Carl Schurz

While representing Missouri as a U.S. senator (1869–75), Carl Schurz began a crusade to reform the civil service, which he continued as secretary of the Department of the Interior (then located in this building) from 1877 to 1881. Schurz concentrated on eradicating widespread corruption that plagued the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He dismissed agents and traders who cheated Indigenous communities for personal gain and fended off the War Department’s efforts to acquire oversight of the bureau. Having immigrated to the United States in his youth, Schurz strongly believed in assimilation and promoted the acculturation of Native Americans through education, rather than forced removal to government reservations.

Schurz later became active in the anti-imperialist movement. In opposition to expansionists such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, he objected to the intervention of the United States in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, warning that imperialism would be democracy’s downfall.