Charles Joseph Bonaparte

• Charles Joseph Bonaparte
• Born: June 9, 1851
• Died: June 28, 1921

Civil service reformer and Attorney General of the United States, was born in Baltimore, the son of Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte and Susan May (Williams) Bonaparte. His grandfather was Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, the younger brother of Emperor Napoleon I. While visiting the United States in 1803, Jérôme met Elizabeth Patterson, the daughter of a socially prominent Baltimore family, and married her the next year. Napoleon was furious and had the marriage annulled in 1805, but not before the brief union had produced Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte.

Charles Joseph Bonaparte was the younger of two children. An older son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte Jr., was born in 1830, twenty-one years before his brother. The family was quite wealthy. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte had sought to console herself for her failed marriage and frustrated dynastic ambitions by accumulating a large fortune. When she died at ninety-four in 1879, this fortune, including some of the most valuable real estate in Baltimore, was divided between her two grandsons.

Charles Joseph Bonaparte was educated first at a French school near Baltimore, then by private tutors, and he entered Harvard in 1869 as a junior. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1871 and a Harvard law degree in 1874. The next year he married Ellen Channing Day, a member of a distinguished Connecticut family. Her grandfather had been a famous jurist, and her father was owner and editor of the The Hartford Courant until his retirement in 1866. The couple settled in Baltimore, and Bonaparte opened a law office there. His clients included corporations and the wealthy, but he also placed his considerable legal skills at the disposal of the poor, often for little or no remuneration. The Bonapartes had no children.

Bonaparte played an important role in the late nineteenth-century struggle for civil service reform, which favored public-service appointments based on merit, and against political corruption. A loyal Roman Catholic, he had a highly developed moral sense that reflected the influence of his mother’s puritanical Presbyteri-anism, and he showed scant sympathy for those public servants who failed to meet his exacting standards. His flippant and sarcastic remarks, his supreme self-confidence, and his polished prose made him a popular speaker at reform meetings.

Bonaparte engaged in a twenty-year war against corruption in his native Baltimore and in Maryland, attacking the political machine controlled by Senator Arthur Gorman. In 1881 he was a founder of the Civil Service Reform Association of Maryland, one of the first state reform leagues. That same year he attended the conference that founded the National Civil Service Reform League, and from 1901 to 1905 he served as chairman of the national league. By 1895 Bonaparte and his fellow reformers had achieved some modest successes in Maryland. A reform ballot law adopting the Australian ballot, a civil service law, and a corrupt practices act had all been added to the statutes of Maryland.

Meanwhile, Bonaparte’s reform activities in the 1880s had brought him into contact with young Theodore Roosevelt, and a friendship was established between the two reformers. After Roosevelt became president, he named Bonaparte to a series of posts before bringing him into the Cabinet in May 1905 as Secretary of the Navy. The appointment was intended as a temporary one, and Bonaparte accepted with the understanding that he would be named Attorney General when the incumbent, William Moody, resigned.

In December 1906 Bonaparte was transferred to the Department of Justice, where he became a central figure in the “trust-busting” of the Roosevelt administration. The struggle against powerful business combinations was a key element in the program of the Progressive Era reformers; and although Roosevelt was not opposed to big business as such, he undertook a well-publicized campaign against selected targets as part of his general effort to augment the power of the presidency.

Bonaparte had something of a reputation for being a reluctant trust-buster, a reputation stemming in part, perhaps, from his generally conservative approach to reform. He was careful to stress that the attack on trusts was not to be confused with a general attack on wealth and privilege, but was only a means of preventing entrenched interests from denying opportunities to others. As a representative of an older American aristocracy that valued leadership and disinterested public service by high-minded, genteel individuals such as himself, he not only opposed the robber-baron industrialists who had been spawned by the great economic growth of the post-Civil War decades, but also decried the egalitarian tendencies of the common people. He feared the poor’s envy of the wealthy and viewed with distaste the belief that every person’s opinion on public issues was of equal value.

Whatever his reputation, Bonaparte was included among those attorneys general who were generously praised by Roosevelt for their role in combating trusts. He continued many actions begun by his predecessors, including the case against Standard Oil, and instituted twenty actions himself. His most notable success was against the American Tobacco Company, although the final decree dissolving the trust was not issued until 1911, several years after he left office.

When Roosevelt retired from the presidency in 1909, Bonaparte left the Department of Justice and resumed his law practice. His interest and involvement in reform causes continued.

Bonaparte died at seventy, after a long illness, at Bella Vista, his estate near Baltimore.

Bonaparte’s personal papers are in the Library of Congress. Many of his speeches were published in pamphlet form but no book is associated with his name. The standard biography is J. B. Bishop, Charles Joseph Bonaparte: His Life and Public Services (1922), an uncritical apologia. E. Goldman, Charles J. Bonaparte, Patrician Reformer: His Earlier Career (1943) provides a convincing analysis but unfortunately limits itself to the years prior to Bonaparte’s tenure as Attorney General. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1929).