Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform

393 Pages·2014·6.236 MB·English

by  Robert E. Mutch

BUYING THE VOTE

B U Y I N G
T H E V O T E
A History of Campaign
Finance Reform
Robert E. Mutch
1
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
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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
viii • 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 fin-
ishing 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 ver-
sions 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 destroy-
ing 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.