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The Longest Campaign

A five-part history of big money in presidential politics … and the efforts to do something about it

Back in the 1960s, when Jesse Unruh, the speaker of the California General Assembly, famously branded money “the mother’s milk of politics,” the extremes and excesses of the years ahead were probably beyond his imagination.

Today, running for the nation’s highest office has become so costly that by the time the November election rolls around total presidential campaign spending will, in all likelihood, easily exceed $1 billion for the first time in history. From Day One of every presidential campaign, how well candidates fare in amassing their war chests is a critical factor in how they are portrayed by the press and in how well they can make their cases to the public.

As the amount of money that pours into the process has grown, so has concern about its influence. Reducing the influence of money in politics has been a long, difficult, and continuing struggle since the nineteenth century. Throughout the nation’s history, as soon as new campaign-finance reforms are enacted, inventive political strategists and lawyers dream up ways to circumvent them.

Some reformers argue that the problem is not so much the amount of money in the political system as it is it where the money comes from, pointing to the ability of those on the giving end to gain influence with those on the receiving end. When big money buys access to elected officials, as it surely does, corruption inevitably lurks nearby.

It was not always thus. In the earliest days of the republic, hard cash did not play nearly so large a role in politics. For one thing, presidential candidates then—and for some time thereafter—didn’t campaign for the office the way they do now. The first of them, George Washington, essentially was drafted, elected, and reelected as a clear consensus choice. His immediate successors simply made themselves available and “stood” for the presidency without actively running for it.

There were no political parties, only factions of like-minded citizens who might bind together behind a particular candidate or issue. As for campaign organizations, individuals or groups supporting a candidate might publish and circulate tracts advocating his election or provide encouragement in the form of liquid refreshments at political gatherings touting him. There was nothing remotely resembling a professional election industry of the sort that has come to dominate American politics.

For a time, congressional caucuses nominated presidential candidates for the factions that eventually became known as the Democratic and Republican parties. The caucuses soon gave way in various states to the popular vote, and the new parties required greater treasuries for informing the citizenry of their candidates’ virtues and, inevitably, their opponents’ vices. The first targets in the quest for campaign funds were federal government employees, who were assessed a percentage of their salaries as a condition of continued employment.

Andrew Jackson, after his election to the presidency in 1828, instituted the spoils system. In the guise of combating corruption in the civil service, jobs were handed to loyal workers who could be counted on to support and help finance the campaigns of the incumbent party’s candidates. The system flourished under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Congressional investigations confirmed the existence of the assessments, but lawmakers on Capitol Hill regularly defeated efforts to reform the system.

In 1867, after the Civil War, Congress finally passed a measure barring the solicitation of political contributions from workers at Navy yards and protecting such workers from being fired if they failed to give. Four years later came another measure that prohibited assessments of any federal workers. Then, in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered that all government officials stay out of political activities beyond expressing their views on the issues of the day, and voting.

Finally, in 1883, Congress approved the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which provided for the selection of certain federal employees through competitive examinations and shielded them from political assessments. In response, the parties, particularly the GOP, turned increasingly to prosperous businessmen to take up the financial slack. Many had been giving to leading Republican candidates since the election of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. When Mark Hanna of Ohio became the party’s national chairman in 1896, managing the campaign and election of William McKinley, the tapping of America’s corporate wealth reached new heights. By this time, Republican presidential campaigns were spending $3 million or more, and a few states started to call for bans on all corporate contributions.

The first effort to limit campaign contributions came in 1901, when Republican Senator William E. Chandler of New Hampshire, recently defeated for reelection by railroad interests in his state, introduced a bill that would have barred all federally chartered corporations, and all those engaged in interstate commerce, from contributing to elections at any level. Chandler was out of the Senate before he had a chance to see the bill voted on, but he continued to push his then-radical idea. 

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.