I’m not a fan of political patronage systems myself, but a few years ago my brother Sasha pointed me to this great quote from George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall political boss of the late 1800s and early 1900s; I added it as an epigraph to the patronage cases section of my First Amendment textbook:
The civil service humbug is underminin’ our institutions and if a halt ain’t called soon this great republic will tumble down like a Park-avenue house when they were buildin’ the subway, and on its ruins will rise another Russian government.
This is an awful serious proposition… Let me argue it out for you. I ain’t up on sillygisms, but I can give you some arguments that nobody can answer.
First this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be h— to pay…
Let me tell you that patriotism has been dying out fast for the last twenty years. Before then when a party won, its workers got everything in sight. That was somethin’ to make a man patriotic. Now, when a party wins and its men come forward and ask for their reward, their reply is, ‘Nothin’ doin’, unless you can answer a list of questions about Egyptian mummies and how many years it will take for a bird to wear out a mass of iron as big as the earth by steppin’ on it once in a century?’”
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