Herman Melville Quotes
All experience teaches that, whenever there is a great national establishment, employing large numbers of officials, the public must be reconciled to support many incompetent men; for such is the favoritism and nepotism always prevailing in the purlieus of these establishments, that some incompetent persons are always admitted, to the exclusion of many of the worthy.
Gallatin was complaining about requirements of Congress, with which he and Madison disagreed but were not powerful enough to stop.
Johnson, after replacing Lincoln, started removing Lincoln appointees, particularly those who were aggressive reconstructionists and replacing them with others who generally were less aggressive in protecting Negro rights. “Going into the field” was the code word of the time for being in combat in the Civil War. He tried to label the civilian Lincoln appointees negatively, justifying their replacement. At the time there was no Civil Service system so even relatively minor officials were replaced. He was impeached by the house and retained his office by a single vote although the majority of the Senate voted to convict him.
The George W. Bush administration, violated the Civil Service Law and the traditions of the Justice Department by making hiring and assignment decisions on the basis of political ideology and participation. Making the situation worse, the political people who were put in senior positions of authority were often not very well qualified and far less so than the people they ended up supervising and outranking. The inspector general of the Justice Department, after being stonewalled, finally uncovered the mess and Monica Goodling, one of the worst offenders, was barred from ever working for the Justice Department again.
The George W. Bush administration was a throwback to an earlier era where such a spoils system was operational. Reforms had almost eliminated this type of contractor political favoritism but a culture of political corruption had developed in Congress and the Executive branch in the early 21st century that was more reminiscent of a more than a hundred years earlier. See {589738} for one of the examples that triggered the editorial.
2nd Baronet Peel. He was then the Chief Secretary of Ireland and only 26 years of age. Patronage jobs, cronyism, and corruption was then extreme in Irish politics.
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851), Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia, and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the centennial of his birth in 1919 was the starting point of a Melville revival and Moby-Dick grew to be considered one of the great American novels.
