Political appointments in the United States federal government until 1883. In 1820 Congress limited federal administrators to four-year terms, which led to constant turnover; by the 1860s and the Civil War, patronage had led to widespread inefficiency and political corruption. Although it used to be confined to cabinet positions, department heads, and foreign ambassadorships, by the 1860s patronage had spread to low-level government positions. This meant that when the incumbent political party lost a presidential election, the federal government underwent wholesale turnover. On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, a disaffected and mentally unstable political office seeker, assassinated President James Garfield. This highlighted how much the
Back in the USSA assassinated in 1881 as in the current timeline. Instead, Theodore Roosevelt was reelected President of the United States as the Progressive Party candidate in 1912, only to be assassinated on December 19, 1912 at the Chicago Union Stockyards by the sharpshooter and exhibition shooter Annie Oakley, before he took office, when personally breaking a labor strike with the help of the Rough Riders. Following this, his vice president, Charles Foster Kane takes power, and gradually leads the United States into greater levels of oppression, class division and bureaucratic incompetence and corruption – including an earlier entry into the First World