Political Order and Political Decay (23 page)

History textbooks traditionally date the rise of the patronage system from the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. By our earlier terminology, however, the U.S. government in the period from 1789 to 1828 was more properly a patronage system, while the one that arose thereafter was a clientelistic one. From the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and the replacement of the Federalists by the Republicans, presidents began using their power of appointment to place their own political allies in positions of power, as British prime ministers did before 1870. Jefferson made seventy-three of ninety-two possible appointments since “continuation of everything in federalist hands was not to be expected”; his successors James Madison and James Monroe did much the same.
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Both the Federalists and Jeffersonians made these appointments out of a fairly narrow range of local notables, with high social status, loyalty, and good breeding as the primary qualifications for office.
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The only Founding Father who showed an interest in strong and capable government was Alexander Hamilton, who laid out the case for “energy in the executive” in Federalist Nos. 70–77. As the first secretary of the treasury, he built up a large bureaucracy within what was at the time the U.S. government's chief administrative arm. But he was strongly opposed by Thomas Jefferson, who articulated America's enduring distrust of bureaucracy and large government in his first Inaugural Address: “We may well doubt whether our organization is too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.” And this was spoken at a time when the whole U.S. government encompassed only about three thousand individuals!

That government was destined to grow quite rapidly to twenty thousand employees by 1831. It still did not, however, constitute a large bureaucracy by European standards, given the size of the country.
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Up until the Civil War, Washington, D.C., remained a small town by the standards of New York and Philadelphia, not to mention London and Paris, with a population of only about sixty-one thousand.
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The federal government was divided into two categories: high-ranking officials including cabinet members and their assistants, overseas ministers, territorial governors, bureau chiefs, and the like; and lower-level clerks, customs officials, postal employees, surveyors, etc.
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While there was an incipient navy, the United States had no need to maintain a large standing army and relied entirely on local militias for security. The government that most Americans dealt with day to day was at a state or local level.

POLITICAL MOBILIZATION AND THE RISE OF PARTIES

It is impossible to understand the rise of clientelism except in the context of the emergence of modern democracy and the appearance of the first mass political parties. The United States was a pioneer in these respects.

Political parties did not exist prior to electoral democracy, unless one counts the mobs of clienteles that Roman politicians could mobilize to rally and intimidate opponents. What preceded them were elite factions of patrons and clients of the sort we saw operating in the British Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Personalistic factions and patronage exist within all authoritarian systems, from the courts of monarchical Europe to the contemporary Chinese Communist Party. It was only the advent of electoral democracy that created incentives to form what we today recognize as modern political parties.
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It is well known that the American Constitution makes no provision for political parties, and that many of the Founding Fathers were hostile to the idea that parties should come to govern the country. James Madison in Federalist No. 10 famously warned about the danger of what he called “faction.” By this he meant precisely the kinds of elite patronage networks that characterized court politics in Europe, which he saw as having led to the downfall of the classical republics in Greece and Rome. George Washington in his Farewell Address warned against “the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party; a conflict that would divide and potentially destroy the new nation,” as did his successor, John Adams, who argued that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” This hostility sprang from the very idea of parties as partial representations of the community whose competition would lead to division and disunity. They hoped instead that the country would be led by public-spirited individuals who would seek only the good of the country as a whole. The Federalist Party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had many of the characteristics of an elite faction rather than a modern party; many historians credit the Jeffersonian Republicans who mobilized a coalition of opposing interests and succeeded in electing Jefferson president as founders of the first real political party in America.
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While the Founding Fathers were remarkably prescient in their design of institutions needed to govern the new democracy, they failed to see the need for a mechanism to mobilize voters and manage mass political participation. Political parties perform a number of critical functions and are now recognized as indispensable to well-functioning democracies: they provide for collective action on the part of like-minded people, they aggregate disparate social interests around a common platform, they provide valuable information to voters by articulating positions and policies of common concern, and they create a stability of expectations in a way that contests between individual politicians cannot.
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Most important is the fact that they are the primary mechanisms by which ordinary citizens are mobilized to participate in competitive democratic politics.
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Political parties thus emerged, unplanned, as a response to the requirements of a democratic political system with a rapidly expanding franchise.

Despite the exclusion of African Americans, women, Native Americans, and propertyless men from voting, America had from the beginning a much wider franchise than any country in Europe. Property qualifications for voting arose out of the old English Whig view that only those who paid taxes (and therefore had some level of property and income) should have a share in government. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, however, America was founded on a deeper principle of equality and self-rule by the common man. In this spirit, many states began to lift property requirements for voting by the 1820s. Elections, which up to that point had been elite-driven affairs, were all of a sudden opened up to a whole new class of voters.

THE JACKSONIAN REVOLUTION

Andrew Jackson came from what was then frontier Tennessee and won military fame by defeating the British at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. He first ran for president in 1824 and won a plurality of both the popular and electoral college votes. But he was denied the presidency, which was decided in the House of Representatives as a result of a deal between the other candidates, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. The electoral college that made this possible had been designed by the Founding Fathers precisely to permit greater elite control over the selection of presidents; Jackson denounced the outcome as a “corrupt bargain” hatched by the eastern aristocracy. Riding a wave of populist anger, and empowered by newly enfranchised voters, he was able to defeat Adams soundly in 1828.

The contrast between Jackson, the plainspoken frontiersman, and the elitist John Quincy Adams was to become an enduring one in American political culture. Adams was a quintessential member of the northeastern elite, a Boston Brahmin who had traveled widely in Europe with his father, John Adams, spoke several languages, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College. Jackson, by contrast, came from a relatively undistinguished backwoods family, had a spotty formal education, and made his reputation largely as a fighter and brawler.
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It was precisely Jackson's nonelite background that made him familiar to and popular with the country's newly expanded electorate. The Adams-Jackson contrast has strong echoes today when comparing the Yale-educated Boston Brahmin John Kerry with the anti-elitist conservative hero Sarah Palin.

Jackson's presidency was the foundation of what Walter Russell Mead has labeled the Jacksonian tradition of populism in American politics that continues up to the present day and finds echoes in groups like the Tea Party that emerged after the 2008 election of Barack Obama.
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This tradition has its roots in the so-called Scotch-Irish settlers who began arriving in North America in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
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They hailed from northern Ireland, the Scottish lowlands, and the parts of northern England bordering on Scotland. These regions were the least economically developed in Britain, and it was indeed their high levels of poverty that drove hundreds of thousands of Scotch-Irish to emigrate. The Scotch-Irish were poor but intensely proud both in Britain and in the United States. The more elite English found this pride irritating since, in the words of historian David Hackett Fischer, they “could not understand what they had to feel proud about.”
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These emigrants from Britain came from what had been an extraordinarily violent region, racked by centuries of fighting between local warlords, and between these warlords and the English. Out of this environment came an intense individualism, as well as a love of guns, which would become the origins of the American gun culture. The Scotch-Irish became pugnacious Indian fighters; Jackson led his Tennessee volunteers in campaigns to drive the Creeks from Georgia and northern Alabama and the Seminoles from Florida.
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They settled in what at the time was the frontier, the mountains of Appalachia extending from western Virginia through the Carolinas into Tennessee and Georgia. They would lead the push westward; Davy Crockett and Sam Houston, heroes of the Alamo, had served under Jackson in the Creek War. The descendants of these Scotch-Irish settlers would go on to populate a band that stretched from the Appalachians through Texas and Oklahoma and on, particularly after the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, into Southern California.

Inevitably, the Scotch-Irish, driven by a strong frontier spirit, would come into conflict with existing American elites, dominated by the New England Puritans and the Quakers who had settled the Delaware Valley. The Adams-Jackson contests of 1824 and 1828 were about breaking the hold of these older elites on American politics and the assertion of a new populist brand of politics.

When Jackson came into office in 1829, he said that since he had won the election, he should decide who was appointed to federal offices, since the earlier patronage distribution of offices had turned officeholding into “a species of property” for the elite.
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In addition, he enunciated a “doctrine of the simplicity of work,” stating that “the duties of all public offices are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.”
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This anti-elitist argument was articulated at a time when the average level of education in the United States did not go much beyond elementary school.
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Jackson's system was one of frequent rotation of officials in office since “no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another,” a practice that created enormous opportunities for placing party loyalists in bureaucratic positions.
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These offices could then be used as a basis for mobilizing political followers in campaigns: Jackson had converted an existing elite patronage system into the beginnings of a mass clientelistic one. (In American history books, it is of course traditional to call this the “patronage” or “spoils” system.)
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The party system that evolved in the United States in the succeeding decades, both at the federal and municipal levels, emerged spontaneously from the political needs of a new democracy. With an expanded franchise, politicians needed a way to get supporters to the polls and to persuade them to demonstrate on their behalf at parades, marches, and rallies. Although programmatic issues such as tariffs or land rights were important to some voters, the promise of a job or a personal favor was a much more effective means of activating a new class of poor and relatively uneducated voters. The fact that this happened in the United States, the first country to experiment with an expanded democratic franchise, suggests that the ensuing clientelism should not be regarded as an aberration or deviation from “normal” democratic practice, but rather as a natural outgrowth of newly implanted democracy in a relatively underdeveloped country. No country, the United States included, ever leaps to a modern political system in a single bound.

A STATE OF COURTS AND PARTIES

The political system that emerged after the Jacksonian revolution became what political scientist Stephen Skowronek has labeled a “state of courts and parties.”
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That is, the two institutions of constraint, the rule of law and accountability, were the most highly developed. What did not exist in nineteenth-century America was a centralized, bureaucratic, and autonomous state of the sort that had been created in Prussia, France, and Britain.

The emerging political parties substituted for the state by exercising a high degree of control over the operations of the government. This can be seen in drawing up budgets, which in European parliamentary systems is most often done in the executive branch but which in nineteenth-century America was exclusively the domain of the parties in Congress. Party control brought “a measure of cohesion to national politics and a measure of standardization to governmental forms and processes … Parties organized governmental institutions internally … routinized administrative procedures with patronage recruitment, spoils rotation, and external controls over the widely scattered post offices, land offices, and customs houses.”
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The parties could play this integrative role only at the expense of developing clear programmatic goals, since the vast coalitions they represented had few common purposes. The courts did not restrict themselves to judicial functions but increasingly defined the boundaries between the responsibilities of the different parts of government, regulated relations between government and citizen, and involved themselves in substantive policy decisions.
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Thus Huntington could argue that the United States divided powers rather than functions. The legislative and judicial branches began to take on functions normally performed by the executive in European political systems.