Pushback / Looking at the sweep of history, we have gone from a bad situation in early America where the spoils system
of patronage gave the people high-cost, inefficient public services to the fairly good system of largely nonpartisan civil service, and now back to a new sort of spoils system controlled by the public employee unions.
Early on, Moskin documents plans, expressed in Congress, to diminish (eradicate would be too strong a word) the spoils system
, associated with the State Department from its very creation.
The Philippines adopted the practice from the spoils system
in the United States, which has long abandoned it.
Strengths of the text include explanation of the spoils system
and the glossing of patronage, militia, and annexation.
For all the attention Brown's case received, the systemic costs of the spoils system
aren't commonly considered.
The political-administrative separation acted as a check on the corruptive influences of the spoils system
Largely rooted out of the American political atmosphere in the 19th and 20th centuries, the spoils system
rewarded a party's supporters with government jobs if its candidate won an election.
The spoils system
does work in Indian politics but it is pretty much a freelance enterprise with little hold of the parties concerned on the people they pick to shower goodies on.
In the context of nineteenth-century presidents, Summers concludes, Lincoln managed to use the spoils system
"in a masterful way" (40).
The secretaries who focused on budgetary matters at best restrained spending in peacetime but failed to systemically alter the spoils system
used by the services in the wake of the intense budget battle between the Navy and the Air Force in 1948.
The dedication may have also jangled these advocates of the canon because Hawthorne's focus on Pierce's "kindness" valorized an aspect of Jacksonian democracy most opposed to the establishment of authority based on quality: the spoils system
The spoils system
in US government exemplified such characteristics.