Was America’s 21st president responsible for spawning a perpetual class of unaccountable power-wielding bureaucrats? In an article for American Greatness, Thaddeus McCotter took aim at President Chester Arthur with the novel accusation that this obscure former president is the Father of the Deep State. He’s wrong.
As a filmmaker who spent two years studying President Arthur to make the documentary “Dear Mr. President: the Letters of Julia Sand,” I learned how this forgotten man grew from a machine politician into a respectable reformer.
It’s true that President Arthur signed the Pendleton Act in 1883, the signature bill that began America’s journey of civil service reform by implementing new hiring standards for federal workers. McCotter asserts that the Pendleton Act removed federal bureaucrats from public accountability, setting them apart as a powerful administrative state. But this is wrong on several counts.
Before this reform, workers were hired into the federal bureaucracy based on their political connections rather than any level of skill for the job, fomenting public cynicism and allegations of corruption and cronyism. Job security was based solely on continuing loyalty—workers were even required to pay dues, or “assessments,” of up to 7% of their salaries to their patron political party. The reforms in the Pendleton Act required a subset of federal workers to be hired based on their qualifications and banned the kickback assessment payments.
Contrary to McCotter’s suggestion, President Arthur’s motivation for signing the bill into law was not to aid his former cronies, whom he had already politically abandoned. The Pendleton Act protected certain federal workers from political reprisals; however, workers could still be fired for cause, such as poor performance or misconduct.
Though Presidents Cleveland and Harrison would expand its reach, the Pendleton Act was fairly modest in its reforms, as it only applied to 10% of the government workforce. Because the law was not retroactive in its hiring requirements, at best, it provided mild protection to workers already in place—workers whose job security would now be based on performance and skill rather than political affiliation. This could hardly be considered a plan to entrench a bureaucratic political machine.
While Arthur, a Republican, called for civil service reform as early as his first Annual Message in December 1881, legislative action wasn’t taken until Democratic gains were made in the 1882 election. Specifically, a lame-duck Republican-controlled Congress wanted to thwart Democrats from taking credit for reform. So it’s odd that McCotter asserts that Arthur somehow tricked the Democrats into protecting the machine-run bureaucracy. Not only was the bill put forward by Democrats, but it would have been gladly signed by the two prior Republican presidents, both opponents of Arthur’s machine wing of the party. He couldn’t have duped people into supporting a reform they already supported.
The Pendleton Act attacked what was known as the spoils system by setting up a new process for hiring government workers. It did not reorganize the federal workforce into an administrative state guided by the principle of “rule by experts.” Nor did it grant bureaucrats policymaking powers. Such concepts would have been completely foreign to Chester Arthur and all presidents before him.
In order to sleuth out the real “Father of the Deep State,” we need to track down who devised rule-by-expert and imbued them with policymaking powers.
That would be Woodrow Wilson.
While a professor at Princeton University, Wilson published a seminal essay, “The Study of Administration,” in 1887. He envisioned a government where the functions of our three branches blurred into an administrative state structured within the executive branch. Wilson believed this bureaucracy must be run by purported experts and shielded from political interference. As he rationalized in his essay, “Public criticism is, of course, a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.” Wilson also lamented “that flaws in our constitution delayed us” from implementing such administrative structures already, as other nations like Germany had already been doing.
Wilson began the implementation of his vision during his presidency, marking the true birth of the unaccountable administrative state in America. Later presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson would expand on Wilson’s work, and adding the public sector unions that formed over the course of the 20th century made firing federal workers a nearly impossible task. But if our goal is to identify the person who fathered the earliest form of the Deep State, Woodrow Wilson is your man.
Chester Arthur’s motives were quite different from his successors. As vice president, he was thrust into the presidency in the wake of the assassination of President James Garfield. Unprepared for the post and uncertain what direction to take, he found himself emboldened by an earnest young citizen from his home state of New York to reform the roundly criticized and corrupt spoils system that he had once been a part of.
It would be too generous to list Chester Arthur among the top tier of presidents, but his story should serve as an inspiration for future curbing of our bureaucracy. He took a brave stand against a pay-to-play system that undermined the integrity of our government. For that, Arthur deserves a legacy of respect.
Destry Edwards is the director of the award-winning documentary “Dear Mr. President: the Letters of Julia Sand” produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.