June 22, 1877: President Rutherford B. Hayes signs an executive order, forbidding federal officeholders from being required to make campaign contributions, or otherwise taking part in party politics. Effectively, this ends the "spoils system" created under President Andrew Jackson, nearly half a century earlier. The term came from Senator William Marcy of New York, who justified such appointments by saying, "To the victor belong the spoils."
Chester A. Arthur, the Collector of the Port of New York, and his subordinates Alonzo B. Cornell and George H. Sharpe, had been appointed by Hayes' predecessor as President, Ulysses S. Grant, on the recommendation of their patron, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York. They refused to obey the order.
In September, Hayes demanded their resignations. They refused. Hayes submitted appointments to replace them to the U.S. Senate, all of them recommended by Hayes' Secretary of State, William Evarts, a New York State rival of Conkling's. One of them was Manhattan businessman Theodore Roosevelt. The Senate's Commerce Committee would have to vote on them, and Conkling was its Chairman. It rejected them, and approved only one of them -- not Roosevelt.
Unbeknownst to Hayes and most others, Roosevelt had stomach cancer, and died on February 9, 1878, only 46 years old. In July, with Congress in recess, Hayes flat-out fired Arthur and Cornell, and replaced them with recess appointments. When the Senate reconvened in February 1879, they approved Hayes' appointments.
For the remainder of his term, Hayes pressed Congress to enact permanent reform legislation and fund the U.S. Civil Service Commission. It would take until the Pendleton Act of 1883, which was signed into law by the man then President -- Chester Arthur.
Alonzo Cornell, son of Cornell University founder Ezra Cornell, was elected Governor of New York in 1879. In 1898, the son of Theodore Roosevelt, also named Theodore Roosevelt, was elected Governor, having had his "crowded hour" at the Battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War earlier that year. It was only after that battle that people seemed to stop referring to him as "Theodore Roosevelt Jr." Afterward, when his father was mentioned, it was as "the late Theodore Roosevelt Sr."
In 1939, 58 years after Hayes' reform efforts began, the Hatch Act was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its main provision prohibits civil service employees in the executive branch of the federal government from engaging in some forms of political activity. For example, it prohibits members of the President's Cabinet, or Ambassadors, from engaging in political fundraising. It also prohibits them from making speeches on behalf of political candidates. For that reason, a former Cabinet secretary may deliver a speech at the Democratic National Convention or the Republican National Convention, but not a current Cabinet secretary.
The Act makes exceptions for the President and the Vice President, since they would need to act on their own behalf to run for re-election -- or, in the case of a Vice President, running for President himself or herself.
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June 22, 1877 was a Friday. The only professional sports league in business in North America at the time was baseball's National League, and it had no games scheduled for this day.
