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We will not know the extent or the success of President Donald Trump’s purge of the federal bureaucracy for some time. There will be lawsuits to fight some of his firings and delay or derail his effort to shut down departments and agencies.
But it is safe to assume the government that emerges at the end of his last four years in office will be permanently different than the one he inherited. Trump wants the federal government to be more immediately responsive to his political aims, and there have been comparisons to the spoils system put in place by his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson.
It’s an imperfect comparison, as I learned from Daniel Feller, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee, who has written extensively about Jackson and the spoils system of the 19th century. Trump’s purge of the federal government could go even deeper.
Our conversation, edited for clarity, is below. It includes the story of a man named Samuel Swartwout, who swindled the US out of tariff revenue right under his Army buddy President Jackson’s nose.
What is the spoils system?
WOLF: You’ve written extensively about the spoils system. How would you describe it to Americans today?
FELLER: It is a system by which government offices are filled by people whose major qualification is their political service to the president’s party.
How did the spoils system come to be?
WOLF: How did it kind of come about during the Jacksonian era?
FELLER: The rise of the spoils system during and after Jackson’s presidency – it wasn’t all Jackson’s doing – was attendant upon the rise of political partisanship in the United States.
In the years before Jackson, when party conflict had been muted and confused and even, at times, virtually invisible, then there was no reason, no motive, to appoint federal officers on the basis of partisan affiliation.
What makes this partly complicated is the image that we have today of Jackson getting into office and firing everybody and then replacing them with party hacks. That is partly true. It’s not a false image, but it’s not as simple as that.
Jackson did not overtly intend to create a spoils system as so called. What he thought he was doing was cleaning out the federal bureaucracy from people who would become lazy and arrogant and incompetent, and replacing them with better ones.
But it is true that service, not to him personally, but to what Jackson called the “cause of the people,” was one of the qualifications. This certainly provided an opening for people whose main qualification was party service to put themselves in line for jobs. And then the whole thing became institutionalized after Jackson.
It became routine that people like postmasters and customs officers were going to be cleaned out when there was a transfer of administration.
Regarding Samuel Swartwout…
WOLF: Was there a particular spoils system appointee who was particularly bad?
FELLER: There were some really bad ones. Jackson’s worst appointment all around was a man named Samuel Swartwout. I’m not actually sure how you pronounce it. Swartwout had been an old Army buddy of Jackson’s.
Jackson had an incredible sense of loyalty to people who had served with him in the military, and along with that, he could not believe that anyone who had served bravely in combat and shed their blood in their country’s cause could be anything other than scrupulously honest and efficient in civil office.
In 1829, shortly after he was elected, Jackson appointed Swartwout to be customs collector for the Port of New York.
The United States at that time got about 90% of its revenue from tariffs on imported goods.
More than half of that was collected at New York City. So the customs collector of the Port of New York had more than half of the federal government’s revenue passing through his hands. As was discovered afterwards, a lot of it wound up sticking to Swartwout’s hands.
The funny thing about this is Jackson did not say, “I’m appointing Swartwout because he’s a political supporter of mine,” though he was.
Jackson’s new secretary of state was Martin Van Buren, who was from New York state. And Van Buren knew the players in New York very well and actually wrote Jackson and said, “Do not do this.” I’m almost quoting, “I was never surer of anything in my life than that you’re going to be sorry about this.” Van Buren actually orchestrated a letter writing campaign against Swartwout from all of his prominent political friends in New York state, saying, “Don’t appoint this guy.”
Jackson, astonishingly, wrote Van Buren back, and he said, “Well, it may be true that Mr. Swartwout is not wealthy, but an honest man is the noblest work of God.”
Van Buren hadn’t been saying that Swartwout was poor but honest. He was saying he was rich and dishonest, and Jackson just didn’t get it at all.
Swartwout remained as customs collector the Port of New York for all of Jackson’s term as president. When you left the federal government office, then all of your accounts had to be audited, and you had to reconcile your accounts. Swartwout’s accounts came up short more than $1 million, which at that time was an astonishingly large sum of money. Swartwout decided it would be time to take a long, long trip to Europe.
What are the echoes today?
WOLF: It’s impossible to directly apply news events today to what happened with a completely different federal bureaucracy in the 1820s and 30s, but as you read the news, what kinds of echoes and differences do you see?
FELLER: Well, there certainly are echoes. There certainly are some surface level similarities. And we can’t resist noticing those.
I think Donald Trump thinks he’s just like Andrew Jackson, and I can point out some rather startling ways – and really historically brazenly obvious ones – in which he’s not.
But there is this similarity that both Trump and Jackson came into office thinking of themselves as outsiders to the ongoing government establishment and thinking that establishment was hostile to them and likely to be hostile to their policy initiatives. There’s a certain amount, not only of overthrow of personnel, but of personal grievance, resentment, behind it.
Trump himself used the word retribution a whole lot. Jackson did not use the word retribution, but he was certainly seeking retribution. There were not only people he wanted to put in place. They were, more particularly, people he wanted to fire. So there is that similarity.
How is what Trump’s doing different than the spoils system?
WOLF: I’m interested in the differences, because I do think that Trump sees himself as this kind of Jacksonian figure, to the extent that he thinks about it.
FELLER: Trump’s overhaul of the patronage is much more policy driven, or much more policy-grievance driven than Jackson’s was.
When Jackson replaced customs officers, for instance, and when he replaced a whole bunch of district attorneys, he was not signaling any kind of policy differentiation here. He wasn’t doing this in order that the customs be collected differently.
What Jackson complained about, about the people he removed, was that they’d become arrogant through long tenure – they had become indifferent to the needs of the public that they were serving. They had become lazy, and they had used their official position to oppose his campaign, to oppose the voice of the people. You could find some similarities between that and Trump, but Jackson’s response to all this is to put in customs officers who will just go ahead and collect the customs, which is what the previous officers had been doing. With the district attorneys it was the same thing. There wasn’t any idea that by replacing the district attorneys, we’re going to stop prosecuting one whole category of people and start prosecuting another.
So in a way, Trump’s attack on the bureaucracy is much, much deeper. It’s not just a matter of personalities. It’s a matter of – I don’t know if the right word is overall ideology or something else – but it’s an attempt not only to switch some people out and to improve efficiency, but to entirely restructure and in some cases overtly destroy aspects of the federal government.
The other big news the last few days has been the tariffs, and Trump, back during his first term, actually, gave speeches in which he said, I’m just like Andrew Jackson and Andrew Jackson imposed tariffs to protect American workers.
It’s the exact opposite of the truth. The literal, exact opposite of the truth.
Jackson’s view of tariffs
WOLF: What happened with Jackson’s tariffs?
FELLER: A big issue when Jackson was elected president was the so-called protective tariff, which was providing most of the federal government’s revenue. But it also, Southern plantation owners claimed, was skewed so that they had to pay for it in the form of higher prices for imported consumer goods and people who were benefiting from it were northern manufacturers.
He entered office as a very equivocal defender of the protective tariff. He dropped that within two years and instead took the position that the tariff should be reduced to the minimal level necessary to meet the federal government’s basic expenses and no more. And throughout his term, he never advocated increasing a tariff on anything.
What he did advocate more and more forcefully was reducing the tariff and bringing it down to what he called a revenue standard.
‘It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.’
WOLF: I think we can assume that Trump will have a standoff with the Federal Reserve in the near future over interest rates. He has also announced there would be this new United States sovereign wealth fund to take ownership stakes in things like TikTok. This may be another imperfect application of history, but Jackson also fought the Bank of the US. Do you see any kind of, historical notes for what is to come in terms of the Fed or American money?
FELLER: We’re in such a different environment today. Let’s say Trump attacks the Federal Reserve – having attacked the Federal Reserve during his first term also, and there was some talk then about, “Oh, this is just like Andrew Jackson.”
I see no similarity whatsoever.
I wrote a piece published by The Conversation, with the title “Warning of ‘oligarchy,’ Biden channels Andrew Jackson.”
The point of that piece was that if you look at Jackson’s banking policy – in particular his veto of the Bank of the United States in 1832 and then his farewell address – the main thrust of that was Jackson’s feeling that a concentration of wealth, power and influence threatened American democracy; it threatened the political voice of ordinary people; and it threatened Americans’ well-being. Jackson found that locus of concentrated wealth, power and influence in the Bank of the United States, and he had reasons for doing so.
(Former President Joe) Biden found it in what he called an oligarchy – he also called it the tech industrial complex. I like as a historian not to be a partisan, because I think it undercuts my authority as a historian, but it’s hard not to see the echo of Biden’s attack on the technocracy in the fact that Elon Musk in large part seems to be running the country now. Musk is a tech mogul; he’s not a banker.
The Bank of the United States is nothing like the Federal Reserve although it did indeed have a lot of powers of the Federal Reserve and had a lot of the powers of today’s United States Treasury. It was a private bank. It had stockholders. It paid dividends, it made profits, and the people who were running the bank were the stockholders of the bank. This is not like the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is not out to make money for itself. That’s not its job.
WOLF: Sounds a little more like a sovereign wealth fund.
FELLER: Well said. He laid this all out in the bank veto. As Jackson said in that veto, the most famous line in it, “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” That’s his objection to the Bank of the United States. I don’t think anybody’s making that objection to the Federal Reserve.
