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CHAPTER V
Battling with the  Spoils  System
I
N the campaign of 1888, the Republicans were victorious.    Mr. Cleveland had been re-nominated, but was defeated by the Hon.  Benjamin   Harrison.     Mr.  Roosevelt had cordially supported the Republican ticket, and his friends thought him highly fitted to be Assistant Secretary of State.    In his interval of private life, Mr. Roosevelt had again traveled abroad; he was intelligently interested in foreign affairs,'and he would have been a valuable man in the Secretary of State's office at a time when a number of foreign ques-

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A Cartoon History of Roosevelt's Career

 

POLITICAL FOOTBALL
president harbison : " What can 7 do when both parties   insist on kicking? ' From Judge, 1889 (New York)
the mob op htjngby office-seekeks :   " Harrison holds the fort.' cleveland :   " Aha!    Now you know how it is yourself, Ben ! " From Judge, 1889 (New York)

Battling With the Spoils System

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STRAWS THAT BREAK THE CAMEL'S BACK
•
habbison : " I can make no progress with public business  until I get rid of that load of straw."
From Judge, April 0,  1880
tions 'of some moment were pending. But Mr. Elaine, who had been an unsuccessful candidate for the nomination, was made Secretary of State, and he had not forgotten Roosevelt's attitude in the convention of 1884.
Mr. Harrison, therefore, found something else for the energetic young man from New York and Dakota. The new civil-service act was unpopular with the politicians of both parties. Yet every one realized that the spoils system had run its course, and that the great business of public administration had to be put upon some basis of merit, efficiency, and permanence. The enforcement of the act was not popular. No man of great political ambition, or high party standing, desired to be made a civil-service commissioner

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A Cartoon History of Roosevelt's Career

From Puck.    Copyright, 1889.    By permission (When Stanley carried the firsf

Battling With the Spoils System

27

NCLUSIONS striving to check his progress by  throwing stones  and other missiles.    Mr.  Stanley got there, just the same.)

A Cartoon History of Roosevelt's Career

BOMBARDMENT OF THE WHITE HOUSE BY THE   ARMY OP OFFICE SEEKERS
From Judge, April 8, 1893

Mr. Harrison, however, offered this seemingly thankless post of difficult service to Theodore Roosevelt, who promptly accepted it.
It should be remembered that from the time of James Buchanan to the time of Grovef-' Cleveland, the Democrats had been* out of office. Thus for the twenty-five years from 1861 to 1885 the Republicans had been filling the offices from top to bottom with their own men. The Democrats were hungry for their turn, and although President Cleveland was not in sympathy with the spoils system, he could not resist the pressure which put scores of thousands of Republican office-holders, great and small, into private life, in order to meet the clamoring of the Democrats for at least half of the salaried positions of the government. Furthermore, in the latter half of his term, Mr. Cleveland was a candidate for re-nomination ; and he allowed himself to be guided by his political friends and supporters, and by the Democratic Na-

NO PLACE LIKE HOME—FOE OFFICE SEEKERS From the Wasp (San Francisco), March 18, 1893

Battling With the Spoils System

29

tional Committee, in much that had to do with appointments to office.
When, therefore, Mr. Harrison was elected in November, 1888, and entered upon his administration in March, 1889, it was natural enough that there should have been a furious onrush of Republican office-seekers. A large part of these were the indignant people who had been from time to time displaced during the brief four years of Democratic rule.

There were three Civil Service Commissioners, and Theodore Roosevelt was chairman of the board. The law did not prevent the dismissal of government employees, but it provided a system under which appointments were to be made upon merit, ascertained in chief part by examinations; and this system was under the control of the Civil Service Commissioners. The system was ridiculed and assailed. At each session of Congress there was a formidable attempt to starve out the system by refusing to appropriate the
UNCLE SAM'S DISMAL SWAMP
(It will have to be drained  to  get  rid of the  noxious miasmas that arise from it.)
From Puck, November lo, 1893
money  necessary  for the  expenditures  of the Civil Service Board.
THEODORE   ROOSEVELT   AS   HE   LOOKED   WHEN
REAPPOINTED   TO   THE   CIVIL   SERVICE
COMMISSION IN 1893
Mr. Harrison was a good President, and instinctively in favor of a business-like public service; but he belonged to his own period and he was a candidate for a second term. The cabinet officers and the heads of bureaus, in large part, wanted to appoint their subordinates in their own way. They regarded the civil-service restrictions as irksome. Mr. Roosevelt at times stood practically alone, with the politicians and the more partisan newspapers against him. But public opinion would not permit the repeal of the civil-service law, and Roosevelt not only enforced it but secured its gradual extension, so that it applied to an ever-increasing number of public offices.

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A Cartoon History of Roosevelt's Career

Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Harrison were again the opposing candidates in 1892, and the Democrats carried the day. Mr. Cleveland showed his appreciation of the chairman of the Civil Service Board by asking him to remain at his post, and Mr. Roosevelt consented. Again there was the pandemonium of office-seekers at Washington. The Democrats insisted that the}' were entitled to the spoils of their victory. Mr. Cleveland was in a position to stand more firmly than in his first term for the merit system, and he and Roosevelt found themselves working together for efficient and economical administration and against the evils of the spoils system,—just as they had been working together ten years before in the State of New York..
Mr. Roosevelt held this office for six continuous years, from 1889 to 1895. It was a period of patriotic service, with little promise of glory or reward. A man of different physical and nervous organization would have been worn out with the nagging and worry of a place that was involved in sharp, unceasing controversy. But the fights for the law, and against the politicians, did not worry Mr. Roosevelt in the least. He was able to keep it all within office hours, and it was a kind of work that gave him exceptional familiarity with every phase of the administrative system of the United States Government.
It gave him, also, a vast acquaintance with the personalities of Congress, and the active men in all branches of the government. Within a little more than six years it was his destiny to become President of the United States; and few experiences could have fitted him so well for the Presidency as the six years of firm, incessant battling at Washington for the systematizing of the government's work in all departments.

Copyright by G. G. Bain, N. Y.
Avery  D.  Andrews.     Mr.  Parker.      Mr.  Roosevelt.    Gen. Fred. D. Grant.
THE FOUR  MEMBERS  OF THE  NEW  YORK  POLICE  BOARD IN ROOSEVELT'S    TIME   (See next chapter.)