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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2002
During roughly the half-century straddling the turn of the twentieth century, America’s national government underwent a dramatic transformation. It proceeded on two fronts, politics and administration. At the beginning of the era, politicians were deeply enmeshed in a system of patronage and graft reflecting their indebtedness to the local and state political parties without whose support their careers would have languished. Local party organizations recruited and sponsored candidates, ran election campaigns, and directed subsequent career moves among its cadre of politicians. In return, these politicians used their offices to stoke the party machine with a steady supply of patronage appointments and government contracts. By the end of the era, a variety of state and national reforms had effectively dismantled the patronage system.
1. Polsby, Nelson W., “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 124–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. An instance of the poor state of public service during this era can be found in recent best-seller Isaac's Storm, which chronicles the inability of the Weather Service to monitor the “hurricane of the century” approach Galveston, Texas, in 1900. Larson, Erik, Isaac's Storm (New York: Crown Publishers, 1999)Google Scholar.
3. White, Leonard D., The Republican Era: A Study in Administrative History, 1869–1901 (New York: Free Press, 1958)Google Scholar.
4. Ford, Henry Jones, The Rise and Growth of American Politics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898), 121 Google Scholar. See also Campbell, Ballard C., The Growth of American Government (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Keller, Morton, Affairs of State (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Johnson, Ronald N. and Libecap, Gary D., The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Bureaucracy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5. Wiebe, Robert A., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar. The most famous instance of this development concerned regulation of the national rail transportation rates.
6. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7. Labels for these models abound. While “state” infuses labels of the former, the latter has been variously called “new institutionalism,” “congressional dominance,” or simply, a positive model of political development.
8. Skowronek, XX. For a somewhat different configuration that incorporates political parties into executive-centered coalitions, see Shefter, Martin, Political Parties and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 1–18 Google Scholar, passim.
9. A prominent exception to this characterization of the “state development” literature is Elizabeth Sanders’ congress-centered history. Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
10. Roderick Kiewiet, D. and McCubbins, Mathew D., The Logic of Delegation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Wilmerding, Lucius, The Spending Power: A History of the Efforts of Congress to Control Spending Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943)Google Scholar.
11. Brady, David W., “A Reevaluation of Realignments in American Politics: Evidence from the House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 79 (1985): 28–49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
12. One cannot dismiss a purely historical explanation, however. Voters paid dearly for services diverted into the party machine. As progressive reformers and yellow journalism popularized abuses, perhaps the electoral costs of continuing to oppose reform, mounted to the point where vote-seeking political parties had to respond. And as they did so, perhaps at times they miscalculated the consequences of their actions. Two possible instances come to mind: in the aftermath of President Garfield's assassination by a frustrated patronage applicant, enactment of the Pendleton Act establishing a limited civil service but allowing future presidents to expand it through executive orders, and the Republican party’s nomination of reform champion Theodore Roosevelt for vice president in 1900.
13. Ballot reform, as Katz and Sala observe, “made creditclaiming and other personal vote activities by members of Congress significantly more important for reelection, even at the very height of ‘strong party government’ in the United States.” Jonathan Katz and Brian Sala, “Careerism, Committee Assignments and the Electoral Connection,” American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 21.
14. For evidence of increasing careerism in the House of Representatives, see Kernell, Samuel, “Toward Understanding Nineteenth-Century Congressional Careers: Ambition, Competition and Rotation,” American Journal of Political Science 21 (1977): 669–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15. Samuel, Kernell and McDonald, Michael P., “Congress and America's Political Development: The Transformation of the Post Office from Patronage to Service,” American Journal of Political Science 43 (1999): 793 Google Scholar.
16. Carpenter, Daniel P., “State Building through Reputation Building: Coalitions of Esteem and Program Innovation in the National Postal System, 1883–1913,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (2001): 138 Google Scholar.
17. Carpenter, “State Building,” 123–25. For a different set of historical processes that give rise to bureaucratic autonomy, see Martin Shefter, “Party and Patronage: Germany, England and Italy,” Politics and Society 7 (1977): 403–52.
18. Ibid., 125.
19. To attract customers, he invented the “money back guarantee,” and to entertain them, he installed in his Philadelphia store one of the world's largest pipe organs, the famous “Wanamaker organ.”
20. Wanamaker's committee was reported to have raised $400,000, three-quarters of it from railroad interests on the promise that a sympathetic Secretary of Interior would be appointed to the cabinet. Fowler, The Cabinet Politician, 208–9.
21. Carpenter, “State Building,” 122.
22. Gibbons, Herbert A., John Wanamaker (London: Kennikat Press, 1971): 296–97Google Scholar.
23. Carpenter, “State Building,” 128.
24. Gibbons, John Wanamaker, 213. Wanamaker's biographer even congratulates his subject for preventing the president “from making the irreparable blunder of accepting the drastic program of the civil service reformers.” Ibid., 299.
25. Quoted in Fowler, The Cabinet Politician, 207. Fowler adds that these two appointments attracted more criticism than any other of President Harrison's appointments (212).
26. Fowler, The Cabinet Politician, 212. In his diary, Postmaster General William L. Wilson, noted that his predecessor, Wilson Bissell, seemed to have assumed that whatever Wanamaker did in his numerous innovations should be carefully scanned. There may have been some foundation for this, as he brought too many of the methods of his department store to the management of a great Department, and there are abundant proofs yet remaining that he perverted the public service to political purposes. His methods of self-advertising were also offensive to an upright man like Bissell. William L. Wilson, The Cabinet Diary of William L. Wilson [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957], 11–12
27. Polsby, Nelson W., Political Innovation in America: The Politics of Policy Innovation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wanamaker was widely suspected of coveting a Senate seat.
28. Carpenter, “State Building,” 149.
29. Stahl, John M., Growing With the West (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), 126.Google Scholar The National Grange appears to have first endorsed the concept of rural delivery in 1891, as Carpenter reports, but the organization's “official” history locates its origins in a state (Colorado) resolution a year earlier. Gardner, Charles W., The Grange, Friend of the Farmer (Washington: National Grange, 1949), 113–14Google Scholar.
30. Vann Woodward, C., Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 245 Google Scholar.
31. Bruns and Bruns, Reaching Rural America, 12.
32. John Stahl argued in his memoirs that the postmaster general’s “spurious” program costs enactment of a true rural delivery about three years of additional effort. Stahl. Growing With the West, 144.
33. Dorothy Garfield Fowler, The Cabinet Politician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
34. Fowler, The Cabinet Politician.
35. The passage continues the irony: “He marches up Capitol Hill feeling burdened with the tremendous responsibility that weigh upon his shoulders.” Bristow, Joseph L.. Fraud and Politics at the Turn of the Century (New York: Exposition Press, 1952): 89–90 Google Scholar. The National Archives has catalogued (but cannot locate) late 19th century department maps drawn with congressional district boundaries in order to show the peripatetic members of the House of Representatives the location of postal routes and installations in their districts.
36. Wilson, The Cabinet Diary, 56–57.
37. Carpenter, “State Building,” 143.
38. And we must remember Wanamaker's $6 million was the price tag for a more grandiose plan rather than the first experiment in true rural delivery its populist sponsors had requested.
39. Carpenter, “State Building,” 143
40. “It is the policy of this administration to extend the postal service on reasonable and economical lines, and to establish post offices wherever communities are justified in asking for them, thereby properly, adequately, and more economically meeting the requirements of postal extension than by establishing rural free delivery at so great an expense to the people.” [Annual Report of the Postmaster General of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893)]. McDonald and I failed to notice this recommendation in our narrative and misrepresent the next appropriation as a reassertion of congressional initiative.
41. Epstein, David and O’Halloran, Sharyn. Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Approach to Policy Making Under Separate Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42. This aspect of agency theory is developed well in Kathleen Bawn, “Political Control Versus Expertise: Congressional Choices.
43. Carpenter, 144.
44. Carpenter and I essentially agree on this point, but differ on whether Congress is being manipulated (in the best tradition of the British career service in Yes, Minister) or merely being served. Fourth-class Postmaster General Bristow described a similar arrangement in his office; every nomination of 4th class postmaster required an accompanying petition. It might be that this practice became a model for this parallel service. Bristow, 159.
45. Carpenter, “State Building,” p. 148 (emphasis in original).
46. Ibid.
47. The value of the postmaster's office lay less in direct remuneration – including commissions for stamps, about $1,000 annually – than in the traffic it generated for their general store or other business.
48. Fuller, 88. That RFD and 4th class post offices ultimately represented a zero-sum proposition had to be apparent to everyone, certainly the politicians who were eroding the value of the office by offering direct delivery. John Stahl wrote that in the early days when he was promoting rural delivery on the rural lecture circuit and in farm newspapers, vocal opposition came from these postmasters who did not want to lose their clients. Stahl, Growing with the West 120–29.
49. For a full discussion of the statistical specification of these electoral variables, see Kernell and McDonald, 802–808.
50. Consider the following contents of a letter from Representative Charles Landis of Indiana to Machen during the 1902 midterm election campaign: “Do not, as you value your life, fail to get this service started Oct. 1st. It would cost me hundreds of votes if it did not go according to promise.” Two weeks later, he instructed Machen, “I want it [service in Hamilton county] humming along when I canvass the district.” Facing stiff competition, a neighboring Republican incumbent telegraphed Machen: “Order rural county service in Kosciusko and Marshall counties. Can't you do this for me? I need it badly.” These and other similar communications are reported in Fuller, 68–69.
