To understand what’s going on at the Pennsylvania Turnpike today, in 2013, you have to understand the role patronage and political corruption has played in Pennsylvania government going back over centuries.
Americans have spent more than two hundred years wrestling with patronage. Patronage caused the assassination of one of our presidents. Patronage has been a snake in the garden since the earliest days of the republic. Its history is entangled in the roots of our two-party system. Patronage, and the debate over it, is at the very heart and soul of our country’s history.
Ancient Chinese bought and sold public offices as far back as 243 B.C. The Chinese are credited with having the first patronage and also the first merit systems.
Job selling rose to new heights in the Roman Empire when the Praetorian Guard began auctioning the office of emperor.
Patronage, oddly enough, was kept alive by the Roman Catholic Church, apparently the first institution to sanction patronage by law. “References to it in canon law describe the practice as the benevolent exercise of privilege,” write Martin and Susan Tolchin in their book To the Victor…. “The term patronage was also used to describe the transfer of power by the Pope to his natural sons, euphemistically called nephews (hence, nepotism), and to his other relatives. ‘Juspatronatus,’ the sum of privileges according to canon law, was derived from the Roman system, which contained within itself an entire class of free men — not citizens — who attached themselves to patrons.”
To make money, the bankrupt French and British crowns sold offices. An English Stuart might pay between 6,000 to 10,000 pounds to become secretary of state. Most offices were hereditary, though poor inheritors often sold their offices like stock on the open market.
Parties and patronage weren’t mentioned in the constitution, but the divisive debate over federalism laid the groundwork. It simply seemed logical to put your guys in, and keep their guys out.
President George Washington at times expressed disapproval of parties and patronage. His farewell address cautions against the formation of parties. In reality he deferred most matters of patronage and appointments to his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who nearly always appointed Federalists.
Washington witnessed a growing rift between Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson who was aided by James Madison . Jefferson’s followers, the Republican-Democrats, soon were excluded.
Factionalism in his own party eventually contributed to our second president, John Adams, electoral defeat to Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Adams made political appointments right up to his last hour in office. One of his last acts was to appoint chief justice John Marshall to the Supreme Court.
Jefferson disliked the idea of patronage, and preferred a merit system. By the time he was elected president, after twelve years of Washington and Adams, Federalists held all the offices. Jefferson observed that job vacancies “by death are few; by resignation none.” Always the practical politician, he systematically replaced them with his own partisans.
What was going on in Pennsylvania?
It would be romantic to say that Pennsylvania at this time enjoyed a citizen legislature, with the public represented by farmers and workingmen. However, already in the late 1700s, Pennsylvania was perfecting a party patronage system. This was really the beginning of the age of professional politicians and American cronyism.
“Pennsylvania’s reputation for political corruption is historic and enduring,” writes former state legislative historian Paul Beers in his book Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday. “There never were any ‘good old days.’ Alexander Hamilton in 1794 during the Whiskey Rebellion dashed off a note: ‘The political putrefaction of Pennsylvania is greater than I had any idea of.'”
Patronage in Pennsylvania was helped along by the budding federal government in the administrations of George Washington and John Adams. Tax collector and post offices, customs houses and other federal posts were filled almost exclusively by loyal Federalists, at first at the expense of Anti-federalists.
Later, followers of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican-Democrats also were excluded. In his book The Federalists and the Origins of the U.S. Civil Service, Carl E. Prince recounts the story of one Lord Butler, the postmaster of Wilkes-Barre. Butler “got in on the ground floor of emerging central and western Pennsylvania commerce in the 1780s acquiring goods imported into Philadelphia and selling them throughout the interior of the commonwealth,” writes Prince. Using his growing wealth to buy into Federalist politics, Butler secured a seat in the state assembly and also became county sheriff. His counting house featured both the post office and the sheriff’s office. Butler was “a zealous, almost fierce party man, ‘decided in his political opinions and free in expressing them.’ ”
When Jefferson became president his new postmaster general, Gideon Granger, targeted Butler for removal. “Butler informed the Republican postmaster general that he would neither relinquish his commission nor the office property in his possession, asserting that his removal was illegal,” Prince recounts. Butler wrote the postmaster general that the real reason he wouldn’t resign was that the job “encouraged my happiness whilst in no way affecting the happiness of any other being,” and that this was “sufficient enough” reason to defy Granger. “Only the threat of federal prosecution brought the charade to an end,” writes Prince, “and ended as well Butler’s stormy tenure in federal office.”
Patronage, nationally, came full force in 1828 with President Andrew Jackson. “The people expect reform,” Jackson told his political lieutenant, secretary of state and successor Martin Van Buren. “They shall not be disappointed.”
Hoping to shake things up by removing wealthy office holders, Jackson in time dismissed 2,000 of the federal government’s 11,000 employees. Jackson’s friend, New York senator William L. Marcy, immortalized the slogan, “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”
“Patronage, Jackson believed, could give the common man the opportunity to participate in government,” write Martin and Susan Tolchin in their book To the Victor…. “He was galled by the fact that one social class — the aristocracy — had monopolized public office for so long.”
Patronage was so out of hand by the time in 1841 of the inauguration of President William Henry Harrison, that upwards of 40,000 office seekers swarmed Washington in search of 23,700 jobs. Many office holders were incompetent, dishonest, or had no inclination for work.
Abraham Lincoln was one of the more adroit practitioners of patronage. Following his election in 1860 he kicked out 1,195 appointees to make room for Republicans, one of the more sweeping displays of patronage up to that time.
In his day Lincoln was criticized for spending too much time doling out jobs, but historians consider its use vital in keeping the Union together, and a secret ingredient of his re-election. Most of the legions he put in office worked for him and the Union. Nevertheless he didn’t enjoy fielding job requests. When he came down with a slight case of smallpox he told his secretary, “Tell all the office seekers to come at once, for now I have something I can give to all.”
To become president would literally mean to become a moving target for office hopefuls. President James Garfield, having spent most of his time filling offices, complained in his diary, “Some civil service reform will come by necessity after the wearisome years of wasted Presidents have paved the way for it.”
By this time, in the early 1880s, the Republican Party had split into two factions, the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds. The factions wrangled mostly over patronage jobs and personalities, not politics. Garfield won office thanks to the support of the Half-Breeds. A Stalwart, Chester A. Arthur, won the vice presidency.
Awaiting a train to take him to a college reunion, Garfield was shot and mortally wounded by a disappointed job seeker. As Garfield lay bleeding on the platform the assassin yelled, “I am a Stalwart and Arthur is president now!” The aspiring job seeker won an appointment at the end of a rope.
This insanity finally shocked the public and congress into action. In 1883 congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which created a civil service commission to conduct examinations, and limited political interference. Cynical historians point out that by the 1880s kickbacks from office seekers no longer were as important to the two political parties, which now could rely on fat contributions from the trusts and smaller business interests.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette and the progressive movement attacked party machines, and campaigned to replace patronage with civil service.
The twentieth century was later marked by various court and congressional efforts to keep politics out of the bureaucracy, and various efforts by politicians to ignore the same.
The Hatch Act of 1939 (amended in 1940), limited the political involvement of government employees (in Pennsylvania this prohibition has often been ignored). Presidents trying to implement new policy meanwhile complained of an increasingly unresponsive bureaucracy. Issuing a directive, Harry Truman observed, was like “pushing on a string.”
Jimmy Carter tried to make the bureaucracy more efficient and responsive, in part by making it easier to fire civil servants.
Unionization and several U. S. Supreme Court rulings tore into state governments. In the 1976 case Elrod v. Burns, a newly elected Democratic sheriff was found to have unconstitutionally dismissed office workers and replaced them with supporters from his own party. Justice Brennan wrote that the court in Elrod reasoned “conditioning employment on political activity pressures employees to pledge political allegiance to a party with which they prefer not to associate, to work for the election of political candidate they do not support, and to contribute money to be used to further policies with which they do not agree. The latter, the plurality noted, had been recognized by this court as ‘tantamount to coerced belief.'”
In the Elrod decision the court cited among other precedents a 1972 case, Perry v. Sindermann, in which it held that a teacher was unconstitutionally refused a new contract by a school board “because he had been publicly critical of its policies.”
Free speech and the First Amendment were increasingly viewed by the court as at odds with patronage. Coerced opinion, the court recognized, was unhealthy to a free society.
In a 1980 case, Branti v. Finkel, the court decided that the First Amendment prohibited a newly appointed Democratic public defender from discharging assistant public defenders who weren’t Democrats. These two cases, Elrod and Branti, ruled out dismissing most employees for reasons of patronage, and set the stage for the next big hit at patronage, Rutan v. the Republican Party of Illinois.
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Bill Keisling is author of the book “When the Levee Breaks: The patronage crisis at the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the General Assembly & the State Supreme Court.” For additional information visit, www.yardbird.com .
