Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

CHAPTER XIX

ROTATION IN OFFICE; A MISCHIEVOUS BY-PRODUCT OF THE MANHOOD SUFFRAGE DOCTRINE AND ANOTHER FACTOR IN POPULAR MISGOVERNMENT; AND HEREIN OF CIRCUMLOCUTION OFFICE REFORM.

One of the incidents of manhood suffrage is the practice of rotation in office, which may be called a by-product of manhood suffrage and represents a doctrine which is only applicable to machine politics. It is sometimes supposed to mean that a public office is a desirable job at which every man should have his turn; but this arrangement is impossible, since there are not nearly offices enough for that purpose even with replacements once a year, which is the limit of frequency thus far proposed for office shifts; and although the politicians are assiduous in making new laws and creating new officials to enforce these laws; who are to be found registering, recording, inspecting and reporting in every possible direction; though they discourage diligence in office and encourage short hours and idleness in office holders, so as to still leave a show of employment for others; yet with all they can do, there will still be one hundred candidates for each place, and ninety-nine of them disappointed. In practice therefore the bestowal of good offices under the rotation system is necessarily limited; its benefits are usually confined to the machine politicians and to a certain number of favored candidates for machine favor; and the vision of a future turn at the public provender is for most party followers altogether illusory.

The doctrine of rotation in office has acquired a certain favor in political circles, because it serves as an excuse for replacing competent and experienced officials by new and incompetent ones, for enforcing the “spoils” system, and aids in keeping in hand the controllable vote.

It is born of the same civic immorality as the manhood suffrage doctrine, and is an incident or offshoot of the vicious theory that the vote is a natural right or privilege of the citizen. The manhood suffrage claim is that the vote is for the benefit of the voter; the rotation doctrine is that the office exists for the advantage of the office holder. The two claims are related. On the one hand if the vote be regarded as a function to be exercised only by the capable, then it is easy and natural to insist upon proper qualifications for public office holders and for permanency in office for the qualified; on the other hand, if the citizen, as such, has an absolute right to vote, why not to hold office? The analogy between a voter and an office holder is not perfect, but it has often been found in practice sufficient to satisfy the popular mind, unaccustomed to disinterested reflections. You may say that the fact that a man is allowed to vote is no reason why he should be permitted to hold office, and business men or men of property will agree with you, for they are not easily tempted to seek public employment. Not so, however, your voter who has neither property nor settled income, nor business capacity sufficient to acquire either. His education often early tends towards office seeking; he is strongly advised by the newspapers and by twaddlers generally, to take part in the primaries, to become active in politics; and if he does so, he soon learns just how the thing is done. Why may not he then have a turn at the trough as well as another? The politicians encourage this attitude. They are of course strongly in favor of rotation in office as a system which is in every way capable of use to the advantage of machine politics. It accomplishes two things for them; it creates office vacancies, and it dispenses with merit in filling them, leaving them absolutely at the disposition of the machine to reward party services. The politicians therefore are able and willing to persuade the uneducated voters of the virtue of office rotation. Nor could they well openly condemn it. You cannot admit the shiftless and ignorant into the electorate, and then systematically spurn the ideas and claims which are natural and appropriate to them as a class. One of these ideas is, that one who has held any office a couple of years has had a fair share, and ought to be satisfied to give way to someone else; and that if he insists on coming up for re-election no matter how competent he may be, he should be “knifed” as they say. And so we have in this country to a mischievous extent the doctrine and system of rotation in office as one of the troublesome and vicious incidents and results of manhood suffrage.

It is interesting to note the dealings of the political managers with this rotation doctrine, which as already stated is impossible of practical enforcement except in a very limited way. They have no idea of permitting this or any other theory to operate to their personal disadvantage. The leaders must in any case be constantly fed at the public crib; they must in any event be well provided for or the whole system would collapse. In order therefore to keep up the illusion of rotation for all, and a show of fairness, the managers are constantly shifted about from one office to another. In this way there is in fact a continuing series of changes among the office holders; and as a rule no sooner does an incumbent become familiar with his duties than he is displaced; but if he be a faithful party man he is at once put on the list for something else. In fact, all of the class of regular politicians are practically in office for life; the only effect of our frequent elections being that they are constantly shifted from one office to another. If any one will take the trouble to compare the list of office-holders from year to year, he will see that most of the names appear in successive administrations; but that they are moved from place to place with the change in the political fortunes of the different parties. When a candidate is defeated at an election, he is usually, if a good politician, soon afterwards appointed to another office; if necessary, a new office is created for him. If defeated at a city election, he may be appointed to a federal office; if his party loses the federal election, he soon turns up in a state or city office, and so on; and so we have in the career of a politician a sort of ambulatory office incumbency. He may be in turn tax collector, district attorney, secretary or commissioner of this or that, judge or justice, state senator, county clerk, foreign consul and so on. If high up in the party, he will appear in the president’s cabinet, or as a foreign minister or as member of some high salaried commission. Being a politician he is supposed to be eligible for anything and everything, and when at last he dies endowed with honors and with usually a fair amount of cash after a life which has certainly been spent in the service of his country, his newspaper obituary will point out to an edified world how men of humble origin prosper in this free land.

This system has the effect of strengthening party discipline; under it every office holder is much more obligated to the party boss than to the public. True, he apparently owes his election to the people; but usually only apparently; since most of the votes he receives are strictly party votes, representing merely the will and the direction of the boss and the machine. But to the latter the candidate’s obligation is clear, direct and personal; to them he owes his nomination, or at least the suggestion of his name to the primaries which makes his election possible; and if defeated at the polls, his future is still in their friendly hands. The party leaders and managers being thus cared for, and their faithful service forever secured by the distribution among them of all the best public employments, guaranteed by the rotation system developed into a “steady job insurance” scheme, there remain the inferior county, city, town and village offices for apportionment among the smaller fry, and to these minor places a real rotation system is applied to a greater or less extent. It is often understood that a sheriff, alderman, tax collector, police magistrate, town solicitor or attorney, county clerk, town or village official, etc., must be satisfied with one or two terms and then give place to some other more hungry politician. This is the rotation system in practice.

The demoralizing results of such a custom are easy to be seen among us and still more easily imagined. Many public office holders in view of the probable brevity of their tenure, try to hold on at the same time to both private business and public office, with the natural result that both are neglected. Elections are expensive. An official owing last election’s bills finds the next one approaching with marvellous rapidity. From rigid enforcement of laws enemies might result, from whom next year’s candidate need expect neither money nor support, but rather opposition; and after all, one year in office is a paltry reward for a faithful party man after many years of fruitless canvassing. And so comes lax administration, blinking of the eyes and scandal more or less smothered. And in this and other ways the character of the office holder is impaired. The lure of this kind of politics is as demoralizing as that of gambling. Thousands of individuals who uncorrupted by political life might have remained honest and industrious citizens, are spoiled for real steady work by their experience of easy living at the public cost, and become half knavish and altogether poor business men, and sometimes even debauched and intemperate. And if the office holder does his very best it usually happens that just when he has learned his duties and begins to perform them well, his term approaches its finish and a greedy greenhorn takes his place.

Everybody knows this and that it is all wrong. No one would think of proposing such a vicious system for any private business; everyone is aware that employés become more valuable with experience and training, and that the success of a business establishment depends largely upon keeping its old force in service year after year. Indeed, if justice requires rotation in the well-salaried offices, the system should be greatly extended, for after all, these political offices are not the real prize employments; they are found in the high places in banks, banking houses and great industrial and mercantile establishments. But no one suggests than in a democracy there should be rotation of private employment, that a bank cashier has had enough after two years of $20,000 a year and that a mill superintendent should retire after three years at $6,000 and be both replaced, one by a patriotic bank porter and the other by a radical travelling salesman. The service of the people is the only one that professional patriots insist upon breaking down by frequent changes in the working force; by constant disorganization.

The reason for this hard treatment of the public service seems to be that it sounds democratic and alluring to say that public office is a prize open to all. It is remarkable how willing people are to be gulled by catch phrases and sayings, like this of “rotation in office,” “government by the people,” and the like. The first Napoleon caught a lot of gudgeons by the saying that every private soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. American youths are gravely told that each of them has a chance to become president of the United States; another humbug, since about only one man out of every million can possibly reach that office, no matter what the merits or deeds of the others may be. Suppose some one opens Carnegie Hall, New York, free to all comers to hear Caruso sing at a certain day and hour; no one could say that he was excluded by the terms of the invitation; and yet the manager would know perfectly well that only three thousand could possibly be admitted, and that all who came after the first three thousand would better have stayed at home. It would sound to the thoughtless like a more generous and democratic act than the distribution of three thousand free tickets, and yet it would in reality be less so; it would indeed have somewhat the effect of a fraud on all except the first three thousand. Now something like this invitation is what is offered the American people when they are each invited, as they constantly are invited, by the politicians in their universal suffrage constitutions to come in and take a part as public officials in the government of the nation. It is in every way impossible for all of us, or for more than a very few of us to do so; and all they really can and do offer us is just what we would have under a restricted suffrage, namely leave to fight or wheedle our own way to public employment or to political influence in the face of all who are determined to forestall us, the number whereof is by these very constitutions made as numerous as possible. And the so-called democratic invention of rotation in office is just another worthless and fraudulent gift, of leave to each of us, to struggle for a paltry office in competition with every political adventurer in the community; when by the very terms of the gift, the office itself is stripped of all honor and dignity, and has attached to it the certainty that the winner is almost certain to be deprived of the employment as soon as he shall have learned to fill it with ability and credit to himself. Truly Barnum was right when he undertook to build his fortune on the theory that most people love to be humbugged.