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Throughout the interwar years, equal pay for women public servants was continually marked as an issue for the government, rather than one for the Civil Service (and thereby other sections of the public service) to decide. This meant that a constant public dialogue took place in Parliament, the press and during the Royal Commission on the Civil Service (1929-1931) and that a multi-faceted defence of unequal pay was constantly mounted. The chapter tracks the ways in which arguments for equal pay were constructed and the ways in which unions and associations generally worked together to press the issue. It is argued that although tangible progress on the issue of equal pay was scarce, the ‘moral’ argument was largely won in the interwar years.

This chapter focuses on the influence that the Black Power movement and rise of employment discrimination litigation had on the Vulcan Society and Black firefighters across the country. The dialectical relationships between the civil rights and Black Power movements and the Vulcan Society’s old and new guard eventually transformed the organization and its objectives and helped facilitate the IABPFF, a national Black caucus group formed to combat discrimination and increase Black representation in — and community control of — urban fire departments. Both the IABPFF and the Vulcan Society embraced “separatism without separation,” and used their “outsider status within a white-dominated institution,” as well as shifts in employment discrimination case law, to “reveal the inner workings of institutional racism” within the FDNY and urban fire departments more generally. This shift was instrumental in the fight to establish legal remedies to address institutionalized racism and its impact on the racial composition of urban fire departments and became the primary method used by the Vulcan Society and the IABPFF and its local affiliates to make fire departments more representative of and responsive to the people and communities they served

This chapter discusses the Pendleton Act to reform the civil service, which was adopted during Chester A. Arthur's administration. It established a bipartisan Civil Service Commission of three members appointed by the president with senatorial consent but critically subject to removal by the president. The Act required that open, competitive examinations be held, with appointments going to those who earned the highest grades, and apportioned the civil service among the states equitably. It provided for protection of the so-called classified service against political assessments by explicitly providing that public servants could not be forced to contribute to political funds or be removed for failure to do so. The act also prohibited federal officials from soliciting political contributions from employees and barred anyone from soliciting or receiving such contributions in any public building. The president was given the power to extend the classified service to more employees by executive order.

The spring of 1896 was a period of discontent for Theodore Roosevelt and for the whole nation. Roosevelt was unhappy with the way his political career was going. He spent six years at the Civil Service Commission and eighteen months on the New York City police board, and was impatient and uncertain. All over the country, farmers were up in arms against the railroad rates they paid to ship their grain, a malaise which gave birth to a loose-knit society of cattle farmers and ranchers called the Grangers (National Grange of the Patrons of Animal Husbandry). Although rates dropped in the 1880s, the railroads retained their iconic status, and the farmers once again grew restless due to a severe downturn in agricultural prices in the early 1890s. In 1894, a labor strike that began in Pullman, Illinois, erupted nationwide. But it was the presidential election of 1896 that would showcase Roosevelt's classist social conservatism. William McKinley won as president and the Republican Party emerged with majority status for the first time in twenty years.

In 1884, the Mugwumps abandoned the Republican Party, which contributed to its loss in the election, but Theodore Roosevelt stayed despite his misgivings, and despite being denounced by his former allies in the Mugwump camp. His loyalty was rewarded when Benjamin Harrison, newly elected president of the United States, appointed him to the Civil Service Commission. The civil service job brought Roosevelt back into politics. He was now convinced that the human species progressed through the domination of one race over others, and saw leadership of the species shifting from the English to what had become the American race. America's confrontation with Spain also revealed to Roosevelt the moral nature of expansion. This chapter examines Roosevelt's return to politics and his views about expansion and self-government in the context of British imperialism, along with his foreign policy strategies. It also looks at his investigation of John Wanamaker, chosen by Harrison as postmaster general.