Word: spoilsmen
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John Bricker qualifies under Rule 5: as Governor he has been a success. By contrast with his predecessor, Tree Surgeon Martin Davey, he has been spectacularly able. Natty, spatty Martin Davey left Ohio nearly bankrupt, with a $40,000,000 deficit and payrolls loaded with spoilsmen...
Bricker took office in 1939. He fired 3,000 Davey employes, cut the state payroll by $3,000,000, smashed the "legal rackets" that Davey's spoilsmen had enjoyed. He made good appointments. He became known, with reason, as Honest John Bricker. Within two years, he turned Ohio's $40,000,000 deficit into a $25,000,000 surplus...
...show imagination or initiative. Theirs is to get to work at 9 a.m. and quit at 4:30 p.m., like automatons, and to draw their pay until death parts them from the payroll. They are not inspiring Government servants-but they are a lot better than unfit spoilsmen who fill Government offices with ward heelers and live by political preferment...
...year and a half ago Bob Ramspeck went up against the spoilsmen-masters of legislative sabotage. He had drafted a bill empowering the President to cover into the civil service by examinations some 200,000 job holders in 26 Federal agencies; to extend departmental Washington pay scales to the field service. This was something like combined atheism and blasphemy at a religious revival. The spoilsmen got busy at killing the bill. They gave it the works: delay, amendments that subverted its whole purpose, points of order, objections, pigeonholings, pressure. Ramspeck resurrected the measure, answered the lies, used a pulmotor...
Fortnight ago, the long fight ended in fireworks on the House floor. Gentle Bob Ramspeck, victory in sight, got tough. He took the floor for 18 explosive minutes, with his Georgia drawl grown corrosive, laid about him with two years' pent-up wrath. When he was through, spoilsmen's bodies were figuratively heaped around him. In a daze the House passed the bill, 206-to-139. With Mr. Ramspeck to the White House last week must have marched the ghosts of all the Presidents who have been harassed to desperation by appointments; President James A. Garfield, slain...