202 Politics and the administration
broadly followed his example, although Thomas Jefferson, after taking office
in 1801, ensured that the Republicans were well represented in the federal
service to an extent that his Federalist predecessors had not. In 1829, how-
ever, with the election of Andrew Jackson as a man of the people, a different
principle of making appointments was explicitly recognised. Jackson claimed
the right to reshape the civil service to conform more closely to the composi-
tion of American society, and to remove from office the ‘unfaithful or incom-
petent’. The era of the ‘spoils system’ had begun. The justification of political
appointment to government jobs was that the civil servants must be in sym-
pathy with the policies of the administration. At the same time the triumph
of the spoils system was the result of a grass roots political movement which
aimed at using the government service as a means of maintaining political
power through patronage at state and local level, and then in the federal
government. Although the spoils system is today much reduced in its overall
impact on the structure of government, these two rather mixed motives con-
tinue to play a part in the way in which the system is operated. It is a means
of satisfying the demands of the party faithful, and at the same time assuring
that an important part of the civil service is strongly motivated towards sup-
porting the president, either out of personal loyalty and gratitude, or because
they believe passionately in his policies.
During the mid-nineteenth century the spoils system became firmly es-
tablished and increased in importance. When Lincoln took office in 1861
he made almost a clean sweep of the top-level positions and his successors
generally followed suit. In the post-Civil War period there was a rising tide
of corruption, which became associated with the patronage system, and as
a result there developed a demand for reform of the civil service, and in
particular for the introduction of a ‘merit system’ of appointment and pro-
motion. After a number of abortive measures, including the appointment
of a short-lived Civil Service Commission in 1871, the Civil Service Act of
1883 (the Pendleton Act) was passed into law. This legislation, which forms
the basis of the present civil service system, was essentially an adaptation
of the British system of recruitment and tenure established as a result of
the Northcote–Trevelyan Report and the Macaulay Report of 1854. The
Pendleton Act established a Civil Service Commission, since renamed the
Office of Personnel Management, to conduct competitive examinations for
entry to the service, and gave a degree of security of tenure to civil servants.
However, the Americans did not follow the British precedent altogether. The
American examinations were to be ‘practical in character’, unlike the system
that emerged from the British reports, with its emphasis on languages and
mathematics. The American system provided also for freedom of entry to the
service at all levels. Only certain classes of employees were included in the
new merit system, representing initially only 10 per cent of the total federal
civil servants, the rest remaining under the patronage system.
In that part of the civil service untouched by the reforms, the spoils sys-
tem continued with undiminished vigour, but the gradual classification of