Spoilsmen Foiled

Abraham Lincoln once remarked that he found it easier to run the Civil War than to satisfy his political followers' ravening for postmasterships. Last summer, in a move shrewdly timed to deflate Republican campaign attacks on Farleyism, Franklin Roosevelt put forward a solution to his great predecessor's problem. By Executive Order, in Congress' absence, he snatched 13.730 first, second and third class postmasterships out of the spoils trough, providing that they should hereafter be filled by: 1) postmasters already in office, after noncompetitive civil service examinations; 2) postal employes with civil service ratings, also after noncompetitive examinations; 3) applicants scoring highest in open competitive examinations (TIME, Aug. 3).

"What's wrong with the spoils system?" bawled Oklahoma's Jack Nichols last week when a bill to make the main features of the Executive Order the permanent law of the land came up in the House for debate. "America has grown great on spoils," declared Representative Nichols. "I can do a better job of picking the postmasters for my district than any Civil Service Commissioner."

Republicans, who wailed that the Roosevelt reform would freeze incumbent Democrats into their jobs for good, joined Democrats who felt as Oklahoma's Nichols did about losing their patronage. Defying the President, who had asked for the bill as first step in his great program of reorganization (TIME, Jan. 25), the rebellious bloc engineered amendments which emasculated it. As though to symbolize the anonymous standing votes by which this deed was accomplished, lights suddenly winked out, plunging the House into darkness. When light was restored and Administration leaders had forced a roll-call vote, the timid rebels shrank from recording their insubordination, killed the amendments by 216-to-164, sent the President's bill intact to the Senate.

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