Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Patronage Systems:
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 1990s; 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?��
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
