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The Longest Campaign (cont.)

During McKinley’s 1896 and 1900 presidential campaigns, Democratic newspapers in New York alleged that the businesses on his donor list had been rewarded with assorted favors, and in 1904 they accused Theodore Roosevelt of granting corporate donors immunity from antitrust suits. The Democratic presidential nominee, Alton B. Parker of New York, charged Roosevelt with “blackmailing monopolies” to fund his election campaign, leading Republicans to respond that Parker was likewise accepting large corporate contributions.

Roosevelt denied the allegations and was easily elected. But later investigations in the New York State Legislature uncovered large under-the-table corporate contributions to the Republican National Committee, including more than $48,000, a sizable sum at the time, from the New York Life Insurance Company. The National Publicity Law Organization, a public-interest group, pressed for the full disclosure of all campaign contributions and spending.

In late 1904, William Bourke Cockran, a state legislator and Tammany Hall leader, proposed federal campaign financing “to do away with any excuse for soliciting large subscriptions of money.” The idea went nowhere. Meanwhile, William Chandler was busy trying to find a fellow Republican still in the Senate to pick up his campaign-reform bill, which would have outlawed many corporate donations. Unable to do so, in late 1905 he turned to a racist Democrat, “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina, who agreed to sponsor a resolution calling for an investigation into national bank contributions in past presidential elections. For the next year and more, Tillman pressed for action.

In December 1905, amid the growing clamor for election reform, Teddy Roosevelt sought legislation to combat bribery and other corruption in federal elections, and to require campaigns and political committees to make public disclosure of campaign contributions and expenditures. A year later, with these reforms not enacted, Roosevelt called for a ban on all corporate contributions “to any political committee or for any political purpose,” but he didn’t throw the power and influence of his office behind it.

Tillman, however, persistently pursued the measure that he had taken up from Chandler. In 1907, the Senate and the House of Representatives both passed a revised version of legislation, known as the Tillman Act, which declared it “unlawful for any national bank, or any corporation organized by authority of any laws of Congress, to make a money contribution in connection with any election to any political office.” It specified that no corporation, including any that was state-chartered, was to contribute money for the election of presidential and vice-presidential electors or members of the U.S. House or Senate.

In December of the same year, as other political reformers tweaked at ways to limit the influence of private money, Roosevelt suddenly picked up Tammany man Cockran’s public-financing idea. He told Congress “the need for collecting large campaign funds would vanish” if it would provide “an appropriation for the proper and legitimate expenses of each of the two great national parties, an appropriation ample enough to meet the necessity for thorough organization and machinery, which requires a large expenditure of money.’’ Among those who endorsed the idea was William Jennings Bryan, the eventual three-time Democratic presidential nominee, who added that public financing combined with another provision “forbidding private contributions” would “go far toward eliminating corruption in politics.”

But Roosevelt fared no better than Cockran had. It would be nearly seven decades before the Watergate scandal inspired passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 and public financing took hold in the 1976 presidential election. In another three decades—a century after Teddy Roosevelt took up the call for public financing—most candidates for the presidency seemed ready to leave it behind.