The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (ch. 27, 22 Stat. 403) of United States is a federal law established in 1883 that stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit. The act provided selection of government employees competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. It also made it illegal to fire or demote government employees for political reasons and prohibits soliciting campaign donations on Federal government property. To enforce the merit system and the judicial system, the law also created the United States Civil Service Commission. A crucial result was the shift of the parties to reliance on funding from business, since they could no longer depend on patronage hopefuls.
Started during the Chester A. Arthur administration, the Pendleton Act served as a response to the massive public support of civil service reform that grew following President James Garfield's assassination by Charles Julius Guiteau. Despite his previous support of the patronage system, Arthur, nevertheless, became an ardent supporter of civil service reform as president. The Act was passed into law on January 16, 1883. The Act was sponsored by Senator George H. Pendleton, Democratic Senator of Ohio, and written by Dorman Bridgeman Eaton, a staunch opponent of the patronage system who was later first chairman of the United States Civil Service Commission. However, the law would also prove to be a major political liability for Arthur. The law offended machine politicians within the Republican Party and did not prove to be enough for the party's reformers; hence, Arthur lost popularity within the Republican Party and was unable to win the party's Presidential nomination at the 1884 Republican National Convention.
The law only applied to federal government jobs: not to the state and local jobs that were the basis for political machines. At first, the Pendleton Act only covered very few jobs, as only 10% of the US government's civilian employees had civil service jobs. However, there was a ratchet provision whereby outgoing presidents could lock in their own appointees by converting their jobs to civil service. After a series of party reversals at the presidential level (1884, 1888, 1892, 1896), the result was that most federal jobs were under civil service. One result was more expertise and less politics.
Famous quotes containing the words civil, service, reform and/or act:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.”
—Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke Wellington (1769–1852)
“It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)