Herbert Hoover Quotes

When you buy a Presidential candidate, you buy his party and you buy 20,000 appointees you never heard of.

Can you let me know what positions you have at your disposal with which to reward deserving Democrats?

'Favoritism' is always a factor, and pressure always build for the appointment of friends of influential supporters of the President, or for the nominees of powerful Member of Congress from the incoming President's party.

The success of any executive measure must now be bought by the use of political patronage in influencing the action of legislators.

No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it. He will make one man ungrateful, and a hundred men his enemies, for every office he can bestow.

Patronage can result in the entrenchment of one or a few [political] parties to the exclusion of others.

A President cannot call men from all parts of the country during the time between his nomination and his election, seek their advice, their counsel, their service, their cooperation in his personal behalf and in behalf of the party ... and also tell them in the same breath, to see the Secretary of War, the Attorney General and the Postmaster General about a presidential nomination.

I favor putting the responsibility for the dispensing of patronage squarely on the organizations [parties]. Let the organizations be held strictly accountable for the endorsements. After the appointment is made the appointee ought to fit the job, so that the appointing power can rest assured that the work entrusted to him will be done right.

Lincoln left the bulk of the nominations for presidential as well as for subordinate offices to his political friends and advisors. The military forces as well as the civilian establishment were exploited freely, and political generals were notoriously numerous. With more offices at his disposal than any president up to that time, … Lincoln appears to have used — or permitted the use of — the appointing power at his command as deliberately as they could have been used for practical, and usually partisan, political purposes.

Even a President like Mr. McKinley, who has more personal friends than any other man in his party, cannot know who should fill every office to which he must make an appointment, even if he were disposed, as President McKinley was not, to ignore any of the party leaders. But President McKinley has held to one rule throughout his dealings with the party leaders in making appointments, and that is that he must have a suitable man for every vacancy. When a suitable man was not presented, the party leader would be given, politely but positively, the alternative of endorsing a man that the President could find without his assistance.

Major parties have lived more for patronage than principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interest to remain there.

A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

Every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions. But normally those people become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce.

The police in Punjab has been politicised; it has become a wing of the Akali Dal.

The American people do not want ambassadorships or any other position handed out to save a party money.

All the anxious politicians of his party have been looking upon him as certainty, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices land offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.

There can be no complete and permanent reform of the civil service until public opinion emancipates congressmen from all control and influence over government patronage ... No proper legislation is to be expected as long as members of Congress are engaged in procuring offices for their constituents

[Martin] Van Buren says he considers it as a misfortune when any office to be filled by him becomes vacant, and thinks patronage rather a burden than a benefit.

Throughout most of Chicago's history, the Civil Service Commission has been enmeshed in partisan politics. Thousands of city employees were given temporary appointments and kept in this status, year after year, in order to keep them loyal partisan political workers.

Take from the United States the appointment of postmasters and let the towns elect them, and you deprive the Federal Government of half a million defenders.

Whenever I form a ministry, the Carleton Club was like the Zoological Gardens at feeding time.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

What we called the Civil Service was, in the main, merely a mass of Republican political appointees frozen into office by act of Congress.

The need for this amendment grows directly out of the unfortunate experience we had in this country in 1940 and again in 1944 when a President (FDR) who had entrenched himself in power by use of patronage and the public purse refused to vacate the office at the conclusion of 2 terms, but used the great powers of the Presidency to perpetuate himself in office.

Every President does it. It goes back to George Washington. I can’t say that past Administrations have asked the same questions, but the end result is the same—you put people on boards that you want.