Civil Servants, Civil Servant Quotes
This was a best seller when published in China. It is surprising to many that the Chinese censors even allowed it to be published.
When politicians and appointees deviate from this principle, they end up with a much more difficult management problem. One of the complaints of elected politicians often is that the executive is not exercising accountability, but if it is exercised publicly, the morale effect is devastating.
This quotation illustrates another political advancement instituted by Queen Victoria. In this case it was Merit Appointments which were almost unheard of. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was notorious for his crony appointments and the use of appointments to gain political support for himself. (He was good at it and became prime minister 4 years later.0 However, under the Queen’s constant insistence and pressure, merit began to be the major factor in selection and appointments. Ironically, even in the United States, diplomats though often very qualified, are one of the last vestiges of patronage appointments with many ambassadorships going to campaign contributors.
Hobson, like Mark Twain in America, was a major critic of imperialism.
Hayes was a Civil Service reformer. After the presidency of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and subsequent Presidents fired large numbers of public servants—even minor poitions and replaced them with supporters. Hayes stopped that practice and initiated civil servce reform.
That is one view—the one tried the most frequently by Presidents who by their own estimates didn’t get a responsive civil service working to his priorities. Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson had great cooperation from their civil servants; they instead appointed very competent people with strong senses of fairness and leading personnel. Ronald Regan tried both techniques. He used Wilson’s technique in his Education and Justice Department where there was slow-rolling and dissonance when his appointees tended to be ideologues with little or no outstanding professional competence in the fields they supervised. However, his military and State Department bureaucracies was very responsive to his appointees who were excellent leaders.
He was assassinated by the Mafia later that year.
“Assessing” did not mean evaluating. It described a process where each civil servamt was “assessed” an amount of money—based on his salary—that was to be paid to the Political Party that appointed him. The specific corrupt process of “assessing” he described well in {629355}. Roosevelt had worked at the local, state and Federal levels of government. All had tolerated a great deal of this form of corruption. At the time this article was written, the Federal reforms had begun to take effect. Some states and local governments followed, but the average level of corruption being most at the local level, next at the state level, and least at the Federal level, as TR observed then was essentially the same into the 21st century. Government corruption was generally less, but relatively it was worst at the local level and least at the Federal level. At the end of the 20th century for example, every Kentucky County Commissioner except 1 was convicted and jailed for taking bribes and kickbacks from highway and road construction contractors. Corruption at the Federal Level was less.
He was describing his first government experience as a a civil servant of the Department of Agriculture in the New Deal. The political party affiliation is not so critical today for most civil service posts but there are about 10,000 positions where party affiliation is very critical.
