Why Public Service Matters

Public Managers, Public Policy, and Democracy

R. Durant

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137069573
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why Public Service Matters conveys the importance, purpose, and nobility of a career as a civil servant in the United States. It does so, however, with an unflinching eye on the realpolitik that drives public administration in America's "compensatory state" and on the pitfalls of reformers' focus on bureaucratic, rather than democratic, administration. The book links the nation's ability to handle contemporary policy problems with the strategic, tactical, and normative quality of public management. In doing so, it offers newcomers a rare, concise, and accessible overview of the field. Readers will gain an appreciation for the challenges, choices, and opportunities facing public managers as they help advance a sense of common purpose informed by democratic constitutional values in twenty-first century America.

CHAPTER 1

Engaging the Call to Public Service

This is both an exciting and challenging time for you to be thinking about starting, continuing, or returning to a career as a public manager. Our very idea of what public managers in the career civil service do as public servants, how they do it, whom they do it with, and what knowledge, skills, and values they need to be successful has undergone profound change. What has not changed, however, are the core values that citizens in a democracy expect from their public servants, including efficiency, effectiveness, representativeness, responsiveness, accountability, equity, constitutional rights, and due process.¹ The rub is that we are still trying as a field to discern how best to meet the challenges, choices, and opportunities that these changes occasion without jeopardizing those core values of a democratic republic.

Since you are reading this book, you have already either embraced the idea of public service or want to see what it means to embrace such a commitment as a public manager at any level of government in the United States.² Thus, one aim of this book is to help you see the myriad connections between what you will do as a public manager and the ability of the United States to address its most challenging public policy problems in the twenty-first century. A second goal is to help you gain a sense for the exciting challenges, choices, and opportunities that await you as a career civil servant in our democratic republic. A third aim is to give you a realistic sense for the challenges and implications for our democracy of making these adaptations and, thus, to show you why public management today requires the recruitment and retention of persons with unprecedented talent and a special calling to public service. As Peter Drucker writes, “One does not ‘manage’ people. The task is to lead people” (emphasis added).³ Finally, in an era of citizen estrangement from government, this book aims to alert you to the role public managers must play if our commitment to democracy in America is to wax rather than wane in the twenty-first century.

Our journey begins in this chapter with a review of how beliefs about the nature, the skills, and the best way to pursue a calling to public service have evolved since the nation’s founding. Introduced in the process will be a variety of topics, issues, and dynamics that we will cover in greater detail later in this book. You will leave the chapter appreciating how the definition of public service in government agencies has evolved in the United States. Also clear to you will be how our changing definition of who qualifies for public service, what training or education they require, and for what purposes they labor cannot be separated from the socioeconomic, political, and cultural environment of the day. With this as historical context, we will turn to the substance and logic of six major challenges facing public managers today and how these challenges will be front and center for you during your career. We will conclude by previewing the remainder of the book.

So You Want to Help Run a Constitution?

Our review of the evolution of the concept of public service in the United States has to begin with the nation’s unique political culture. Some politicians and pundits today call this uniqueness “American exceptionalism,” and they use the term inaccurately to mean that the United States has a kind of moral superiority over other nations, that it is immune from challenges faced by other nations, or that the nation is predestined for greatness. These are not the meanings attached to it here. Rather, our reference is to a set of values that Americans hold dear—at least rhetorically—and that have been translated into the relatively unique political system you will operate in as a public manager. These values include a preference for limited government, individualism, states’ rights, equality of opportunity, and markets. These—and, most especially, limited government—are reflected in the Madisonian system of separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.⁴ Thus, when thinking about how changes have occurred in the definition of public service, its purposes, who does it, and how one prepares for it, you must think in terms of three pivotal eras that also had to come to terms with this cultural and institutional legacy: after a so-called “era of gentlemen,” these are the patronage state era, the administrative state era, and the networked state era.⁵ In the patronage state, public service jobs were viewed as mundane and, thus, ripe for rewarding campaign supporters. In the administrative state, civil service positions were viewed as too important to leave to patronage and, thus, best filled on a merit basis. In the networked state, the authority for decision making has been diffused to a variety of public, private, and nonprofit organizations but with the government still first among equals and held accountable for results.

Toward the Patronage State: Beyond the Era of Gentlemen

If you were considering a public service career during the founding era of this nation, you might have either been advantaged or disadvantaged by your economic, racial, or gender status in society. Ascendant for the federal government was a belief that only the best and the brightest could discern and administer the affairs of the new nation in order to create a national—rather than state-based—sense of identity. Public service was thus a calling or vocation for “gentlemen,” or as Washington put it, for people of “fit character”—namely, the well-heeled, educated, and connected white male gentry. Politics, however, did play into appointments to the extent that regional representation was deemed prudent for gaining allegiance to the new national government.

No greater exemplar of a public servant exists than Cincinnatus, the reluctant, simple, and virtuous Roman citizen who left home and hearth several times to serve his country before always voluntarily relinquishing power. And what power was envisioned during the presidencies of Federalists George Washington and John Adams! Each embraced the necessity of what Alexander Hamilton called “energy in the executive” in opposition to the fear held by anti-Federalists of the concentration of power in the executive and national government. In state and local governments, in contrast, Americans’ fears of centralized power largely meant neutering the administrative capacities of chief executives, such as governors and mayors. Idolized in American imaginations were New England town meetings where citizens debated and addressed the issues of the day. Yet, here again, the class, gender, and racial biases of the day limited public service to white, property-owning males. In fact, the sense of entitlement held by the landed gentry produced an informal system of incumbents passing on their positions at death to their eldest sons! So, depending on your family tree, the odds of you successfully pursuing a public service career were either flush or minimal.

Launched in reaction to these biases, perceptions of elitism and government excesses by the Federalists in (among other things) the Alien and Sedition Acts during the Adams administration, and related scandals was a more egalitarian (albeit still white male-dominated) and prosaic view of public service. But this move toward what is called the “spoils” or “patronage” system would not be institutionalized until the inauguration of Andrew Jackson in 1829. To be sure, party considerations played a role earlier. Following Adams—who pursued a partisan-focused, upper-class appointment process favoring Federalists—President Thomas Jefferson found his “gentlemen of fit character” almost exclusively among fellow anti-Federalist Republicans.

All this changed, you will learn, when a largely uneducated and poorer “frontier” constituency in the newly settled states west of the Appalachian Mountains catapulted Jackson to the presidency. Reflecting the interests of his political base, Jackson argued that an upper-class-based public service with de facto “property rights” to jobs was not only intolerable in a democracy but also reduced the responsiveness of government to the general public. For Jackson, what your coursework will call “rotation-in-office” was necessary to correct this situation and “democratize” the public service. Put most bluntly by Democratic senator William Marcy at the time, rotation-in-office meant “to the victors of elections go the spoils” of appointing their supporters to government jobs. Out went the “rascals” of the defeated party in government and in came appointees of the victorious.

Jackson argued that “no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.”⁶ Nor was an upper-class bias in staffing these positions necessary, because public service jobs “admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves” for the performance of the roughly 20,000 positions available.⁷ Often, the “admit of being made” phrase was left out of Jackson’s statement by patronage critics. In reality, he justified his position in a fundamental principle of bureaucracy that you will learn in your coursework—the “division of labor”—arguing that rotation would help diminish any negative side effects on government operations: “Labor was to be divided, tasks defined, jobs simplified.”⁸ “In this system, individuals could be placed or replaced [after an election] without upsetting the integrity of the whole.”⁹ Animated by this principle, Jackson removed over 250 persons of the opposite party from office during his two presidential terms, more than all his predecessors combined.

Begun in this fashion, the spoils system accelerated in the ensuing years. This occurred as the Whig Party—staunch opponents of patronage until 1840—discovered the virtues of spoils once its own candidates captured the White House! Under presidents James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln, for example, roughly 53,000 positions were available by the end of the Civil War, while approximately 131,000 positions were available for patronage appointments by the time of President James Garfield’s assassination in 1881.¹⁰

As Theodore Lowi points out, this trivialization of public service produced a “patronage state” bent on promoting a “commercial republic.”¹¹ The latter aggressively promoted economic development through government funding of internal improvements, subsidies, contracts, tariff protections on imported goods, public land disposals, and patents to encourage innovation. If that meant helping one’s friends, allies, and political patrons first to government largesse or jobs in what Daniel Carpenter calls a “clerical state,” what harm was there?¹² So, were you seeking a public service career in the federal government, your allegiance to the party in power and implicit (but, hopefully, not enthusiastic!) tolerance of their mischief would determine your fate.

Nor, however, were patronage jobs limited to the federal government. No scholar has ever afforded a more evocative summary of this era in state and local government than that written by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist William Kennedy. In his novel Roscoe, fictional Albany, New York, party machine leader Felix Conway indoctrinates his son and heir Roscoe in the finery of the city’s real-life, patronage-based machine known as Tammany Hall:

How do you get the money, boy? If you run ’em for office and they win, you charge ‘em a year’s wages. Keep taxes low, but if you raise ’em, call it something else. The city can’t do without vice, so pinch the pimps and milk the madams. Anybody that sells the flesh, tax ’em. If anybody wants city business, thirty percent back to us. Maintain the streets and sewers, but don’t overdo it . . . Keep the cops happy and let ‘em have a piece of the pie. A small piece . . . When in doubt, appoint another judge, and pay him enough so he don’t need to shake down the lawyers . . . Control the district attorney and never let him go; for he controls the grand juries . . . Make friends with millionaires and give ’em what they need. Open an insurance company and make sure anybody doing city business buys a nice policy . . . Give your friends jobs, but at a price, and make new friends every day . . . anybody on our payroll pays us dues, three percent of the yearly salary [what were called “political assessments”], which is nice. But if they’re on that new civil service and won’t pay and you can’t fire ’em, transfer ’em to the dump.¹³

Indeed, this view of “public service” stretched across levels of government. Federal agencies—such as the Agriculture Department, the Interior Department, the Postal Service, and the Treasury Department—became satrapies of state and local political machines and members of Congress throughout the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. With public land, custom house, and other financial corruption scandals rife and attributable to machine politics, however, harbingers of successful proposals for civil service reform came from President Rutherford B. Hayes during the 1870s and after the election of Garfield in 1880.

Hayes appointed Carl Schurz, a reform advocate, to head the Interior Department, where he instituted a merit system for hiring. Garfield was a compromise candidate nominated on the 39th ballot of the Republican Party convention and elected with only the reluctant support of the so-called “Stalwarts” of his party who—like New York state party boss and US senator Roscoe Conkling—supported the spoils system. Upon taking office, he felt that the time consumed in meeting individually with patronage seekers diverted him from governing. From 10:30 am to 1:30 pm each day, he met in the White House with office seekers who one administration official characterized as “beasts at feeding time” and who Garfield said “would take my very brains, flesh, and blood if they could.”¹⁴ Alas, in 1881, it might have been you standing in these lines or in lines at the departments of State or Justice trying to persuade overwhelmed officials of your fealty to the party in power!

After initially trying to compromise with Conkling, and owing his support to civil service reformers known as “half breeds” in his party, Garfield refused to fill the New York Customs House with the senator’s appointees. Indeed, he did so as his vice president—Chester Arthur—who had once been appointed by Conkling to serve as collector of this custom house, worked actively with Stalwarts in their party against his reform efforts! Asked Garfield, “Shall the principal port of entry in which more than 90% of all our customs duties are collected be under the direct control of the Administration or under the local control of a factional Senator?”¹⁵ Calling his bluff and hoping to force Garfield’s hand, Conkling resigned from the Senate, thinking that the New York State Legislature would quickly reinstate him. He was mistaken, and his career ended in humiliation.

Meanwhile, a growing number of civil service reform associations were created at the state and local levels of government, associations that confederated into the National Civil Service Reform League in 1881, the year of Garfield’s assassin...