An Assassin's Bullet Killed the Spoils System

On 2 July 1881, a delusional lawyer named Charles Guiteau walked up behind President James Garfield in a Washington train station and shot him twice. Garfield lingered for eighty days; the wound itself was probably survivable, but his doctors managed it with unwashed fingers. Guiteau's grievance, scrawled in letters he had been sending to the White House for months, was that he believed his stump speeches had earned him a consulship in Vienna or Paris. The administration had ignored him.

This was not, in 1881, an absurd expectation. Since Andrew Jackson's presidency, federal jobs had been distributed as political patronage. Customs houses, post offices, and Indian agencies were handed to party loyalists in return for campaign work and a cut of their salary kicked back to party coffers. Each new administration cleared out the previous one's appointees. Office-seekers were a literal physical presence in the White House, lined up in corridors waiting to make their case.

Guiteau's act made the system politically untenable. Reform groups, which had been organizing for a decade, suddenly had a national audience. The Democrats won the House in the 1882 midterms running on civil service reform; the lame-duck Republican Congress, reading the room, passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Chester Arthur — a former New York Customs House appointee, a creature of the spoils system as completely as anyone in Washington — signed it on 16 January 1883.

The initial law covered only about ten percent of federal positions. Each subsequent president was authorized to add more under the merit system. By 1900 it was roughly forty percent; by the Second World War, the great majority. The Vienna consulship Guiteau wanted now requires an exam.