Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

Today — in case you might have heard — is midterm election day across the country.

Once you’ve done your part — vote, make telephone calls, knock on last-minute doors, whatever you’re doing, but most of all, VOTE! — there’s not much to do.

But really: Make sure you vote. All across the country today, elections will be decided by tiny margins. Make sure your voice is counted.

There’s no need to sit down and doomscroll through hot takes and unknown speculation — we’ll know the real results soon enough and the truth is that today no one really knows anything. G. Elliot Morris, the only pollster I bother trying to listen to, wrote in his final forecast, the whole Senate is within the margin of error.

Instead of doomscroll, I wanted to offer you a fun distraction to read, full of hope and optimism that tomorrow can be better than today: A chapter from my new book, AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS, out a week from today, that tells a moment when another major midterm election swung a major reform effort.

Today is a good day to spend some time reading about what history can teach us about the future of our American experiment.

The book’s argument is that America has always been imperfect — but a country that gets better, little by little, decade by decade. America is the story of revolutions, plural. Not one, but many.

In fact, the Founders left almost all of the hard work of realizing the dream of a multiracial, multigender, multifaith, pluralistic democracy was left for others to sort out. The idea the Founders birthed set off centuries of ripples and repercussions that they never could have imagined, as people—including many the Founders didn’t even consider ‘citizens’ at the time, either legally or morally—seized their idea and made it their own.

As I write in the introduction, “The beauty and genius and hope embodied in the Constitution allowed that from almost the moment America was founded, we the citizens began to change the idea of who was included in that vision of the United States. The Constitution was only a beginning. This book, in a way, is about all the people who were left out of that glorious day and how they responded to claim their belonging and write their own beginning.”

The book brings together 25 stories from across our 250-year history to show how the country has gotten “better” — not perfect, but better. Moments when we’ve expanded the circle of who counts as American, moments when we’ve collectively decided that we deserve better as citizens, moments when we’ve raised our sights and expectations and tried to push the country toward being more just, more equal, and more free.

While some of the stories in the book are familiar — Reconstruction, women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights Movement — I devote a half-dozen chapters to what I call “qualitative” rights, moments when we’ve collectively decided that all of us deserve more from our government. Across the book, for instance, I tell the story of the revolution in food safety that follows Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the consumer rights movement birthed by Ralph Nader and Unsafe At Any Speed, and the environmental movement birthed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

And today I wanted to share the chapter about what was one of the greatest revolutions of the 1800s — the idea, very much under attack in our modern era — that the US deserved and required a merit-based nonpartisan civil service and competent government.

Across the book, you’ll learn about a host of mostly unfamiliar people we should rank in American history alongside those original “Founders,” people whose quest for justice and equality earned them the title of a “modern-day Founders.

People like Sarah Winnemucca.

You can preorder the book here — and get an amazing set of coasters, drawn by POLITICO’s cartoonish Matt Wuerker celebrating nine of the modern-day Founders I feature in and across the book.

Without further ado, here is the full text of Chapter 4: “The Merit Revolution and the Right to Honest Government (1883)” of AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS.

So treat yourself to a long read today — you know you’re not going to be doing anything productive today with all that nervous energy!

Wander into Emancipation Hall in the US Capitol today and behold a striking bronze statue of a Native woman in full tribal regalia, the fringe of her dress waving in an imagined prairie breeze. Under one arm, she carries a book; the other arm, raised, holds a flower aloft. The statue is a gift from Nevada—every state gets to send two statues to the Capitol, depicting a resident worth remembering—but the name on its plaque, Sarah Winnemucca, will not register for most Americans.

Among her other achievements as an educator and Native activist, Winnemucca’s writing and lecturing across the 1870s and ’80s helped transform what Americans expected of their own government and its public servants by drawing attention to the corruption of political patronage, which rewarded party loyalists with government jobs and authority regardless of their fitness or skill. Today, our government’s nonpartisan, merit-based civil service is all but taken for granted (or at least it was before the willful destruction of so much of the federal civil service in 2025), but the creation of that system heralded one of the biggest shifts in the nation’s vision for itself and its democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not an easy fight. As one historian wrote in his 1961 examination of the “spoils system,” “Civil service reform was a live political issue in the post–Civil War United States. It made and broke presidents, would-be presidents, and a number of lesser political figures. No other American movement has claimed more intellectual and social leaders.”

The story of the end of the spoils system and the professionalization of the US government in the Gilded Age usually fixates on the assassination of President James Garfield by what history has termed a “disappointed office-seeker.” It’s a far more interesting story to focus instead on Winnemucca, known to her Northern Paiute tribe as Thocmentony—a word that translates to “shellflower,” the flower that she holds aloft in perpetuity at the Capitol. Alongside Sacajawea and Pocahontas, she is one of just three female Native Americans broadly known and remembered before the twentieth century—and the first Native American woman to publish a book, one she hoped would spur the US government to finally reform its system of political patronage. In doing so, she fulfilled the mission she laid out in the opening of her autobiography: “I mean to fight for my down-trodden race while life lasts.”

According to popular history, doling out government jobs to unqualified party hacks was an invention and corruption of Jacksonian America, when— as we traced in an earlier chapter—democracy opened to white male voters of all classes. The drunken masses overran Andrew Jackson’s inauguration and, in turn, our government, creating a system of spoils, graft, and corruption that ultimately enabled the rise of machine politics like Tammany Hall during the Gilded Age. In reality, patronage dated back to the earliest days of the United States and even before, as many administrators in the early colonies were appointed less for their subject expertise than their service to powerful benefactors. “Literary monuments of the revolutionary period, such as the correspondence between John and Samuel Adams and James Warren, are full of references to spoils,” recounts political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich. “There were numerous positions . . . where the word ‘qualification’ never so much as entered into view. What ‘qualified’ men for positions was . . . recognition of past and expectation of future services to the recommender, as well as other less tangible assets, such as family connections, friendship, and the like.” None other than Benjamin Franklin—postmaster general for His Majesty—applied the colonial patronage system to his own favor: He made his son, William, postmaster of Philadelphia, and his brother, John, postmaster of Boston, among other appointments.

George Washington had resisted adopting the same tradition (“He was, of course, a soldier, and as such he had a genuine regard for technically effective performance,” Friedrich notes), but in the years following his presidency, patronage positions became a central part of the rise of political parties in the United States.

Tammany Hall, the powerful New York political machine that had become synonymous with corruption and graft, first organized as a fraternal organization in the 1780s, and one of its leaders, Aaron Burr, mobilized it to help elect Thomas Jefferson in 1800. It highlighted an early tension of Jeffersonian America, wherein Founders like Federalist Alexander Hamilton, who envisioned building long-term governmental institutions for the good of “every honest man,” clashed with others, like Burr, who understood the hunger of voters for more short-term incentive structures. As one historian summarized, “Tammany Hall interested the people, not because it believed in liberty, but because it gave them jobs as street cleaners.” In turn, workers appointed to such patronage positions were expected to support the machine: to campaign, to deliver specific families, populations, and neighborhoods to the voting booths, and to kick back part of their public salary to the political bosses. The jobs turned over with regularity, to spread the wealth and as parties came and went from power.

Jackson is blamed for the spoils system not because he pioneered it, but because his use of patronage was particularly jarring. While his arrival did represent a sea change in early populist politics, patronage exploded largely because his election in 1828 also represented the first time since 1800 that the Executive Mansion (it wasn’t formally the White House until Teddy Roosevelt’s time in office) changed parties, ending the four-presidency streak begun by Jefferson for what was then known as the Democratic-Republican Party. The US government by 1828 had never been larger, providing a bounty of well-entrenched and long-standing government positions to hand out to new party faithful. Jacksonian politics brought a pioneering spirit toward the mechanics and processes of government administration: “The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance,” Jackson promised in his first annual message in 1828.

Jackson pursued patronage boldly and nakedly; in 1831, he nominated Martin Van Buren to be minister to the United Kingdom, a posting that immediately drew complaints and, in turn, led Senator William L. Marcy to offer a defense that would be long quoted in history: “To the victor belong the spoils.” Indeed, from Jackson onward, the growing size of the federal government made the patronage system an expected—and important—part of holding power. “Victors” from the highest office on down to state and local leaders had a host of positions to hand out; the president, in particular, had hundreds of postmasters and customs inspectors scattered in almost every community and center of commerce across the country. When Democrat James K. Polk took office in 1845 after four years of Whig control, he replaced 13,500 of the nation’s 16,000 postmasters. 

As historian Carl Russell Fish wrote, “The presidential election became a quadrennial ‘event,’ with the civil service as the prize.” Congressmen and senators became used to being able to influence presidential appointments in their own districts or states, a quid pro quo for their own loyalty, in turn, to the party. 

Complaints came, if at all, primarily from those who were “out” in any given electoral cycle. Yet the spoils system wore deeply on the presidents themselves, who, leading in an era when there was not much staff around them, found much of their time taken up by office-seekers hoping for a ­ minute to discuss this postal job or that clerkship in some cabinet department.

The US government in 1860 had been completely unprepared for the scale of the war effort ahead. Lincoln struggled with graft, corruption, and the constant onslaught of job seekers across his presidency. “Anyone who had given their support to the Republican Party, donated money to Lincoln’s campaign, or did anything to help Lincoln get elected felt entitled to receive a reward for their efforts. Most came looking for a job or an appointment, and descended upon the White House to collect their payments. The president felt duty-bound to talk to as many of these fortune hunters and job seekers as time allowed,” writes David Alan Johnson. “The interviewing of job seekers was an activity that frequently took up a major part of President Lincoln’s working day, much to his annoyance as well as the annoyance of his advisors.”

Lincoln’s first (and now forgotten) secretary of war, Simon Cameron, was a Pennsylvania political boss who had been rewarded with the cabinet position for his critical machine support at the 1860 convention. He had just ninety employees to oversee the fast-swelling army of seventeen thousand amid the unfolding secession crisis, and one contract after another was handed out to friends and incompetent or outright corrupt suppliers. Less than a year into his tenure, Cameron was demoted to an ambassadorial post to Russia and Lincoln installed Edwin Stanton.

Amid the tumult of the Civil War, a group of Republicans began to agitate for change and Senator Charles Sumner first took up the mantle of reform, trying to induce the US to move toward a “merit system,” introducing legislation that would have implemented competitive hiring exams for federal positions, similar to how Great Britain was professionalizing its government administration at the time, but the political power and tradition behind patronage was too strong. As government professor Sean M. Theriault tallied in 2003, “Sumner’s proposal was the first of 64 civil service reform bills to fail. His bill and each of the civil service reform bills introduced in the succeeding nine congresses failed. In fact, no bill prior to . . . 1882 ever made it successfully through either chamber.”

Indeed, it was in the years following the war, amid Reconstruction, westward expansion, and the building of the railroads, that corruption really took hold. The US government after the Civil War was composed of about 53,000 workers spread across seven cabinet departments—including the post office, political patronage’s prime dumping ground, which was responsible for roughly half of all the federal workforce; the Treasury Department, which had powerful (and lucrative) customs and internal revenue agents across the country; and the Interior Department, which oversaw everything from patents and federal land to Native relations and pensions; as well as four departments with small peacetime staff and thus little political capital to dole out to loyalists: State, War, Navy, and the brand-new Justice Department. “As time went on, ability received less and less emphasis. By 1865 capacity was an unnecessary prerequisite for most offices,” historian Ari Hoogenboom wrote. In the two decades from 1861 to 1881, the number of political appointees in the federal government nearly doubled, increasing 173 percent. This period probably represented the most systemically corrupt period of US government until at least modern times.

At best, the system of patronage delivered to the expanding federal workforce employees who were merely unskilled and unprepared for their jobs, but the reality was that too many were downright corrupt, lazy, or absentee entirely. Patronage might have been tolerable when the federal government was small and most of the nation’s economy local and agrarian, but the increasing urbanization and industrialization of the United States meant that how federal workers performed their jobs now really meant something to business leaders and larger corporations. “At present there is no organization save that of corruption; no system save that of chaos; no test of integrity save that of partisanship; no test of qualification save that of intrigue,” social reformer Julius Bing wrote in 1868. “We have to deal with a wide-spread evil, which defrauds the country in the collection of taxes on a scale so gigantic that the commissioners of revenue, collectors, assessors, and Treasury officers—at least those of them who are honest—bow their heads in shame and despair.”

It became increasingly clear that some level of expertise and skill was necessary to administer government. “Legal, engineering, and scientific tasks presented themselves with which the common man could not conceivably hope to cope, even if he happened to be a genius,” Friedrich wrote. Many civil servants took leaves of absence to work on the campaigns of their patrons, extended hiatuses that became less tolerable as the workloads grew. Plus, as Hoogenboom explained, “Morale was low in a civil service largely composed of misfits employed on a temporary basis.”

A series of scandals exposed a terminal disease at the heart of the government as the explosive war-driven growth of federal spending and the absence of meaningful oversight created almost unlimited opportunities for graft at every level. A commission in 1866 exposed massive fraud and waste at the New York Custom House, the single most lucrative patronage post in the country, collecting the majority of all federal tariff revenue. At a time when the total federal budget was around $500 million a year, the commission estimated that between $12 million and $25 million—i.e., as much as 5 percent of the total revenue—was lost to graft and incompetence at the Custom House. Collectors employed far more workers than operations required, assessed staff a percentage of their salaries for Republican campaign funds, and colluded with importers to undervalue goods. “America was up for grabs,” writes New York political observer Peter Quinn. “What was different in New York City was the size of the trough.”

Multiple such scandals struck President Ulysses S. Grant’s tenure. Well into the mid-twentieth century, historical consensus (largely driven by Lost Cause southern historians) held that Grant was a naïve and passive president who was systematically exploited by unscrupulous men around him—a wartime leader lost at sea in the hard-knock world of politics. More recently, historians have offered a revisionist view of Grant as a talented politician who was a genuine and often courageous champion of Reconstruction and Black civil rights, but who failed to police his own administration as the result of his stubborn personal loyalty. After his election in 1868, he had tried to avoid engaging in the spoils system—refusing in the weeks after winning the presidency to discuss his cabinet choices and surprising Washington with his announcements after his inauguration. (“If announced in advance, efforts would be made to change my determination,” he said.) At first his nominees, including prominent backers of civil service reform, seemed like a new day in government; Rutherford B. Hayes proclaimed in wonder, “His Cabinet looks like a revolution. . . . It is an attempt to put fitness and qualification before what is called claims and ‘political services.’” But over time it became clear that many of his choices, particularly lower-down in government, were unworthy of his trust.

Just before the 1872 election, the New York Sun revealed how the Union Pacific Railroad had inflated the cost of building the Transcontinental Railroad—by almost double the actual amount—and then lavished its executives and Washington politicians with below-market stock shares, bribing dozens of members of Congress as well as both the sitting vice president and Grant’s 1872 running mate. It was a wildly complex scheme that rested on how the railroad had paid Crédit Mobilier, the entity the railroad had set up to fund the construction, reimbursing the entity with undervalued stock and bonds that would surge when the railroad was completed. Estimates found that the railroad executives involved in the Crédit Mobilier scandal had made off with as much as a billion dollars in today’s money.

That same year, the long-running patronage machine of Tammany Hall that ran New York City’s government—overseen by the infamous William “Boss” Tweed—would finally run into trouble. Machine bosses argued that their efforts helped recent immigrants establish a foothold in the new country at a time when New York City was exploding from a sheltered coastal seaport into an urban metropolis. As the powerful Irish American boss Richard Croker would argue, “Think of the hundreds of foreigners dumped into our city. They are too old to go to school. . . . Tammany looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there by which so long a row could have been hoed so quickly or so well?”

Tweed had for years overseen a hugely profitable political machine that traded city jobs and contracts for kickbacks and loyalty. The New York County Courthouse became emblematic of the rot of public corruption. Begun in 1861, the cost of the building’s construction soared to roughly $13 million—twice the cost of the US government’s entire 1867 purchase of Alaska—and the work stretched to nearly two decades. One carpenter who worked on the project for only a month received $360,751 (roughly $5 ­ million today); another furniture contractor was paid $179,729 ($2.5 million) for three tables and forty chairs. Tweed himself owned the Massachusetts marble quarry that the building’s façade came from.

Disgruntled employees leaked details of the fraud to The New York Times: “Andrew J. Garvey is clearly the prince of plasterers,” it wrote on July 24, 1871. “His good fortune surpasses anything recorded in the Arabian Nights. On one day, July 2, 1869, he received for plastering and repairs no less than $45,966.89. . . . He beat that, however, in May, 1870, when he was lucky enough to receive $394,614.57.” Tweed’s exorbitant graft quickly became fodder for the famous political cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly. Tweed fled to Spain to evade criminal charges, but—amazingly—he was recognized from the Nast cartoons at the Spanish border, arrested, brought back to the US on a navy ship, and ultimately died in prison.

A growing section of powerful and well-connected interests found the corruption and incompetence intolerable—while much of the reform movement were what historian Ari Hoogenboom called “professional men,” editors, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and professors, the drive was hardly just comprised of “good government” reformers. To many businessmen and corporate leaders, ending the spoils system represented a critical step for capitalism, shifting power away from the whims, petty grievances, and corruption of politically connected officeholders and creating instead an environment and structure that prioritized the predictable legal rights and claims of corporations. “Civil service reform flourished in an age when the businessman, particularly the industrialist, became the most important element in American society,” writes Hoogenboom.

The most damaging scandal for the Grant administration came with the Whiskey Ring, when in 1875, Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow uncovered and broke open a wide-ranging conspiracy of businesses that had been bribing Treasury agents to avoid excise taxes on liquor using false records and fraudulent tax returns. Bristow ultimately recovered more than $3 million in tax revenue and hundreds of prosecutions continued for years; the scheme extended even into Grant’s inner circle, as his personal secretary, Orville Babcock, was indicted, as was a well-known Union general, John McDonald, whom Grant had made revenue collector in Missouri.

And then there was the Office of Indian Affairs.

*** 

While outrageous events like the Whiskey Ring and Crédit Mobilier grabbed headlines, the federal government’s failure to provide adequate, competent, and politically neutral services and support was experienced on an individual level by people like Sarah Winnemucca every day.

The daughter of Paiute leader Winnemucca and granddaughter of Captain Truckee, who had helped John C. Frémont in his expedition through the West and long after carried with him a letter from Frémont, Sarah Winnemucca was born in modern-day Nevada in the 1840s, just as the first white settler wagon trains headed west. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming. My people were scattered at that time over nearly all the territory now known as Nevada.”

Her upbringing ranged across modern-day Oregon, Nevada, and ­ California—the lands her seminomadic tribe had inhabited for hundreds of years, following the seasons and the game. Paiute bands were historically small, they convened in larger groups only a few times a year around organized hunts, and fiercely protected their place in the regional pecking order that few white settlers understood. (“Few Indians of Sarah’s day conceived of Indianness in the all-embracing terms of a common cause,” her biographer Sally Zanjani writes.) Their ancestral land was mostly harsh desert; the tribe’s traditional greeting upon passing another on the trail was “uduta hada”—“it’s hot.” Winnemucca’s life spanned a time of enormous and often violent disorientation and dislocation as the military, territorial governments, and white settlers forced Native tribes out into new unfamiliar lands. As Zanjani writes, Winnemucca “faced a white world from a shrinking Indian outpost” and recognized that she would need new and different skills to help her family and tribe succeed and survive.

She had learned English and, with her sister, had briefly attended a convent school in San Jose, California. While the Civil War unfolded in the East, the Paiutes faced their own conflict with settlers and soldiers in Nevada. The tribe was confined by the government to Pyramid Lake Reservation, where, in theory, they were expected to embrace agriculture—despite the harsh desert landscape and the lack of any training or assistance in farming. Many of the tribe starved. To earn money, Winnemucca and members of her family toured San Francisco, performing onstage as a “Paiute Royal Family,” playacting stereo­types like “Taking a Scalp” and “War Council” to entertain theatergoers.

In 1871, at twenty-seven, she’d started working as an interpreter for the Office of Indian Affairs—which, if it wasn’t the most corrupt corner of the government, certainly appeared in the top tier. Particularly after the Civil War, it became one of the great patronage troughs of the federal government. It’s hard to think of a better recipe for corruption and official abuse of power: Agents were political appointees, paid modest salaries to administer reservations worth unfathomable (and nigh-unknowable) amounts of money in supplies, rations, leases, and annuity payments, with almost no meaningful oversight, managing a captive population with effectively zero political agency in the US system—unable to vote, sue, or testify in most courts.

Around Christmas 1878, after already having been forced from their traditional territory in 1876 to the Malheur Reservation in western Oregon, the federal government forced Winnemucca’s tribe north again, this time to Yakama, a brutal 350-mile journey in the middle of winter. “There was no wood, and the snow was waist-deep, and many died off just as cattle or horses do after travelling so long in the cold,” Winnemucca wrote. This pain spurred an intense period of advocacy that would remake her life. In November 1879, she began a lecture series in San Francisco that her biographer calls perhaps “one of the first sustained efforts by an Indian leader to win hearts and minds and to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear on the national government.” Her captivating lectures, mixing the history of the Paiutes with pleas for justice for her people and tales of the corruption of Indian agents, were a huge hit—running for a month and covered in the front page of San Francisco newspapers. As one reporter described them, “San Francisco was treated to the most novel entertainment it has ever known, last evening, in the shape of the address by Sarah, daughter of Chief Winnemucca.”

While lecturing, she sent petitions to Washington, pleading the case of the Paiutes, and was subsequently invited to meet with Interior Secretary Carl Schurz. She departed for Washington in mid-January 1880 and upon arrival in the capital was promptly vaccinated for smallpox. She met twice with Schurz, who had taken office as a firm backer of civil service reform. “I have come to plead for my poor people, who are dying off with broken hearts, because they are separated from their children and husbands and wives and sons,” she told his office.

She won from him a promise that her tribe could return to its previous reservation, at Malheur, Oregon. She met, too, with President Hayes—she had long wondered about the nation’s chief executive, recalling, “I want to know whether he is made of wood or rock, for I cannot for once think that he can be a human being.” Schurz interceded to stop her from lecturing while in Washington, or continuing on to lecture in other eastern cities, and— thinking her wishes had been fulfilled by the government—Winnemucca returned west. There, the plans to return her tribe to Oregon fell apart: “promises which, like the wind, were heard no more,” she wrote.

In her lectures and writing, she outlined the day-to-day petty corruption of the Indian agents charged by the government with “helping” her people, as well as the injustice of the larger system and treatment of Native tribes across the country. She named specific corrupt agents and detailed their methods, exposing the tactics so many used to line their own pockets at the expense of the tribes: inflating census rolls to draw extra rations and selling the surplus to white settlers, leasing reservation grazing land to ranchers for personal kickbacks, distributing rotted goods and foods, withholding annuity goods until desperate families signed receipts for items they never received, and using the threat of withheld rations to extract labor, sexual favors, or silence. She accused agents of conspiring with freight contractors and beef suppliers in elaborate skimming operations, and she described the forced 1879 winter march of the Paiutes to the Yakama Reservation. As she explained, all of these actions were simultaneously both the individual fault of small, cruel men given power they didn’t deserve, but also the entirely predictable and foreseeable outcome of a system that rewarded political loyalty over competence and looked the other way at theft and graft. As one literary scholar wrote, “Winnemucca was so good at adapting Paiute oral conventions to the uses of the pen and to the entertainment and persuasion of white audiences.”

The agents she named struck back through the press and official channels to Washington—smearing her as a gambler, drunkard, prostitute, and general troublemaker—and the smears stuck well enough that her reputation took a century to recover. But the record she compiled across the 1870s and ’80s in her lectures, her book, her testimony, meetings with officials, and her ­ unrelenting correspondence became one of the most damning primary sources we possess on the corrupt experience and moral vacuum of the ­ reservation era, and it helped seed the reform agitation that slowly, haltingly, forced Congress to confront the lived reality of political patronage far from the halls of power.

***

As Winnemucca raised alarms across the country, Washington itself was rocked in July 1881 when President Garfield was shot by a disgruntled, mentally ill office-seeker. The Republican Garfield had taken office just months earlier, part of a compromise ticket by the party paralyzed by division over civil service reform. Republicans had fractured into two creatively named factions: the Half-Breeds, led by Maine senator James G. Blaine, who supported reform, and the Stalwarts, led by New York power broker Roscoe Conkling. Amid a heated convention, Half-Breed Garfield had been nominated as president alongside a Stalwart for vice president: Chester A. Arthur, a little-respected and corrupt Conkling crony. A Vermonter-turned-New York lawyer, Arthur had long been one of the key figures of Conkling’s political organization, and had actually been fired from his post as Collector of the Port of New York by President Rutherford Hayes amid an effort to reform the patronage system. 

As Garfield lay dying—eventually he succumbed not to the gunshot wound but to the roiling infections brought on by aggressive attempts to “treat” him in an era before hygienic medical practices—reformers convened with new urgency. They established the National Civil Service Reform League and launched a massive public pressure campaign. The new efforts connected with a horrified nation; as one historian wrote, “Garfield’s assassination gave reformers a simple, emotion-packed illustration which the previously uninterested masses could easily understand. The spoils system equaled murder.” The irony, however, was that Garfield’s death in September delivered one of the ultimate beneficiaries of the spoils system, Vice President Chester Arthur, to the highest office.

In a surprising reversal, Arthur asked for civil service reform in his first message to Congress, on December 6, 1881, saying, “an appalling calamity has befallen the American people,” and that civil service reform now represented a “subject . . . of grave importance.” He devoted more than 1,600 words of his address to the question, dissecting the English system of public service many hoped to model, and embracing what he argued were the four tenets of a merit system that “are doubtless shared by all intelligent and patriotic citizens”: “Original appointments should be based upon ascertained fitness. The tenure of office should be stable. Positions of responsibility should, so far as practicable, be filled by the promotion of worthy and efficient officers. The investigation of all complaints and the punishment of all official misconduct should be prompt and thorough.”

Congress remained obstinate. For a year a major reform bill by Ohio senator George Pendleton, again, went nowhere. Only once Democrats seized control of the House in the 1882 midterm elections, aft er making reform a central issue in the campaign, did Republicans act. Returning to the lame-duck Congress, the Republican leadership realized that it was politically advantageous to them (and their patronage officeholders) to craft and pass the civil service reform before Democrats took over. In the end, where good governance, scandals, and even assassination had failed, basic political self-interest took over—if someone was going to make new rules, the Republican members of Congress realized, it was better that they did it themselves. Less than a week aft er reconvening, Pendleton’s bill was ready for the floor; two weeks later, it passed the Senate, and took just another week to clear the House. Arthur signed the bill on January 16, 1883.

As political scientist Harrison Cook Thomas concludes, “The passage of the civil service reform law is an excellent example of a reform forced on politicians against their will by the pressure of public opinion aroused by a few earnest advocates.”

The Pendleton Act rewrote the basics of government administration— prohibiting mandatory campaign contributions and requiring exams for hiring, among other steps. Taken as a whole, as political scientist Stephen Skowronek argued, the Pendleton Act “amounted to nothing less than [a] recasting [of ] the foundations of national institutional power.”

***

It was a rare example of a bill that “divid[ed] the public’s preferences from the politicians’ interests,” Theriault writes, and makes clear how the Founders’ decision to force House members to face reelection every two years exerted such enormous and successful pressure on them to act against self-interest. The American public would remain vital to the protection and security of American democracy.

Arthur—again to the surprise of almost everyone, perhaps even himself—forcefully implemented the new reforms. Over the years that followed, in Grover Cleveland’s administration, the number of civil service positions protected by the merit system jumped to nearly 40 percent and, with time, rose steadily to nearly 90 percent. Many subsequent reforms were necessary to realize the underlying goal and revolution of a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service, but the Pendleton Act had set the United States on a different course—a recognition that the American people deserved competent and noncorrupt government administration; faithful operations that centered the good of the country, not a party; and a bureaucracy that was powered by talent and ideas, not loyalty and patronage.

Winnemucca never stopped pushing for systemic reform and a better life for her people. Incensed by the Hayes administration’s broken promises, she began a renewed national lecture effort. Across 1883 and 1884, Winnemucca lectured over three hundred times, up and down the East Coast, often in churches, speaking about the reality of her people and the crimes the government was committing against them; she appeared before crowds in beaded buckskin, wowing audiences who came in part for the exotic spectacle and left instead with a stinging civics lesson. After months of writing furiously in Boston (or likely more accurately, dictating furiously), where she was hosted by the famous Peabody sisters—noted educators and leading Transcendentalists Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann, widow of Horace Mann—Winnemucca published a memoir, Life Among the Piutes, in the spring of 1883, just months after the passage of the Pendleton Act. It was not, as Mann claimed, the first book published by an American Indian—Winnemucca’s biographer calculated that it was in fact the fifteenth to appear in the United States—but it was the first by a Native American woman and the first by any Native American west of the Rockies. She appeared before Congress in April 1884, testifying about her people’s mistreatment.

Late in her short life—she died in her forties, in 1891—she founded the Peabody Institute, named after the sister reformers who had helped her in Boston. The school was her attempt to combat the other great wrong of the government’s attack on tribal nations—the forced schooling and removal of children from reservations, a fight that would continue for another century.

Thanks for reading — I hope you enjoyed this preview of AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS.

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GMG

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