1907
The nation’s first campaign finance legislation is introduced by an unlikely reformer: Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a staunch white supremacist who boasted of having stuffed ballot boxes to disenfranchise blacks in his home state. Tillman, a Democrat from South Carolina, proposes banning corporations and banks from making political contributions to elections mostly as a way to hurt the Republican Party that inflicted Reconstruction on the South. Despite the Tillman Act’s unsavory parentage, public outrage about the influence of big business on politicians is so strong that the bill receives widespread support. “It is impossible to make a case against the Tillman bill on any other grounds than that boodle has become an indispensable factor in our elections,” The Washington Post editorializes. Congress sends the bill to President Roosevelt’s desk for his signature, but not before the GOP-controlled Senate rewrites it so that the law bans only corporate or bank contributions to federal elections, not state or local ones. In practice, the Tillman Act proves to be fairly toothless. Since the law sets no limits on what individuals can give, corporations can easily get around it by having executives make donations in their own names and then reimbursing them by paying bonuses.
SOURCES: Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro, From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press), 1997; Thomas Fleming, “The Long, Stormy Marriage of Money and Politics,” American Heritage, November 1998; R.H. Sager, “Campaign Finance Was Dirtier in Our Republic’s Early Days Than It Is Today,” The New York Sun, May 30, 2002.
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Previous election year: 1920 - Harding vs. Cox
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Next election year: 1924 - Coolidge vs. Davis