The Garfield’s Presidency’s Resurgence In National Memory

The President James A. Garfield assassination is back, thanks to the Netflix series Death by Lightning. Garfield’s character foil is Charles Guiteau, who shot Garfield in 1881, four months into his presidency, after failing to get a job in the government. Garfield was sage and concerned with civil service reform; Guiteau was a lunatic who wanted to clamber on the corruption train—as we are remembering events now.

When the government shut down not this past October, but once under President Obama, I wrote a column about the Garfield assassination, about how it still haunted our civic life in the twenty-first century. The chief result of that assassination was the setting up, in the 1880s, of a professional civil service. This institution, the professional civil service, has sailed on for nearly a century and a half now, populating the government with ranks upon ranks of qualified people, often with degrees and paid according to a step-system as sure as any in the corporate world. As I quoted President Obama on government employees, on civil servants:

“The Federal Government is America’s largest employer, with more than two million civilian workers….Today, I wanted to take a moment to tell you what you mean to me—and to our country.

“You persevere, continuing to serve the American people with passion, professionalism, and skill.

We must “keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealistic Americans to the public service that our citizens deserve and that our system of self-government demands.

“Public service is noble. Public service is important. And by choosing public service, you carry on a proud tradition at the heart of some of this country’s greatest and most lasting achievements.”

Prior to Garfield, and his death by lightning, which is to say assassination by an aspiring government employee, virtually all government jobs were filled via the spoils system. Successful electoral candidates rewarded abject, lowlife party loyalists with paying jobs at the Post Office, the Marshal Service, the Custom House.

The Custom House—as I noted last week, this, by name, is the introductory chapter to the preeminent work of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne worked at the Custom House, the place where federal government workers made tariff tax assessments on foreign merchant ships coming into harbor (the tariff was the only federal tax at the time), in Salem, Massachusetts, for a few years before he wrote his novel, as he tells you in this intro. His fellow employees on the job:

“Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between sleep and a snore, and with a lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else, but their own independent exertions.”

“A Custom House officer,” Hawthorne went on in 1850, again in the very supreme entry of American literature, no less than The Scarlet Letter, “can hardly be a praiseworthy or respectable personage,” who “while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support.”

The best thing for such people—and such people were, to be sure, all government workers—Hawthorne said, was for them to be let go with no chance of re-hire. The problem is that whoever gets on the gravy train of “Uncle Sam’s gold,” via a job, endangers the better attributes of one’s nature, one’s soul: “its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to the manly character.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, one worked in a government job to the contempt of the public. We are perhaps unaware of how essential was this contempt, how it played a highly important role in America’s reaching heights of mass prosperity care of the prodigiously productive private sector. Government employment was self-discrediting. There were government employees in the old days, but they could not escape the reputation of being utter losers—and, especially after 1865, but even before, in a society of simply phenomenal opportunity. Therefore, government remained small.

In the 1880s, the United States started to replace self-discrediting public employment with the non-patronage civil service system, which was creditable. A central prompt was the Garfield assassination—an officeholder killed him so let’s reform and make prospective employees take an objective test and thereby be “qualified.”

The civil service exam and the professionalization of government employment encouraged the impression, surely unfounded, that government employment is inherently “noble” as our recent president said. So why not have more of it? Given now (after the post-Garfield civil service reform) that government employment has been “good,” we have gotten more of it—“the federal government is America’s largest employer,” as Obama was keen to tell us, and even as smaller government, not larger, is consistent with mass prosperity. The horrible reputation of government employment, back in the era of Hawthorne’s time, served a useful public purpose prior to the Garfield assassination. It let people follow the better angels of their nature in real work in private business.

No lie: when government employment had a horrible reputation, economic performance at large was fantastic.

Self-discrediting was the secret of the tax system, too. The tariff—the predominant federal tax prior to 1913—was plainly self-discrediting. It advertised itself as a favor-trading mechanism. Rich manufacturers would pay off Congressmen to get a foreign competitor blocked. It was gross. Rich people connected to the government, discredited. Congressman accepting emoluments and bribes, discredited. Therefore, the nation did not want too much of it. The tariff mustered about 2 percent of GDP in revenue—a tenth of what we might get today from our total federal tax system.

Our tax system has an anchor in an income tax, which professes itself as moral and professional. Discredited it is not. Our income tax is moral in that it is progressive, taking more from the moneyed, and it is professional in its administration and its ties to establishments like academic economics. When we had a self-discrediting tax system, emphasizing connections and graft, we had incredible economic growth and countrywide success. Since we have had a tax system with a superior attitude, we have had nowhere near the growth rates of the old days. Indeed today, in a pattern completely unknown before 1913, a consensus is forming that the American Dream for all is kaputt.

Do the math—self-discrediting government, great economy; proud government, sad economy. The link is not obscure. Spending system, discredited—see Hawthorne, in the very pinnacle of American letters. Tax system, discredited—see tariff. Sequence: tiny, government, big mass prosperity, constituting the last best hope of earth and all that from Lincoln. History appears to be clear that small, quite severely limited government is good for prosperity, as big, ambitious government is not.

Beyond Hawthorne, American literature has alighted on the topic of how pathetic government employment can be. Sections of Willa Cather’s Professor’s House (1925), plus Tom Wolfe’s essay on the “flak-catchers” included at the end of his Radical Chic (1970) are first-rank examples. But even Hawthorne lost heart. In his Custom House intro, he told us that his ambitious side urged him to write history, if imaginative, about his town’s past—in other words, to get real and forsake the government job. Great American literature can only set upon government employment as a subject for a brief while, because it is so unbecoming a subject of a great nation and a great people. Garfield’s death by lightning gave us the civil service and in a way a 10X increase in the size of government. Not only ick, but we have lost mass prosperity because of it.