Political Order and Political Decay (24 page)

This does not mean that the United States was badly governed; for the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, there was little that the national government needed to do beyond running customshouses and post offices, and distributing land. The American economy was agrarian and spread out over a vast territory, localized around isolated farms and villages; there were no significant foreign threats and therefore no need for mass military mobilization. Ideologically as well, nothing in the Lockean inheritance justified looking to the state as the protector of the common good, in the manner of Hegel's bureaucratic universal class.
33

Without pressure to reform, party-managed clientelism developed over time, and reached a peak of sorts in the period just prior to the Civil War. In 1849, President Zachary Taylor replaced 30 percent of all federal officials during his first year in office; Democrat James Buchanan replaced a similar number of officials in 1857 despite the fact that he was succeeding another Democrat, Franklin Pierce.
34
Abraham Lincoln was overwhelmed by patronage requests after his election in 1860; when reelected four years later, he hoped to keep as many officeholders as possible in place because “the bare thought of going through again what I did the first year here, would crush me.”
35
The military itself was open to political appointments, such as that of Dan Sickles, a New York politician who was made brigadier general in 1861, where his poor judgment caused major problems for the Union side at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.
36
The satirist Artemus Ward suggested that the Union Army's retreat at the Battle of Bull Run was caused by a rumor of three vacancies at the New York Custom House.
37
Lincoln complained about the endless stream of office seekers he had to deal with, but he was trapped in a system in which doling out bureaucratic offices was an integral part of building political coalitions.

As in ancient China and early modern Europe, war proved to be a spur for American state building. During the Civil War, the size of the Union Army went from fifteen thousand to well over a million and involved the creation of a gigantic bureaucratic system to supply and move such large numbers of men. The U.S. Capitol building was renovated and its huge dome completed in this period. The Civil War also precipitated a shift in the way Americans thought of themselves: before the war, they would say, “The United States are,” reflecting the country's federal origins, while after it, it became more common to say, “The United States is,” signifying the union that Lincoln had gone to war to save.
38

This moment of state centralization was, however, fleeting. The country quickly returned to its deeply embedded Tudor traditions. The Union Army was demobilized quickly after the war and returned to being a small frontier force dispatched to distant western forts. The executive branch structure responsible for war mobilization was dismantled and the control of government resources returned to the political parties. With Reconstruction and the return of the southern states to the Union, the period of Republican hegemony ended and a two-party system came to dominate politics until the end of the century. All that remained of the wartime state, according to historian Morton Keller, was a series of military metaphors applied to party politics: political campaigns, party standard bearers, rank and file, precinct captains, and the like.
39

The political system that emerged in the 1870s and '80s was in fact a far more highly organized form of clientelism than the antebellum one. Because of the country's rapidly expanding size and growing social complexity, the older forms of face-to-face relationships gave way, at a national level, to a much more highly organized and hierarchical structure by which the parties distributed favors and offices.
40
Lord Bryce, a British observer, noted that “what characterizes [American politicians] as compared with the corresponding class in Europe is that their whole time is more frequently given to political work, that most of them draw an income from politics and the rest hope to do so, that they come largely from the poorer and less cultivated than from the higher ranks of society, and that … many are proficients in the arts of popular oratory, of electioneering, and of party management.”
41
The very term “political machine” suggests the degree of organization that was required to make late nineteenth-century clientelism work.

BOSSES AND CITY POLITICS

American clientelism was most highly developed on a municipal level and survived there for the longest time. Political machines were erected in virtually all the major eastern, midwestern, and southern cities, where they served as mechanisms for mobilizing large numbers of nonelite voters.
42
They were particularly important in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities that saw, toward the end of the century, a huge influx of emigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who had never before voted. The spontaneous emergence of these machines in response to an expanding base of relatively poor voters again suggests that clientelism is an efficient way of energizing this type of population and therefore should be seen as an early form of democratic participation. It differed very much from the type of patron-client relationships that existed in southern Italy in the nineteenth century, where existing elites could use their wealth and social status to organize and dominate large numbers of poor voters. In America, by contrast, clientelism was a way for ambitious but nonelite politicians to become wealthy and increase their social status, while delivering concrete benefits to their supporters. Some early writers on machine politics suggested that there was a cultural or ethnic dimension to American clientelism, since many of the machines recruited voters who were Irish or Italian Catholics, while the reformers tended to be relatively high-status Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
43
But machines also were set up in Lexington, Kentucky, and Kansas City, Missouri, which didn't have significant numbers of recent immigrants or Catholic voters. The real issue was class, since clientelism has a more direct appeal to poorer and less-educated citizens.

Municipal-level political machines were simply modernized and highly organized versions of the Melanesian Big Man and tribal
wantok
, in which an elected leader develops a base of political support by giving out individualized benefits to his supporters.
44
In nineteenth-century America, the scale of organization required even in a relatively small city like Lexington was substantial: successful bosses tried to maintain personal relationships with as many supporters as possible, but they needed to recruit precinct captains and ward heelers as intermediaries to manage recruitment of voters, distribution of resources, and monitoring of voter behavior. It was these individuals who had to have detailed knowledge of their constituents and be able to cater to their needs. The individualized benefits given out could vary from jobs in the post office or city hall to Thanksgiving turkeys to hods of coal. Billy Klair, the boss of Lexington, used his control over the city's police force to selectively enforce anti-alcohol laws during Prohibition.
45

There is no end of colorful characters and stories that can be told about American municipal machine politics.
46
Perhaps the most famous was New York's Tammany Hall, established in 1789 as a charitable organization formally known as the Society of Saint Tammany. In the mid-nineteenth century it was dominated by William Marcy Tweed. Boss Tweed, as he was known, and his Tweed Ring managed to enrich themselves substantially due to their control over public contracting. For example, the New York State legislature authorized a new courthouse in 1858 that was budgeted to cost no more than $250,000. By 1862, the building had not been completed and Tweed authorized an additional $1 million toward its construction. By 1871, the courthouse was still not finished, and total outlays now amounted to $13 million. A special commission was appointed to investigate the project, which was itself controlled by Tweed, and which managed to funnel $14,000 in printing costs for its report to a company owned by Tweed.
47
Similar stories could be told about contemporary India, Brazil, and Nigeria; anyone who thinks this sort of corruption was an invention of contemporary poor countries is unaware of history.

Despite these outrageous instances of corruption, municipal machines like Tammany Hall did play an important positive role in mobilizing otherwise marginalized citizens and allowing them to participate in the political system. This was particularly true of recent immigrants, who were often disdained by existing elites for their religion, habits, or sheer foreignness. Municipal machines took advantage of this fact and in return provided certain key social services—for instance, a ward boss who could interpret for the newcomer at City Hall—that few other institutions in nineteenth-century American society were able to perform.

While the poor gained advantages from the party machine, their long-term interests suffered. Because they were being organized on the basis of the distribution of individual benefits rather than broad programmatic agendas, it was much harder to recruit them into working-class or Socialist parties of the sort that emerged in Britain and Germany, where working-class parties demanded more formal types of redistribution such as universal health care or occupational safety programs. One of the reasons socialism never took hold in the United States is that the Republican and Democratic Parties captured the votes of working-class Americans by offering short-term rewards instead of long-term programmatic policy changes.
48

In chapter 5 I made a distinction between clientelism, which involves a reciprocal exchange of benefits, and more predatory forms of corruption in which public officials simply steal. This is an important difference, but clientelism often evolves into pure corruption because politicians have the power to distribute public resources as they wish; money that could go to clients often ends up in their own pockets. This became a widespread problem in the so-called Gilded Age that began with the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant in 1869, a period characterized by a number of scandals—the Crédit Mobilier affair, the Whiskey Ring, War Secretary Belknap's selling of Indian post traderships, the “Salary Grab” in which Congress voted itself a retroactive pay raise at the end of the session from $5,000 to $7,000 per year.
49
With the growth of industrialization and the vast new concentrations of money that came with it, lobbyists emerged to mediate between private interests and Congress. The railroads in particular paid legislators on both federal and state levels to do their bidding. Several western states were commonly believed to be wholly owned by railroad interests.
50

America in the 1880s had many similarities to contemporary developing countries. It had democratic institutions and competitive elections, but votes were bought with the currency of public office. The quality of government was generally poor, a problem mitigated only by the fact that it wasn't expected to do much in terms of fighting wars or regulating the economy. These conditions changed dramatically as the country began to industrialize in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the United States needed a European-style state, and it slowly began to build one.

 

10

THE END OF THE SPOILS SYSTEM

Why the United States needed a modern state in the late nineteenth century; the Garfield assassination and the genesis of the Pendleton Act; reforming machine politics in American cities; what new social groups made up a reform coalition, and their motives; why strong presidential leadership was important in bringing about change

In the period between the early 1880s and America's entry into World War I, the clientelistic system on which federal employment was based was gradually dismantled, and in New York, Chicago, Boston, and other American cities a new generation of city managers replaced the old party bosses. The foundations were thus laid for a modern state along Weberian lines at both a national and local level. The United States, having invented clientelism, successfully modernized its administrative system.

It took the United States almost two generations to accomplish what the British were able to do in the period from the issuance of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in 1854 to the establishment of a modern civil service in the 1870s. This reflects the different social structure and political values of the two countries, and the fact that the United States was simultaneously more democratic and more suspicious of state power than Britain. It also reflects the greater capacity of the British Westminster system for decisive action than America's system of checks and balances. The United States to the present day has never succeeded in establishing the kind of high-quality state that exists in certain other rich democracies, particularly those coming out of absolutist traditions such as Germany and Sweden. Indeed, as we will see in Part IV of this book, the quality of the American state has decayed substantially since the 1970s, undoing much of this progress.

A LIBERTARIAN PARADISE

In the early 1880s, the United States constituted the kind of small-government society that Ron Paul and other contemporary libertarians hope it will someday become again. The federal government took in less than 2 percent of GDP in taxes, mostly in the form of customs revenues and excise taxes; the work of actual governing was largely done at state and local levels; the United States was on the gold standard, with no Federal Reserve able to create discretionary money; the military was small and involved in frontier security, with no entangling foreign commitments. Presidents were weak and real power lay with Congress and the courts. Although there were no formal term limits, intense competition between the two parties led to high turnover in Congress, ensuring that most members remained amateurs. Private interests were vigorous and expanding, and indeed succeeded in capturing a great deal of Congress through payoffs and patronage.
1