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Article: Hatch Act
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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HATCH ACT
HATCH ACT
(1939), as amended, regulates partisan political activities by U.S. civil servants. The Democratic senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico, protesting the political involvement of federal employees in primaries and general elections, sponsored the bill that became the Hatch Act in order to ban federal employees from participating actively in political campaigns or from using their positions to coerce voters.
The Pendleton Act of 1883 and several executive orders limited partisan political activity by career civil servants. But the number of federal government workers ballooned from 14,000 in 1883 to 560,000 in 1926, so that by the 1930s, conservative Democrats and ...