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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
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Chapter 20. Underlying Factors 433
classes (Tories) in America were liquidated.® There was thus no inherited
bureaucracy to start out with. The results were very different from those in
comparable countries—^particularly the Scandinavian countries and Great
Britain—where the bureaucracy was already in existence when the legis-
latures developed. In those countries, democracy arose as the legislatures
fought to widen their electoral basis and to make the bureaucracy into an
effective means of carrying out the popular will. In the United States, on
the other hand, bureaucracy developed in a haphazard manner. Protected
by the Atlantic Ocean, America was also less exposed to international
dangers. Efficient administration of the country was, therefore, not so much
of an immediate necessity. The history of American wars for more than
a century after the Revolutionary War brings out this point beautifully.
The protecting oceans were as important as the frontiers for American
domestic development and, particularly, its system of government, a fact
not adequately developed by historians.®
The attempts of the Hamiltonians to create a stable and independent
administration in America were, as is understandable in this historical
setting, unfortunately associated with the anti-democratic movement. This,
in turn, served to strengthen the anti-bureaucratic tendencies of those men
who felt themselves fighting for the liberal ideas of the American Revolu-
tion. Thomas Jefferson’s election to the Presidency in 1800 was a victory for
the latter forces. Even if he was careful to fill the vacancies as they occurred
with trusted partisans, he did not, however, start out with a wholesale
removal of federal officeholders appointed by the earlier regime. For the
next few decades there were, perhaps, rather favorable conditions for the
growth of an independent federal administration. But when Andrew Jack-
son inaugurated the ^^spoils system,” he broke down this hope completely.
At the same time he furnished a pattern for the state and local governments,
where they were not already ahead of the national government. Underlying
this familiar American pattern were, among others, the idea that there
should be “rotation in office” and the idea that public service did not require
much special training.
Thereafter, through American history until recent decades, there has
been a dominant force constantly pressing to increase the direct control of
the electorate over public affairs. The movement has been self-generating,
since in the great American tradition the cure for the inefficiency and cor-
* The frontier was actually first given its true significance in American history by Frederick
Jackson Turner in his epochal essay, 77/^ Significance of the Frontier in American History
(1893), at a time when the frontier was already disappearing from the national scene. The
ocean, on the other hand, has not yet been made the theme of a comprehensive American
history. A technical development of communications and warfare, becoming apparent in
the present War, has substantially decreased the protection of the oceans. It would not be
surprising if there would soon appear, as a consequence, a review of American history in
this new light just as revolutionizing as the one stressing the frontier as a main viewpoint.
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