Buying the vote a history of campaign finance reform

BUYING THE VOTE



BUYING
THE VOTE
A History of Campaign
Finance Reform
Robert E. Mutch

1


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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mutch, Robert E.
Buying the vote : a history of campaign finance reform / Robert E. Mutch.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–934000–2 (hardback)—ISBN 978–0–19–934001–9 ()—
ISBN 978–0–19–934002–6 ()  1.  Campaign funds—United States—History.
2.  Campaign funds—Law and legislation—United States—History.  I.  Title.
JK1991.M87 2014
324.7'80973—dc23
2013050417

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Printed in the United States of America
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To old friends

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1. From Plutocrats to Populists: 1884–1900

12

2. The 1904 Election and the First Scandals: 1904–1907

27

3. The Beginning of Reform: 1905–1907

45

4. The Triumph of Reform: 1908–1911

62

5. Big Business Money Remains Dominant: 1912–1928

77

6. Organized Labor Becomes Active: 1932–1948

97

7. The Revival of Reform: 1952–1972

115

8. From Buckley to Austin: 1976–1990

139

9. From Reform to Reaction: Since 1996

162

Conclusion

186


v i i i â•… •â•…

Contents

Appendix: Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 Campaign Contributors

201

Notes

217

References

315

Index

347


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been several years in the making. I  began writing it only when
I realized that I had unintentionally been researching it off and on ever since finishing Campaigns, Congress, and Courts in 1988. Writing that book was only the
beginning of my interest in the history of campaign finance practices and laws,
and only the beginning of my research into that history. Almost twenty years
later, I saw that the journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers that
came out of that research amounted to a rough outline for this book.
I discussed my research with many people over the years. They did not all agree
with me, and a few emphatically disagreed, but they all helped make this a better
book than it otherwise would have been: Paula Baker, Ted Burrows, Rick Hasen,
Allison Hayward, Ray La Raja, Dan Lowenstein, Dave Magleby, Maeva Marcus,
Dick Pious, Adam Winkler, and two anonymous reviewers for Oxford University
Press. I also benefited from discussions at panels where I presented earlier versions of some of the chapters in this book or was a discussant: annual meetings

of the Social Science History Association (1997), the American Political Science
Association (2003), and the American Society of Legal Historians (2005), the
Money in Politics conference at the University of California, Berkeley (2000),
and the Columbia University Seminar on Law and Politics (October 2005). Any
errors that remain are entirely my responsibility. And many thanks to my editor
at Oxford, Nancy Toff, who was enthusiastic about the book from the start.
This book required a fair amount of primary research, and here I must thank
South Trimble, William Tyler Page, and their successors as Clerks of the U.S.
House of Representatives, for preserving disclosure reports rather than destroying them, as the law permitted them to do. Thanks to them, reports from 1912
to 1968 are on file in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Thanks also
to the Overacker-Heard Archive at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies
Library, for providing access to Louise Overacker’s files on presidential campaign
donors. Dollar values increased by a couple of orders of magnitude over the years
covered in this book, and I used MeasuringWorth.com to track the changes.



L I S T O F A B B R E V I AT I O N S

AAPA
ACWA
AF
AFL
BCRA
BG
CED
CPPA
CIO
CIO-PAC
CRF

CT
DNC
FCPA
FECA
GAO
HACH
HECH
HJCH
HSCH
ICC
ILGWU
LAT
MCFL
NCF
NCPAC
NPBO
NRWC

Association Against the Prohibition Amendment
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
American Federationist
American Federation of Labor
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold)
Boston Globe
Committee for Economic Development
Conference for Progressive Political Action
Congress of Industrial Organizations
CIO-Political Action Committee
Citizens’ Research Foundation
Chicago Tribune

Democratic National Committee
Federal Corrupt Practices Act
Federal Election Campaign Act
General Accounting Office (now Government Accountability
Office)
House Administration Committee Hearings
House Elections Committee Hearings
House Judiciary Committee Hearings
House Special Committee Hearings
Interstate Commerce Commission
International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union
Los Angeles Times
Massachusetts Citizens for Life
National Civic Federation
National Conservative Political Action Committee
National Publicity Bill Organization
National Right to Work Committee


x i i   • 

List of Abbreviations

NYHNew York Herald
NYT
New York Times
NYTrNew York Tribune
NYWNew York World
OFE
Office of Federal Elections

PAC
Political action committee
RNC
Republican National Committee
SCCH
Senate Commerce Committee Hearings
SGCH
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Hearings
SJCH
Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings
SPECH
Senate Privileges and Elections Committee Hearings
SRCH
Senate Rules and Administration Committee Hearings
SSCH
Senate Select Committee Hearings
TIGTA
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration
UMW
United Mine Workers
WP
Washington Post
WRTL
Wisconsin Right to Life
WSJ
Wall Street Journal


BUYING THE VOTE

Introduction

Campaign finance reform was not always as controversial as it has
been since the 1970s. The modern reform movement began in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of the response to the
wrenching social and economic changes that accompanied the rise of
corporate capitalism. The appearance of the big corporation was deeply
unsettling to Americans who had come of age in an era of small-scale
proprietary capitalism. Equally unsettling was the discovery that the
country’s major political parties were being financed by those same
corporations. Congress and state legislatures responded to popular
anger by regulating the way corporations conducted their business
and the way political parties financed their election campaigns.1
The big corporations and the gaping inequality of wealth that came
with the new industrial order also posed new problems for the idea of
a democratic community. They opened a new phase of the old debate
about how our democracy should work, turning it into a question
about money as well as votes. Like earlier differences about how far
to extend the suffrage, the debate over where campaign funds should
come from is part of the larger constitutional issue of deciding who
should govern. It is about defining a political community, identifying
its members, and deciding what rights they have.
Congress entered the debate by prohibiting corporations from
making campaign contributions, requiring political committees to
disclose who gave them how much money, and setting limits on campaign expenditures. These reforms were passed by majorities of both
parties in both houses of Congress during the Theodore Roosevelt
and William Howard Taft administrations. Congress was not eager
to pass these laws, because its members were reluctant to regulate the

very practices they had used to win office. They had to be jolted into
action by scandal, which came when business executives testified that
they had been dipping into company treasuries to make campaign
contributions. Congress might have needed prodding by an alarmed
public to pass these reforms, but there was a great deal of support for


2   • 

BUYING THE VOTE

them outside of Congress. Within a few years state legislatures across the country,
most of them under Republican control, passed similar laws.
These laws made up the first of the two scandal-reform cycles—the second
being the one started by Watergate—into which this book divides the modern
history of campaign finance reform. As the term “scandal-reform” indicates, these
cycles were about legislative responses to two political crises. Crises often play a
crucial legislative role by focusing public attention on previously ignored problems and creating rare opportunities for nonelite actors to get their reform proposals made into law. Once on the books, though, reforms enacted in response to
external shocks were revised and supplemented in accord with normal legislative
procedures.2
By banning corporate money from elections Congress answered the constitutional question by reaffirming the old idea that it is citizens who govern, that
corporations are not citizens and do not have the same rights. Requiring parties to publicly disclose their finances told voters for the first time who was footing the bill for election campaigns. Disclosure also had an egalitarian effect, as
big donors made smaller contributions and the parties very publicly broadened
their donor bases by looking beyond traditional sources on Wall Street to begin a
more than century-long search for small donors. The direct limit on expenditures
added a third prong to a reform that was intended to discourage parties from
relying on a few wealthy donors to pay for election campaigns. Keeping corporate
money out of elections and preventing the inequality of wealth from undermining political equality among individual citizens have been the primary goals of
campaign finance reform ever since. No one objected to the political goals reform
was intended to achieve; or at least no one then thought it was wise to do so in

public.3
More than sixty years after the first laws, the Watergate scandal jolted Congress
into passing a much more ambitious set of reforms. Once again the voters learned
that corporations had given money to a presidential campaign, that rich donors
had made very large contributions, and that these gifts had been kept secret.
Once again Congress passed laws to reduce the political advantages of wealth
and encourage small donors, and this time it also created an agency to enforce
them. These reforms, too, were passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress. But
they also faced a new obstacle in the form of overt opposition from conservatives
whose goals were shaped by a very different definition of democracy.
We had long ago agreed to solve the old problem of who could vote by
expanding the franchise, taking a right that once belonged only to property owners, then only to white males, and eventually granting it to all adult citizens. The
rich would always have a bigger political voice than the rest of us—that is simply a fact of life, which expanding legal rights cannot change—but it became a


Introduction  • 

3

generally accepted matter of democratic principle that everyone should have a
voice in elections. The first federal campaign finance laws offered similar solutions to the newer problem of how to pay for election campaigns. Those laws
might have been more important for their symbolism than for concrete effect;
but symbolism is important in politics and the reforms stood for an egalitarian
definition of democracy.
That definition was not challenged until the enforcement provisions of the
post-Watergate laws raised the possibility that the second round of reforms would
be more than symbolic. Conservative opponents of the new laws raised a new
argument—that restrictions on campaign money were effectively restrictions
on political speech and thus violated the First Amendment. A Supreme Court
that had itself become more conservative agreed. In a series of decisions since the

1970s, the Court has held that the old egalitarian goals were unconstitutional
and that corporations are members of our democratic community and have much
the same rights as citizens. The very problems that gave rise to the reform movement have now been given constitutional protection.4
I will develop the history of this movement by tracking changes in the sources
of presidential campaign funds; analyzing the origins and evolution of efforts to
regulate those sources; and evaluating the debates over those regulations, whether
they were conducted in Congress, the press, or the courts. The movement begins
in the late nineteenth century, but wealth-based political inequality had been a
feature of American society since colonial days.
Unequally distributed wealth had always been easy to convert into political
power. The merchant and landed gentry who dominated politics and government
in the colonial and early Republican years were the big businessmen of their day.
As the country industrialized and turned into a mass democracy with organized
political parties, new kinds of businesses found new ways to be politically active.
They did not contribute much to campaign funds, as parties could get most of
what they needed by levying political assessments on government workers, all
of whom were political appointees. At a time when getting out the vote was a
labor-intensive effort, a company’s most valuable political asset was not its treasury but its employees. From the antebellum years through the 1880s, factory
owners in the Northeastern states made in-kind contributions by coercing their
employees to vote for the owners’ preferred party.5
Although factory owners used their companies to benefit political parties,
the problem was seen to be with the owners as individuals; the enterprises themselves, most of which were individual proprietorships and partnerships, did not
figure in definitions of democracy. The new industrial economy of the late nineteenth century, however, was dominated by corporations—large railroad, mining, oil, manufacturing, and other enterprises that became concentrations of


4   • 

BUYING THE VOTE

unprecedented private economic power. They conducted their business activities

on a national scale that put them beyond the ability of state legislatures to control. The very size of these continent-wide enterprises was unsettling and they
brought with them an even more markedly unequal distribution of wealth. These
developments raised the question of how a once relatively egalitarian democracy
could accommodate the new corporate capitalism and still remain a democracy.
The corporate system was taking shape as civil service reformers finally succeeded in getting Congress to begin dismantling the spoils system. One reason
that Congress felt comfortable passing a reform it had been resisting for years was
that the business money that had always been part of party campaign funds had
been growing apace with the new industrial economy. It soon became clear that
contributions from corporations and business barons were more than an adequate replacement for kickbacks from lowly government clerks. But this source
of campaign funds posed a new problem for democracy.6
Political money had always come from inside the political system. It came from
the gentry politicians of the eighteenth century, who paid their election expenses
by digging into their own pockets, and from the party leaders of the nineteenth,
who dug into the pockets of their political appointees. From the colonial era
through the spoils system, nearly all of the money in party coffers came from
politicians—from people who could be voted out of office. The business barons
who filled those coffers in the new corporate system, however, were not politicians and did not have to answer to voters. The corporation was troubling enough
as the powerful engine of a rapidly industrializing economy; that it should also
be a political engine without having any formal political role or any way to be
held accountable to voters was even more troubling. The movement to regulate
political money began when that money started to come from outside the political
system; legal regulation was an imperfect substitute for political accountability.
People did not know who was contributing how much to whom at the
time, of course, as that information was not publicly disclosed. The public got
its first glimpse of what had always been the private world of political fundraising in 1905, when a New York State investigation into the business practices of
life insurance firms inadvertently revealed corporate contributions to Theodore
Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign. Asked to clear up irregularities in company accounts,
insurance company and Wall Street executives admitted they had been dipping
into company treasuries to make campaign contributions to the Republican party
since 1896. The scandal continued two years later, when private correspondence

stolen from a railroad mogul revealed that he had agreed at a White House meeting to raise $250,000 for the 1904 campaign.
That partial exposure created the first modern campaign finance scandal—
modern in that it was about where money came from rather than how it was


Introduction  • 

5

spent—and set off the first scandal-reform cycle. As the original goal of reform
was to curb the ability of big business and the rich to turn their wealth into political influence, I  will trace contributions to presidential campaigns made by the
economic elite, defined here as executives and directors of the biggest corporations and banks, and rich individuals. In later elections, I will also look at labor
money. To make this task manageable, I  will look only at large contributions
these elite donors made to presidential campaigns in the 1884, 1904, 1908, 1916,
1936, 1956, 1972, and 2000 elections.
The 1905–07 scandals set off public debates about how we should pay for
presidential election campaigns. Those early debates were more likely to take place
in newspaper editorials and private correspondence than in formal settings such
as legislatures and courts. That changed in later years, when initiatives to amend
campaign finance law were more likely to come from Congress than from reform
groups. It turned around completely in the 1970s, when reform opponents challenged the constitutionality of the laws passed in the second scandal-reform cycle.
The courts have dominated the debate ever since. The Supreme Court began to
issue rulings on campaign finance law as early as 1921, but it is five later cases that
will get the most attention here: United States v. CIO (1948), Buckley v. Valeo
(1976), First National Bank of Boston v.  Bellotti (1978), Austin v.  Michigan
Chamber of Commerce (1990), and Citizens United v. FEC (2010).
I chose these eight elections and five Supreme Court cases for the way they
shaped the reform debate. The elections matter for the way they were financed.
It was the sources of campaign funds or the way they were raised that motivated
some group to propose regulatory legislation. In some elections people were

alarmed that campaign funds came from Wall Street or organized labor; in others the concern was that funds were raised in secret, in excessive amounts, or in
novel forms such as independent expenditures, soft money, or through formally
nonpolitical tax-exempt groups. Different concerns produced different laws. The
Supreme Court cases matter for the way the justices resolved political arguments
about those laws. The arguments came before the Court when one side raised a
constitutional challenge, so to decide legal disputes the Court had to take sides
in political arguments.
The elections gave the reform debate something different to focus on in different eras, but the Supreme Court decisions changed the nature of the debate
itself. Reformers and their opponents have taken different sides in a political
philosophy debate about how we define our democracy and how we want it to
work. The point of the debate was always whether to reduce or protect political
inequalities based on wealth and whether corporations should be accorded the
same rights as citizens. These issues appear again and again over the 130 years
covered in this book.


6   • 

BUYING THE VOTE

The debate had not yet begun when Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine
faced each other in 1884. Both political parties in that year’s election were very
much a part of the corporate capitalist system that was still taking shape, so the
system itself was not yet an issue. Corrupt ties between business and government
were a problem, however, and the Republicans’ nomination of James G. Blaine
made a prominent campaign issue out of the crony capitalism that had developed since the Civil War. A partial list of contributors to Grover Cleveland’s campaign shows that the Democrats were a second business party, with a financial
base much like the Republicans’. They retained the loyalty of these elite donors
through the 1888 and 1892 elections—in 1892 they might even have raised a
bigger campaign fund than the Republicans.
That changed in 1896. The rise of William Jennings Bryan and the

Southern-Western populist alliance caused business donors to flee the Democratic
party. The Republicans’ elite donors remained loyal in 1896 and have stayed loyal
ever since, leaving the GOP as the sole business party. The Democrats still get
most of their money from business because that is where the money is, but they
never regained the broad business support they enjoyed in the Gilded Age. The
Democrats’ factional split brought about a permanent realignment of the two
parties’ financial constituencies.
We first see evidence of this new alignment in the 1904 election. That election
is significant in this history for several reasons. What appears to be a complete
donor list for Roosevelt’s campaign—uncovered in a 1912 Senate investigation—is the first such list we have for any presidential election. That list and
testimony from Democratic donors gives us our best look at the Gilded Age
practice of financing presidential campaigns with very large contributions from
very few individual and corporate donors. It was also the last “unreformed” election. Public reaction to the partial exposure of Gilded Age practices in 1905–07
had a powerful effect on the practical business of running campaigns by setting a
negative example, by showing parties that the old ways were no longer politically
tenable.
In the wake of the 1905–07 scandals, 1908 presidential candidates William
Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan wanted to show the public that they
did not depend on Wall Street to pay for their campaigns. Congress had already
twice rejected a disclosure law—members evidently thought they had appeased
reformers enough by banning corporate contributions—but both candidates
went around Congress by pledging to voluntarily make their campaign finances
public. They made good on those pledges. Taft’s report had the biggest impact
because he won the election and it was his party that had been linked to the scandals. Wall Street and big business still gave to his campaign, albeit in fewer and
smaller contributions; but his postelection report reveals that he broadened the


Introduction  • 

7

Republican donor base by seeking small contributions from larger numbers of
people outside New York.
If 1904 was the last Gilded Age election, 1908 can be called the first modern one, as the fundraising changes the parties made that year were permanent.
Publication of Taft’s donor list—it appeared on the front pages of the major
New  York, Boston, Washington, and Chicago newspapers—was a public relations coup for the GOP and for campaign finance reform. Praise for the new
practices reduced the Republican-controlled Congress’s resistance to disclosure,
and it responded to Taft’s public call for a disclosure law by passing it in 1910.
Reform had regained traction, and after Democrats won control of the House
in 1910, Congress took it further, strengthening disclosure and setting limits on
expenditures for House campaigns.
Roosevelt’s party-splitting run in 1912 and Bryan’s decision to stay on the
sidelines both helped Woodrow Wilson win that year’s election. But the GOP
reunited behind Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 and very nearly dislodged Wilson
from the White House. This election marks another turning point, as it was the
first one that was not dominated by the divisive figures of Bryan and Roosevelt.
The post-Bryan Democrats were able to attract more business money than at any
time since 1892, but still much less than the post-Roosevelt Republicans. The
1916 election solidified 1908 campaign practices into a pattern that persisted,
with modifications, through the rest of the century.
The 1936 election is generally considered to be one of the most crucial in
our history and it is no less important for the narrower subject of campaign
finance. It was effectively a referendum on the New Deal and confirmed the 1932
realignment of the two parties’ electoral bases. It also gave the 1896 realignment
of financial bases a more markedly class character than it had had before. The
Republicans broke their 1896 record by raising an even bigger campaign fund,
getting large contributions from the Duponts, Pews, Mellons, Rockefellers, and
other rich families, who opened their checkbooks as never before. And organized
labor made a historic break with the past by putting large amounts of money into
a presidential campaign, all of it behind the Democrats.

Labor participation in the 1936 election was the first in a chain of events that
brought about permanent changes in campaign finance law and practices. The
conservative coalition in Congress wanted to prohibit unions from making any
more campaign contributions and managed to pass a wartime ban in 1943. The
Congress of Industrial Organizations immediately responded with two innovations that have since become standard features of campaign finance practice and
law: it created the first political action committee (PAC) and originated the legal
distinction between contributions and expenditures. (Corporations had been
making independent expenditures for twenty years or so, mainly for what later


8   • 

BUYING THE VOTE

was called issue advocacy, but Congress paid little attention to them, so corporations did not need to give them legal standing.) The conservative coalition of
Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress made the ban permanent in
1947 by using the Taft-Hartley Act to bring unions under the Tillman Act’s prohibition against corporate contributions.
Conservatives justified the move by inventing a rationale for the Tillman Act
that made unions look like corporations. They said Congress passed the act to
prevent “aggregations of wealth” from exerting a “disproportionate influence on
federal elections” and to protect the interests of dissenting shareholders; and they
said labor unions were like corporations because they too were aggregations of
wealth and their members were analogous to shareholders. Given this equivalence, conservatives concluded, unions posed the same kind of danger to elections and so should be subject to similar regulation.
The CIO immediately challenged the constitutionality of the Taft-Hartley
Act. It is likely that most of the justices who heard United States v. CIO thought
the act violated the First Amendment, but a split Court struck down only the
government’s application of it to political editorials in the labor organization’s
internal publication. What the Court left standing was the “aggregations of
wealth” rationale and the conflation of corporations and labor unions.
The 1956 election, by contrast, is important here more for what did not

happen. There were no changes in financial constituencies or campaign finance
laws, but the Senate committee appointed to examine the financing of that year’s
presidential election did an especially thorough job. The committee took the
unusual step of hiring a team of academic experts on campaign finance to do the
research, and they compiled a much more detailed report of who gave how much
to whom than any previous committee had done. The widely shared prosperity
and comparatively harmonious politics of the 1950s were very different from
the Depression and the divisive politics of the 1930s. But the committee report
showed that the class divide in campaign funds was as wide in 1956 as it had
been in 1936, and it underscored the point by identifying economic-elite donors
by their positions in the country’s biggest corporations and banks. The Senate
decided that this was taking disclosure too far and by a bipartisan majority it
denied funding for the final report.
The politically disruptive potential of disclosure is also why the 1972 election
is included here. Of course it was this election that produced Watergate and set
off the second scandal-reform cycle. But campaign finance might have been only a
small part of the scandal had a new generation of reform groups not been aggressive in using the old disclosure law as well as the stronger one in the 1971 Federal
Election Campaign Act. Members of Congress had begun introducing bills to
revise and strengthen the law in the 1950s. As this sentiment gained momentum


Introduction  • 

9

in the 1960s, it expanded to include business, professional, and advocacy organizations outside Congress and eventually led to the creation of reform groups
such as Common Cause. During the 1972 campaign these groups used the law
to give the public more disclosure than Congress expected or President Nixon’s
campaign committee wanted. It was their reports that exposed corporate contributions and the Gilded Age–size gifts from rich donors that were supposed to be
a thing of the past. Congress might have amended the 1971 FECA even without

the outrage these reports stirred up, but it is not likely it would have done so on a
scale that amounted to a new beginning for campaign finance reform.
The biggest difference between the first and the second scandal-reform
cycles is that the second began with a collision between two opposing forces.
Reformers in the first cycle had to overcome Congress’s reluctance to act, but
they encountered very little open opposition. In the 1970s, though, the rejuvenated reform movement met a resurgent conservative movement that for the first
time offered an explicitly ideological opposition to reform. The conservatives
developed a First Amendment doctrine that so closely linked campaign speech
with campaign money that it would have made any regulation of that money
unconstitutional. This was the argument they used to challenge the FECA before
the Supreme Court in what became the landmark case in campaign finance law,
Buckley v. Valeo.
The challengers were fortunate in bringing the case before a Court that had
itself become more conservative and that readily adopted their reading of the
First Amendment. The Court did not give them everything they wanted, but it
did use their doctrine to find that the previously uncontroversial reform goal of
equality was now unconstitutional. The challengers won only a partial victory,
but the Court gave them a precedent they have used ever since to chip away at
the rest of the law.
The reformers’ post-Watergate optimism eventually faded. PACs raised the
first concerns, as corporations, banks, and industry associations made business
money more visible by forming such committees. Worry about PACs was eventually overtaken by concern about soft money, which was raised and spent under
more permissive state laws and through loopholes in the FECA. Most of this
money came from corporations, and the amounts the parties raised shot up dramatically in 1996 and 2000.
The 2000 election is the last to be considered in detail here because it was the
last one held before Congress prohibited party soft money by passing the 2002
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as McCain-Feingold. The 1896
alignment of the parties’ financial constituencies remained as stable as ever in
2000, albeit with some new details. Elite donors still preferred the GOP, but they
also proved to be very willing to give to both parties, and so to be on friendlier

1 0   • 

BUYING THE VOTE

terms with the Democratic party than in previous elections. It was the extraordinary amount of soft money in the 2000 election that marked what many political
scientists saw as the final collapse of the FECA.
Most of what scholars and journalists have written about the Supreme Court’s
campaign finance cases begins with Buckley, as it was the narrow range of permissible regulation imposed by that decision that has shaped the law and the debate
in the second cycle. Although that once controversial decision has become mainstream thinking on campaign finance law, criticism of the Court’s reasoning
shows no sign of going away. Little of what has been written about Buckley looks
at the First Amendment doctrine that informed that decision, but the doctrine
and its political origins will be examined here.
Bellotti is more important than the smaller amount of literature on it suggests. In that decision the Court went well beyond Buckley to grant limited First
Amendment rights to corporations by permitting them to make expenditures in
ballot-measure elections. Bellotti is important in this history for two more reasons: thirty-two years later it became the core precedent for Citizens United; and
unlike later corporation cases, the 5–4 decision did not run neatly along partisan or ideological lines. It was only when the much more conservative justices
appointed by President Ronald Reagan took their seats on the bench that an
ideological gulf opened up, a gulf that first appeared in Austin.
By 2010 the new conservatives had the votes they needed to expand the First
Amendment rights granted to corporations in Bellotti. They had not had the
votes to do that in Austin, and they created an opportunity to overturn that decision. In Citizens United the Court overturned a more than century-old definition
of democracy to find that corporations were part of our political community and
had much the same speech rights as citizens. The conservative justices laid down
as constitutional law the very threat to democracy that had ignited the reform
movement in the first place.
This book traces the reform movement from its roots in the first Gilded
Age to what can fairly be called a second. That this history is framed by two
gilded ages is more than an accident of terminology. Tracking changes in

where campaign funds actually came from reveals that, after more than a century of reform, today’s system differs only in degree from the Gilded Age system that the first reformers tried to uproot. It is true that reform has brought
in hundreds of thousand of small donors, many more than anyone would have
thought possible in 1904; what it has not done is given them a political voice
that is anywhere near as loud as that of the very small number of Wall Street,
big business, and rich donors. Those big donors no longer provide the majority of presidential campaign funds, as they did for Grover Cleveland, William
McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. But they continue to provide a highly