This Shutdown Season, The President Garfield Assassination Still Haunts Us

The great government shutdown of 2013 sure has had its moments. Veterans calling for the President to “tear down this wall” jerry-built to close the World War II memorial; Representatives in Congress pleading that they need their biweekly paychecks (where have you gone, property qualifications for office!); the farce of the Obamacare rollout.

But perhaps the saddest moment of the whole thing came the moment it happened, when the President announced the shutdown to federal employees with these extended words:

“The Federal Government is America’s largest employer, with more than 2 million civilian workers….Today, I wanted to take a moment to tell you what you mean to me—and to our country.

“That begins by saying thank you for the work you do every day—work that is vitally important to…American families’ economic security….You guard our borders and protect our civil rights. You help small businesses expand and gain new footholds in overseas markets….

“You do all this in a political climate that, too often in recent years, has treated you like a punching bag. You have endured three years of a Federal pay freeze, harmful sequester cuts, and now, a shutdown of our Government. And yet, you persevere, continuing to serve the American people with passion, professionalism, and skill.

“None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to 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.”

These are some pretty major whoppers, all this about how great and good is federal employment. For in reality, federal employment has been rather our undoing for quite some time now.

Over the first hundred years of the Republic, until after the civil war, federal employment was the province of the lazy and the unprincipled. This is not a tendentious statement. Everybody who studies the subject comes to this conclusion. In fact, at the time, it was the national consensus.

The federal government was small back then, from the late 18^th to the late 19^th centuries, employing the majority of its people in the post office and in customs. Both of these operations, let alone the other petty agencies run by the Feds, were notorious for attracting employees whose work ethic was wanting, who wanted to skim off the top, or who were looking to press political influence. In the context of a private sector growing at amazing rates the whole while, the attraction of federal employment among normal folk was nil.

Federal employment was a national embarrassment, in a word, but a contained one. Federal spending (in peacetime) rarely breached 2% of GDP (compared to today’s 22%), and the vast incompetence in places like tax and tariff collection kept a nice lid on tax receipts.

In the years after the civil war, however, the venality of the federal bureaucracy got especially pronounced, probably owing to the lucrative handouts the Union army had made during the war. Officeholders, including each president beginning with Ulysses S. Grant, called for reform in the ways of federal employment.

These calls got nowhere until a shocking incident occurred. In 1881, several months into his presidency, President James S. Garfield was shot and killed by a man named Charles Guiteau. Guiteau was angry that he hadn’t been given a federal job even though he had plumped for Garfield during the 1880 campaign.

After Garfield died, the president became none other than a former federal employee, indeed one who had become greatly enriched from kickbacks from the underlings he had hired. This was Garfield’s vice-president, Chester A. Arthur, who had made his name in life as the Port of New York’s customs collector.

It became unbearable for the nation to see both the president shot on account of office-seeking and to have such a blatant beneficiary of graft replace him in office. So as a sort of memorial to the slain Garfield, a “civil service” bill made it through Congress. Arthur signed it, surely because he wanted to blunt the impression that he was a master of venality.

That law, the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, was the germ of the big-government state. Under its precepts, and those of laws and directives following, federal employment became “professionalized.”

What we have seen, slowly at first in the 1880s, but accelerating mightily in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, is a justification for federal employment that we never had had before: namely, that federal employees are productive, even necessary.

In the first half of American history, federal employment soaked up the underside of the workforce and stayed small as its obtrusiveness was controlled. In the second half of American history, emboldened by a claim of professional credibility, federal employment grew and grew.

Certainly the obtrusiveness of federal employment has also expanded mightily. The regulations listed in the mammoth federal register, and the sixth of the national economy taken up by these employees, point to this fact. But can the same be said for American prosperity?

The golden era of American economic growth was the first 125 years of the Republic. Government statistics didn’t exist then—government workers concocting them at the time was unthinkable—but today, private-sector reconstructions show a steady 4% growth rate in the national economy over this period. Interestingly, the biggest short span of growth ever in American history was the four years prior to the Pendleton Act, 1879-1883, when growth was 40%, or more than twice the growth we have seen in the entire 21^st century.

Over the last 100 years, since 1913, we have grown at 3.2% per year. But so much of that lower rate of growth itself has been gobbled up by government with its professional employees.

It is perfectly reasonable to propose that had we never thought to qualify and laud federal employees as professional, government would have stayed contained, growth would have been higher, and the American people would have retained a greater portion of that growth for their own enjoyment, edification, and betterment. Today the president says that we often treat federal employees as a “punching bag.” We used to, and the results justified it.

If we ever got the heart again to call government employment for what it is, we would observe that the private sector can be very good at regulating itself—far better than the feds are at that task. But it takes real drive, clarity of mind, and selfless ambition to opt for private-sector solutions in lieu of the pretend government ones, especially in the current environment. Public choice economics, and its brethren Bloomington School, have been driving home this argument for years.

Garfield’s assassination is an obscure footnote in American history in all the recountings. Yet the push it gave to the enormous expansion of the federal bureaucracy—the signal event of our times—makes it one of the central junctures of this nation’s past.

The article was originally published in Forbes.