There are three million civil servants who work for the US government today. Many take

entrance exams, they have standardized pay scales, they work in the State Department or

the Department of Energy or the Department of Homeland Security, regardless of which

president or which political party is in office. Well, this definitely hasn't always been

the case. For the first hundred plus years of the country's beginning, government

jobs were basically handed out as political favors to people who in many cases had

absolutely no qualifications or relevant experience. It was a system just

right with corruption and patronage. So for this episode we're going to explore

the moment in American history when that transformed or reformed under President

Chester Arthur. Now I've got someone here who dove into the research for this

episode with me, my colleague David Parenthold, who's a politics reporter at the

post, and who did an incredible series of stories investigating government

waste. Thank you. Chester Arthur. Thanks for volunteering for this one.

The most obscure of all. Well, so if anyone knows Chester Arthur today, it's

probably as the namesake of a fictional elementary school that appeared in the

1995 die hard with a vengeance movie as many of our podcast listeners have

pointed out to me. In all seriousness though, David, I think you and I both went into

this episode thinking that because Chester Arthur is so obscure and because

the main thing that happened on his watch was civil service reform, that this

was maybe going to be a kind of dry dense story. And we were so wrong. We were so

wrong. Chester Arthur has one of the most amazing stories that I think we've

heard yet in our study of the American presidency. He was the son of a

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