Under the old spoils system, the American government was remade every four years. Incoming presidents would purge more than ten thousand officials from the Post Office alone, sending postmasters and clerks packing to make room for political cronies. This churn lasted well into the twentieth century. As late as the Eisenhower administration, Republicans still had around seventy thousand federal jobs to hand out—nearly twenty times today’s number—yet they complained this was too few, even treating it as proof that patronage had been gutted.
Although the government was built to reward allies, not cultivate expertise, an unremarkable press release from the Taft administration showed that experts could sometimes carve out space within the patronage machine. It announced, in 1903, the appointment of a new head of the Steamboat Inspection Service, one Mr. George Uhler. He had been recommended by a committee of expert marine engineers, and the choice proved a sound one. Uhler went on to hold his post for nearly twenty years, serving under both Republicans and Democrats and even investigating the Titanic disaster. The article was only a single paragraph long, ending with the bland note: “Mr. Uhler knew nothing of the proposition to appoint him until the place was tendered to him. No politicians were consulted in the matter.”
The tension between political influence and expertise still shapes debates today. Critics of the Trump administration’s civil service reforms, for instance, claim that these efforts will politicize the bureaucracy and thus inevitably hollow out its competence. Yet Uhler’s appointment suggests that political influence does not simply crowd out expertise; even during the height of the patronage era, genuine experts could rise to the top. Politicians took it for granted that the Steamboat Inspection Service should be run by an expert, even as they packed the Post Office with thousands of loyalists. The Service seems to have been built in a way that allowed experts to claim it.
