brought the Commission
into conflict with many men of low ideals, both in Congress and
without. Roosevelt found a number of men in Congress--like
Senator Lodge, Senator Davis of Minnesota, Senator Platt of
Connecticut, and Congressman (afterward President) McKinley--who
were sincerely and vigorously opposed to the spoils system. But
there were numbers of other Senators and Congressmen who hated
the whole reform--everything connected with it and everybody who
championed it. "Sometimes," Roosevelt said of these men, "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."
Conflict with these men was inevitable. Sometimes their
opposition took the form of trying to cut down the appropriation
for the Commission.
Then the Commission, on Roosevelt's suggestion, would try the
effect of holding no examinations in the districts of the
Senators or Congressmen who had voted against the appropriation.
The response from the districts was instantaneous. Frantic
appeals came to the Commission from aspirants for office. The
reply would be suave and courteous. One can imagine Roosevelt
dictating it with a glint in his eye and a snap of the jaw, and
when it was typed, inserting a sting in the tail in the form of
an interpolated sentence in his own vigorous and rugged script.
Those added sentences, without which any typewritten Roosevelt
letter might almost be declared to be a forgery, so uniformly did
the impulse to add them seize him, were always the most
interesting feature of a communication from him. The letter would
inform the protesting one that unfortunately the appropriation
had been cut, so that examinations could not be held in every
district, and that obviously the Commission could not neglect the
districts of those Congressmen who believed in the reform and
therefore in the examinations. The logical next step for the
hungry aspirant was to transfer the attack to his Congressman or
Senator. In the long run, by this simple device of backfiring,
which may well have been a reminiscence of prairie fire days in
the West, the Commission obtained enough money to carry on.
There were other forms of attack tried by the spoils-loving
legislators. One was investigation by a congressional committee.
But the appearance of Roosevelt before such an investigating body
invariably resulted in a "bully time" for him and a peculiarly
disconcerting time for his opponents.
One of the Republican floor leaders in the House in those days
was Congressman Grosvenor from Ohio. In an unwary moment Mr.
Grosvenor attacked the Commission on the floor of the House in
picturesque fashion. Roosevelt promptly asked that Mr. Grosvenor
be invited to meet him before a congressional committee which was
at that moment investigating the activities of the Commission.
The Congressman did not accept the invitation until he heard that
Roosevelt was leaving Washington for his ranch in the West. Then
he notified the committee that he would be glad to meet
Commissioner Roosevelt at one of its sessions. Roosevelt
immediately postponed his journey and met him. Mr. Grosvenor,
says Roosevelt in his Autobiography, "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." He declared to the committee, for instance, that he
did not want to repeal the Civil Service Law and had never said
so. Roosevelt produced one of Mr. Grosvenor's speeches in which
he had said, "I will not only vote to strike out this provision,
but I will vote to repeal the whole law." Grosvenor declared that
there was no inconsistency between these two statements. At
another point in his testimony, he asserted that a certain
applicant for office, who had, as he put it, been fraudulently
credited to his congressional district, had never lived in that
district or in Ohio, so far as he knew. Roosevelt brought forth a
letter in which the Congressman himself had categorically stated
that the man in question was not only a legal resident of his
district but was actually living there then. He explained, says
Roosevelt, "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." Grosvenor at length
accused Roosevelt of a lack of humor in not appreciating that his
statements were made "in a jesting way," and declared 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." Finally he rose with dignity and,
asserting his constitutional right not to be questioned elsewhere
as to what he said on the floor of the House, withdrew, leaving
Roosevelt and the Committee equally delighted with the opera
bouffe in which he had played the leading part.
In the Roosevelt days the Commission carried on its work, as of
course it should, without thought of party. It can be imagined
how it made the "good" Republicans rage when one of the results
of the impartial application system was to put into office from
the Southern States a hundred or two Democrats. The critics of
the Commission were equally non-partisan; there was no politics
in spoilsmanship. The case of Mr. Grosvenor was matched by that
of Senator Gorman of Maryland, the Democratic leader in the
Senate. Mr. Gorman told upon the floor of the Senate the
affecting story of "a bright young man from Baltimore," a Sunday
School scholar, well recommended by his pastor, who aspired to be
a letter carrier. He appeared before the Commission for
examination, and, according to Mr. Gorman, he was first asked to
describe the shortest route from Baltimore to China. The "bright
young man" replied brightly, according to Mr. Gorman, that he
didn't want to go from Baltimore to China, and therefore had
never concerned himself about the choice of routes. He was then
asked, according to Mr. Gorman, all about the steamship lines
from America to Europe; then came questions in geology, and
finally in chemistry. The Commission thereupon turned the bright
young applicant down. The Senator's speech was masterly. It must
have made the spoilsmen chuckle and the friends of civil service
reform squirm. It had neither of these effects on Roosevelt. It
merely exploded him into action like a finger on a hair-trigger.
First of all, he set about hunting down the facts. Facts were his
favorite ammunition in a fight. They have such a powerful punch.
A careful investigation of all the examination papers which the
Commission had set revealed not a single question like those from
which the "bright young man," according to Mr. Gorman, had
suffered. So Roosevelt wrote to the Senator asking for the name
of the" bright young man." There was no response. He also asked,
in case Mr. Gorman did not care to reveal his identity, the date
of the examination. Still no reply. Roosevelt offered to give to
any representative whom Mr. Gorman would send to the Commission's
offices all the aid he could in discovering in the files any such
questions. The offer was ignored. But the Senator expressed
himself as so shocked at this doubting of the word of his
brilliant protege that he was unable to answer the letter at all.
Roosevelt thereupon announced publicly that no such questions had
ever been asked. Mr. Gorman was gravely injured by the whole
incident. Later he declared in the Senate that he had received a
"very impudent letter" from the young Commissioner, and that he
had been "cruelly" called to account because he had tried to
right a "great wrong" which the Commission had committed.
Roosevelt's retort was to tell the whole story publicly, closing
with this delightful passage:
"High-minded, sensitive Mr. Gorman. Clinging, trustful Mr.
Gorman. Nothing could shake his belief in the "bright young man."
Apparently he did not even try to find out his name--if he had a
name; in fact, his name like everything else about him, remains
to this day wrapped in the Stygian mantle of an abysmal mystery.
Still less has Mr. Gorman tried to verify the statements made to
him. It is enough for him that they were made. No harsh
suspicion, no stern demand for evidence or proof, appeals to his
artless and unspoiled soul. He believes whatever he is told, even
when he has forgotten the name of the teller, or never knew it.
It would indeed be difficult to find an instance of a more
abiding confidence in human nature--even in anonymous human
nature. And this is the end of the tale of the Arcadian Mr.
Gorman and his elusive friend, the bright young man without a
name."
Even so near the beginning of his career, Roosevelt showed
himself perfectly fearless in attack. He would as soon enter the
lists against a Senator as a Congressman, as soon challenge a
Cabinet member as either. He did not even hesitate to make it
uncomfortable for the President to whom he owed his continuance
in office. His only concern was for the honor of the public
service which he was in office to defend.
One day he appeared at a meeting of the Executive Committee of
the Civil Service Reform Association. George William Curtis was
presiding, and Roosevelt's old friend, George Haven Putnam, who
tells the story, was also present. Roosevelt began by hurling a
solemn but hearty imprecation at the head of the Postmaster
General. He went on to explain that his explosive wrath was due
to the fact that that particular gentleman was the most
pernicious of all the enemies of the merit system. It was one of
the functions of the Civil Service Commission, as Roosevelt saw
it, to put a stop to improper political activities by Federal
employees. Such activities were among the things that the Civil
Service law was intended to prevent. They strengthened the hands
of the political machines and the bosses, and at the same time
weakened the efficiency of the service. Roosevelt had from time
to time reported to the Postmaster General what some of the Post
Office employees were doing in political ways to the detriment of
the service. His account of what happened was this:
"I placed before the Postmaster-General sworn statements in
regard to these political activities and the only reply I could
secure was, 'This is all second-hand evidence.' Then I went up to
Baltimore at the invitation of our good friend, a member of the
National Committee, Charles J. Bonaparte. Bonaparte said that he
could bring me into direct touch with some of the matters
complained about. He took me to the primary meetings with some
associate who knew by name the carriers and the customs
officials. I was able to see going on the work of political
assessments, and I heard the instructions given to the carriers
and others in regard to the moneys that they were to collect. I
got the names of some of these men recorded in my memorandum
book. I then went back to Washington, swore myself in as a
witness before myself as Commissioner, and sent the sworn
statement to the Postmaster-General with the word, "This at least
is firsthand evidence." I still got no reply, and after waiting a
few days, I put the whole material before the President with a
report. This report has been pigeonholed by the President, and I
have now come to New York to see what can be done to get the
evidence before the public. You will understand that the head of
a department, having made a report to the President, can do
nothing further with the material until the President permits."
Roosevelt went back to Washington with the sage advice to ask the
Civil Service Committee of the House to call upon him to give
evidence in regard to the working of the Civil Service Act. He
could then get into the record his first-hand evidence as well as
a general statement of the bad practices which were going on.
This evidence, when printed as a report of the congressional
committee, could be circulated by the Association. Roosevelt
bettered the advice by asking to have the Postmaster General
called before the committee at the same time as himself. This was
done, but that timid politician replied to the Chairman of the
committee that "he would hold himself at the service of the
Committee for any date on which Mr. Roosevelt was not to be
present." The politicians with uneasy consciences were getting a
little wary about face-to-face encounters with the young fighter.
Nevertheless Roosevelt's testimony was given and circulated
broadcast, as Major Putnam writes, "much to the dissatisfaction
of the Postmaster General and probably of the President."
The six years which Roosevelt spent on the Civil Service
Commission were for him years of splendid training in the methods
and practices of political life. What he learned then stood him
in good stead when he came to the Presidency. Those years of
Roosevelt's gave an impetus to the cause of civil reform which
far surpassed anything it had received until his time. Indeed, it
is probably not unfair to say that it has received no greater
impulse since.
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