As Winston Churchill put it, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” As the United States slides into a spoils system of government, it is worth remembering where that has led in the past: incompetence, corruption, and even violence.
A spoils system takes its name from the phrase, “to the victor goes the spoils.” It is a practice in which a politician, after winning an election, rewards his supporters, cronies and relatives with government jobs. It is the opposite of a merit system, where offices are awarded on the basis of some measure of merit, independent of political activity.
The United States operated under a spoils system for much of the 19th century. After a period of rampant corruption that followed the Civil War, Congress in 1883 enacted a civil service reform act that reduced the number of patronage jobs.
As Congress expanded the reach of the federal government to regulate railroad rates, to control the money supply, and to prevent unfair trade practices, Congress set up independent agencies. Their board members, appointed by the president but confirmed by the Senate, serve fixed terms. To reduce the potential for political control, Congress staggered their terms and provided that a president could not remove a board member absent a showing of inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.
Those protections are now under attack. The present administration has fired civil servants wholesale, appointed unqualified cronies to important positions, and asserted the ability to remove agency heads without any pretense of good cause. More ominously, it has attempted to remove the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the agency charged with reporting executive misconduct to Congress, without any pretense of good cause.
There is a Mississippi perspective on this problem. Well into the 20th century, Mississippi government operated on a spoils system. Whoever got elected governor had the power to hire and fire a large number of state employees. That was what enabled Governor Thedore Bilbo to fire professors at the University of Mississippi, an act that led to the creation in the 1940s of our College Board, a constitutionally-protected independent body whose members must be confirmed by the State senate and serve staggered terms.
Even before that, one of Mississippi’s most forward-thinking governors, Mike Conner, had persuaded the legislature to engage the Brookings Institution, a Washington promoter of good government, to study the Mississippi system of government. Its 1930 report criticized the spoils system then in place. When it came to “personnel administration,” the report first observed that “no semblance of the merit system has ever been adopted.” Mississippi, it said, was operating as the federal government had operated before 1883. It said this about spoils systems:
“It is difficult to exaggerate the harm the application of this principle, if it could be called such, has done and is doing in the way of damaging the morale of state employees. The evils inherent in it are … manifest…” It went on to quote from another study:
“The system necessarily carries with it the negation of almost all the principles that must obtain if a really efficient personnel system is to be secured. Under it there can be no such thing as permanency of tenure, since each change in political power … means the dismissal of existing incumbents of office and their replacing with others as rewards for party services rendered.” It continued:
“Though some consideration may be given to the matter of the qualification of appointees for the offices to which they are appointed, there is no pretense of seeking to select those most competent. Even if reasonably competent persons are secured, there is, under the spoils system, no inducement for them to render the best services of which they are capable, since they are only too well aware that their retention in office and their advancement are dependent upon the political influence that they can exert or the further political services that they can render rather than on the manner in which they discharge the duties of their offices.” It added:
“Finally, the system carries with it the constant temptation for government employees to make illegitimate use of their offices to promote the welfare of their … political chieftains to whom they are indebted for their offices.”
The Brookings report went on to observe that, in a spoils system, those appointed begin as novices lacking qualifications, and finish with “extreme laxity and indifference” because their tenure may soon end.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that each of these things is now and will be in the future true of the version of the spoils system now being put into place in Washington. The result will not be the touted “efficiency” but rather gross inefficiency. The baseless but defamatory demands that federal employees resign are likely to drive out of government those we need most, i.e. those who take pride in their work and whose skills will enable them to get a better-paying job elsewhere. The wholesale firings will make it more difficult, and more expensive, to recruit competent government employees in the future.
And there may be a darker side. Louisiana Governor Huey Long was the king of spoils system politics. He even maintained a “deduct” box into which bribes should be paid. In 1936, a doctor – a past president of the Louisiana Medical Society -- outraged by Long’s effort to replace a local judge, shot Long and killed him.
We can only hope that aspect of the spoils system does not repeat itself.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
