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Logo White Text Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

By Gary Gerstle

The Third Eccles Centre for American Studies Plenary Lecture given at the European Association for American Studies Annual Conference, Constanta, Romania, 2016

www.bl.uk/eccles-centre Published by The British Library

ISBN: 0 7123 4484 5

Copyright © 2018 The British Library Board Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

By Gary Gerstle

The Third Eccles Centre for American Studies Plenary Lecture given at the European Association for American Studies Annual Conference, Constanta, Romania, 2016

www.bl.uk/eccles-centre Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge. He is a social and political historian of the twentieth century, with substantial interests in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the Society of American Historians, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians. His writings have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Gerstle is the author or editor of eight books, including two prizewinners: American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), winner of the Saloutos Prize for outstanding work in immigration and ethnic history; and Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government From the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015), winner of the Organization of American Historians’ Hawley Prize for the best book on American political history. He is the creator and presenter of a four-part radio programme, America: Laboratory of Democracy, broadcast on BBC World Service in October and November 2017. A paperback version of Liberty and Coercion appeared in 2017, as did a revised edition of American Crucible, which contains a new chapter on race and nation in America from September 11, 2001 through the election of Donald Trump. Gerstle is currently at work on a new book, The Rise and Fall of America’s Neoliberal Order, 1970-2020. Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

The American political system is awash in private money. The 2016 presidential campaign is estimated to have cost nearly three billion dollars. America’s billionaires played an outsized role in the campaign. The Koch brothers amassed a war chest that on its own is estimated to have been worth nearly one billion dollars. In the Republican presidential primaries, gaining a billionaire backer – or being a billionaire oneself – seemed to have become a prerequisite for being a serious candidate. The billionaire who now sits in the White House has populated his cabinet and the ranks of his close advisors with those who are themselves worth tens to hundreds to thousands of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the billionaire’s Democratic opponent in the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, sullied her own reputation in the eyes of many by cosying up to centres of wealth and power: giving speeches to Wall Streeters and corporate leaders for $300,000–$400,000 a pop; socialising too freely with the Aspen and Davos elites; and allowing donors to the Clinton Foundation to believe that generous contributions would one day gain them influence in a Clinton White House.

How did the United States arrive at this state of affairs? Much commentary focuses on the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which overturned laws limiting what wealthy individuals and organisations could give to political candidates.1 This decision has undoubtedly convulsed American democracy, both by permitting far vaster sums of money to flow into the political system and by generating anger at the corruption of politics it has caused. But I want to argue that the troubled relationship between money and democracy in America is much deeper and more intractable than what a focus on the 2010 decision permits us to see. Its roots lie in the nineteenth century, when America first became a mass democracy, and one notably lacking in public organisations and mechanisms necessary to make this democracy work. Political parties arose at this time (initially as private organisations) to superintend the unruly electoral system that had unexpectedly emerged, becoming, in the process, among the most inventive, improvisational, and successful institutions that America has ever produced. Managing American democracy turned out to be a hugely expensive business; and with the US Constitution making no provision for public funds for elections (or for 2 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

limiting expenses), political parties turned to private sources for funds and also to selling access to government through patronage and graft. As parties made themselves into entrepreneurial organisations larger than almost any other in nineteenth century America, they gave private interests, especially monied ones, considerable opportunities to penetrate governing institutions. Democratic movements sought repeatedly to contest the influence of private money, but few enjoyed more than temporary or partial success. Indeed, in America, the expansion of democracy and the influence of money have often seemed to march hand in hand. Making sense of this intimate relationship is the principal aim of this essay.

In the last decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty- first, historians of the United States largely turned away from the subject of money and politics, as they did from most stories that focus on political economy. The record of historically minded social scientists is better in this regard, though they, too, lost much of their earlier interest in questions of wealth, parties, and power in America. The neglect of political economy is now being remedied, largely as a result of recent work by new historians of American capitalism, much of it crystallising in the wake of the financial crash of 2008.2 Still, little work has been done recently on the story I reconstruct in the pages that follow: how political parties raised money, how they spent it, how they established links with groups with whom they wished to curry favor, how they managed their businesses, how they brought together their public and private roles, and how they handled the risks that elections perpetually caused to the security of their enterprises.3

The essay has four parts: the first explains why democracy in America made the raising and spending of money an obsession of those who sought political success; the second examines the organisations – the political parties and machines – that emerged as a result of this money imperative and reconstructs the techniques they developed to acquire and maintain political power; the third sheds light on why efforts to restrain the influence of private money on American democracy proved so feeble across a half century (1870s–1920s) of determined reform efforts; the fourth assesses what this history means for politics in America in 2018 and beyond.

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Across the last two generations, we have seen the emergence of an important literature on the history of suffrage in America. Most of that literature has focused on those excluded from voting – African Americans, women, the poor, immigrants, and those importing “alien” political ideologies into the United States.4 These exclusions denied substantial portions of the American population access to key rights, and must be factored into any analysis of democracy in America. Nevertheless, this literature should not cause us to lose sight of another feature of the American polity, from the time of Andrew Jackson forward: namely, that America, by the 1830s had become a mass democracy, meaning that very large portions of the adult male population had access to the right to vote. America became a mass democracy in the 1820s and 1830s, as a result of the Jacksonian revolution. By the 1850s, universal white manhood suffrage had become the standard in the various states.5 By this time, the number of electoral districts in the United States, the number of elective offices, the number and frequency of elections, the breadth of suffrage, and the number of new people seeking office exceeded that of any other republican polity in known history. Elections became America’s strongest claim to being a society in which the people ruled; they have kept this status ever since. Indeed, American history is punctuated by democratic electoral uprisings – among them Jacksonianism, populism, Progressivism, the New Deal, and Reaganism – that stand out as being among the most powerful and eloquent demonstrations of the people’s will.

The emergence of mass democracy in America signaled a departure from what the founders of the American republic had intended to create. The men who framed the US Constitution had not wanted by and large to create a republic with this suffrage breadth, this volume of elected officials, this frequency of elections, and this degree of popular control. Most expected the country to be governed the classical republican way: by wise, disinterested, and economically secure individuals who would handle the country’s business with virtue and public-mindedness.

For a while, it seemed as though the new American republic would indeed be able to operate according to these classical republican principles. The men who dominated politics in the early 1800s limited the vote to propertied white men, kept the ratio of elective to appointive offices relatively low, and 4 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate Historyuckers

reserved most important decisions for America’s “best men” – the merchants, plantation owners, lawyers, former generals, and other men of substance who sat in Congress and who would be called upon to resolve differences through face-to-face relationships and the application of virtue and wisdom to the country’s affairs. Poor and plebeian Americans outside Congress were expected to fall into line with Congressional decisions and to play their secondary part in a political system still permeated by the deference that was a powerful legacy of British rule. The preeminence of Congress’s “best men” is evident in the Congressional caucus that controlled nominations for the presidency and other national offices from 1800 through 1824 and in the designation of Congress as an Electoral College of last resort, as it became in the election of 1800.6

Americans today are still living with vestiges of this “best men” system, evident in a variety of political mechanisms meant to restrain “excess democracy,” including the Electoral College and the cloture rule in the Senate. But the challenges to this original system have also been deadly serious, as many groups of Americans have attempted to establish the kind of republic that they believed the Constitution had authorised: one in which “the people” really did rule.

The process of creating a broad and decentralised mass democracy in the 1830s and 1840s was unruly. So were many of its end products: elections that were often boisterous, more passionate than reasoned, and whose male participants indulged in drinking, swearing, rude public behavior, and occasionally, violence. Some observers were disturbed enough about the emerging electoral process in America to wonder whether it was really serving democracy or simply unleashing the passions of the mob.7 The smash-up at the White House that occurred after President Andrew Jackson’s 1829 inauguration seemed to presage what was to come. One early student of political parties pieced together the tale of the mob that invaded Jackson’s new residence in this way:

The crowd broke into the White House, filled all the rooms in a twinkling, pell-mell with the high dignitaries of the Republic and the members of the corps diplomatique; in the great reception hall men of the lower orders standing with their muddy boots on the damask- covered chairs were a sort of living image of the taking possession of Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 5

power by the new master. When refreshments were handed round…a tremendous scramble ensued, crockery, cups, and glasses were smashed to pieces, rough hands intercepted all the ices, so much so that nothing was left for the ladies….The fury with which the people flung itself on the refreshments was destined very soon to become highly symbolic.8

Even as they acknowledged that elections became an opportunity for drunken white men to riot, many Americans still believed that the electoral system emerging around Jackson’s presidency fulfilled the American Revolution’s democratic promise. Many other groups of Americans would find inspiration in the positive side of Jacksonian Democracy: the antislavery forces of the 1840s and 1850s that brought the Republican Party into being; the Populists and Progressives of the 1890s and 1900s who sought to take back America from the “interests” and return it to the “people”; and the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, which mobilized all kinds of poor people on the margins – urban and rural; Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish; white and black – to build an enduring New Deal Order.

The sheer size of the nineteenth-century American electorate combined with the radically decentralised system of electioneering (and the frequency with which elections occurred) made the system difficult to manage. Part of the attempt to solve the problem of electoral anarchy, or a surfeit of democracy, was to impose restrictions on suffrage; as Alexander Keyssar and others have demonstrated, these campaigns to limit the franchise have played a far more important role in shaping and in constraining US democracy than Americans usually acknowledge.9 But managing electoral anarchy required more than franchise restriction; it required as well institutions to manage the elections themselves – to find candidates, to promote them, and to get out the vote.

The Constitution contained no provision for funding this work; given the liberal conception of power that underlay the Constitution, by which I mean the conviction that the powers of the central government should be circumscribed, there was little sentiment for having the government step in to manage the unwieldy electoral system. Private organisations began appearing to take on the task that the government had refused. They are known to us as political parties. 6 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

These parties became public institutions in the sense that their leaders represented political constituencies, sat in public assemblies, and made public policy. The parties, as the political scientist Stephen Skowronek has written, also played a key role in binding “together a radically decentralized state and faction-ridden nation.”10 Along with the federal courts, they were the only political institutions to span all levels of American government. Parties developed brilliant mechanisms for containing the centrifugal forces unleashed by American federalism. They brought groups from every part of the country together in omnibus and national organisations. They allowed and even encouraged the circulation of party officials, supporters, and ideas through the different levels of government, thereby bringing individuals who worked in the diverse state and federal systems into frequent contact. In so doing, parties performed a vital public and governing service. They became, in essence, an indispensable fourth branch of government.

But the public service that political parties performed was extraordinarily labour intensive and costly. Because the Constitution authorised no public monies for this service, these nascent organisations turned to private sources for funds and also to selling access to government through patronage and graft. In the process, political parties gave private interests, especially monied ones, substantial opportunities to penetrate governing institutions. Let me briefly lay out how this occurred.

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Political parties undertook to recruit huge numbers of candidates, to nominate them, to raise money for them, to campaign for them, and to turn out the vote for them. They began to regularise elections, confining them to a more limited set of days.11 Complicating this task of regularisation was the maddeningly decentralised character of politics in America. Party organisations had to follow the federalist model, as all electoral contests occurred within the boundaries of individual states. This was true even of presidential elections, whose outcome was determined not by national vote totals but by the votes of electoral college delegations from each state. Thus to be nationally competitive, a party had to field a large and effectively autonomous organisation for each state; state party leaders, along with those from America’s largest cities, became the most important figures in a political party’s firmament. Somehow they had to find a way to knit a national party together from its constituent state and big city units.

21 Hubert Aquin, Trou de mémoire ([Montreal]: Le Cercle du Livre de France, 1968). Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 7

Matthew Josephson, a 1930s student of nineteenth-century politics, observed that party government acquired the form of a “colossal elective pyramid, a vast mechanical structure of primaries, conventions, committees, whose workings, wheel within wheel, whose numerous details, committee business, advance arrangements, were far too complex to remain subject to the casual will or decision of the masses of busy workaday citizens.”12 Writing about this party system when it was at its peak at the turn of the twentieth century, the English political analyst James Bryce noted that “it has now grown to be the second ruling force in the country, in some respects fully as powerful as the official administration which the Constitution of the Nation and of the several states have established.” In a development that Bryce and other European commentators found stunning, the parties constituted “a second, parallel government” that had arisen entirely unanticipated by the Constitution yet “directing that which the Constitution creates.”13

That this party system grew into the “parallel government” described by Bryce and Josephson reflected, too, the reluctance of the country’s “official administration” to extend its own direct dominion over the electoral system developing under party auspices. In a polity vigilant about fragmenting government power and limiting its formal scope, it seemed reasonable to hand off responsibility for elections to groups in civil society who wanted to make their voices heard. Such activity could even be seen as the apotheosis of democracy. But who would ensure that a system developed under private auspices would be made to serve public purposes? And, if the government declined to assume responsibility for funding what Josephson depicted as the “colossal…pyramid” of electoral machinery, who would? In the 1830s and 1840s, the second question was the more pressing of the two, and increasingly the answer focused on the work of a new type of politician, known in the nineteenth century as the “professional politician” to some, the “party boss” to others. We may also usefully describe him as a political entrepreneur and, later in the century, as a CEO.

These professional politicians devoted themselves to looking after the affairs of the party full time. They developed elaborate organisations that reached down to individuals in the smallest electoral unit in their municipality or state. They sponsored partisan newspapers to get out favorable notices on their candidates running for office; they raised money; they printed and distributed ballots, the expense of which, for much of the nineteenth century, had to be born by the parties themselves. In immigrant 8 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

areas, the parties facilitated the naturalisation of large numbers of the foreign born, often the moment they got off the boat. They turned out numerous supporters in public venues to celebrate and then to vote for their candidates, occasions that became ever more spectacular and carnivalesque as parties dueled with each other for electoral supremacy. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, no campaign in a major urban area could conclude without an elaborate and expensive torchlight parade involving thousands, even tens-of-thousands, of party supporters. Rural areas would host giant barbecues, eagerly serving up what The Nation in the late nineteenth century described as an “unlimited supply of roast ox for the multitude.”14

Party bosses also flooded election sites with ballot distributors to press their party’s ballot into the hands of willing voters. Other party representatives carried large sums of monies in their pockets to purchase the votes of “floaters,” individual citizens who were more interested in being paid for their vote than in casting a ballot on the basis of ideology or partisan loyalty. So many of these floaters sought to cast their votes twice (and thus be paid double) that they became known as “repeaters” in the parlance of nineteenth-century election professionals. The going rate per vote for much of the nineteenth century was $5 (approximately $125 in today’s dollars), with rates sometimes escalating to $7 ($165) or $10 ($250), and occasionally reaching the stratospheric level of $20 or $30 ($500-750).15 Still other party workers scrutinised polling places, making sure that individual voters cast the right ballot and that the ballots were deposited and then counted correctly. Electoral success became the obsession of the parties and the measure by which they expected to be judged.

As party bosses and their staffs made the party their life, they also made politics their livelihood. This meant finding ways in politics to generate income for themselves, ones that would be more robust and more secure than what elected positions themselves provided. Most professional politicians were not gentlemen or gentry; instead their origins lay in the lower and middling orders. Many, like Martin Van Buren of New York (the paradigmatic professional politician), had the profile of the classic American outsider, someone who gains power and influence not through the genteel means of education, apprenticeship, or marriage, but through energy, smarts, singlemindedness, boldness, and, if necessary, ruthlessness. Party bosses needed to generate income not just for themselves but for the Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 9

armies of political operatives on whom their electoral ambitions depended. Elections were labour-intensive operations, requiring the deployment of large numbers of workers.16

Because cash for party workers was often in short supply, the Jacksonians invented the spoils system, a scheme through which the victorious party declared its right to fill appointive positions it controlled with party members. This was a noncash way of paying off those who had worked on the party’s behalf. Spoils also became a mechanism to generate new streams of cash for the party. As early as the late 1830s, a House of Representatives committee reported a “‘regular taxation of public officers…for the support of party elections’ at the New York customs house.”17 By the time the Civil War had ended, party bosses had extended this mode of taxation, now known as “assessments,” to most individuals holding local, state, or federal patronage jobs. Aggressive assessment of public employees continued well into the twentieth century.18

Party bosses also began charging a substantial fee to those individuals who received plumb patronage positions or nominations for those positions. In New York City in the 1880s, individuals paid anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 ($250,000-375,000 in today’s dollars) for the right to run for aldermanic and sheriff posts and superior and common pleas court judgeships. Nominations to state senatorships, state judgeships, the US Congress, and County Clerk and Register positions began at $20,000–$25,000 ($500,000- 625,000) and went up from there.19

Paying these kinds of fees for the right to run for elective office hardly made sense unless one could generate cash from office-holding. Revenue came in a variety of ways. Prominently placed individuals in municipal departments of public works demanded kickbacks from contractors chosen to do city work; police officers extracted protection money from vice entrepreneurs operating in their precincts. Federal Supervisors of Internal Revenue, operating out of Department of the Treasury field offices, enjoyed especially lucrative opportunities as they went about collecting excise taxes on whisky and other hard liquors.20

For party men working at the federal level, imports constituted an even greater source of funds than whisky. Three quarters of the imports entering the United States annually came through the New York Custom 10 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

House in New York City. More than a thousand federal officials toiled there under the direction of the Collector of the Port of New York.21 A large majority of these employees paid an assessment on their salary, making the Custom House the single greatest source of party patronage in the country. Moreover, a significant number of employees generated additional revenue through the goods inspection process. They conspired with importing merchants to underreport the value of goods coming in, or they levied fines on merchants for misrepresenting the size and value of their cargoes. When an inspector caught one importer lying about a large shipment in the 1870s, the Custom House charged the importer more than a quarter of a million dollars in fines, to be paid to four employees, including Chester A Arthur, then the Port of New York Collector. It is little wonder that the future president became a wealthy man during his seven-year tenure (1871–1878) in this position.22

The extraction of these sums from manufacturers and merchants cannot be understood, however, simply in terms of the personal venality of spoilsmen. Arthur knew that he had to pass along to the state and national Republican Parties a portion of the assessments and payoffs he had collected. At each state Republican convention, he reserved a hotel suite at his “own” expense and filled it with food, drink, and cigars. Here Republican nabobs would gather to plot party strategy, and to figure out how to raise more cash and where to inject it. Political parties, in other words, had come to depend on an extensive system of extralegal and sometimes illegal financing to fund their activities. The origins of this system lay in the vast and decentralised system of electioneering that the framers of the Constitution had not anticipated and for which they had designed no legal mechanism for funding. Political parties arose to bring coherence to this anarchic system and to raise the large sums of money required to make it work.

We don’t often pause to ponder the costs and labour requirements of this entrepreneurial electoral system. The premier student of political parties in nineteenth-century America, Moisei Ostrogorski, estimated that by the 1890s, “the regular and permanent machinery” of party organisations involved as many as 900,000 to 1,000,000 individuals actively working on the parties’ behalf, out of a total electorate of fifteen to sixteen million. At election time, this one million swelled to four million, or “one militant…to every four or five electors.”23 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 11

In New York state, a Republican machine run by Thomas Platt employed an estimated 10,000 to 13,000 regulars at a cost of almost $20 million ($500 million) per year.24 The Republican party machine in neighbouring Pennsylvania counted 20,000 state citizens on its rolls, including those who held patronage positions in Pennsylvania government and those non- government workers whom the machine paid to get out the vote. At 20,000, the Pennsylvania Republican party workforce was larger than those of most US corporations of the era, and it was two-thirds the size of the one assembled by the Pennsylvania Railroad, then the largest corporation in the world. Maintaining this army of party workers cost its boss, Matt Quay, an estimated $24 million ($600 million) per year.25 New York City’s Tammany Hall was an even more extravagant operation than Quay’s Pennsylvania machine, sending out at election time an estimated 20,000–25,000 workers to swarm over New York City’s 812 election districts.26

Few election workers were doing this labour for free. Most expected to be paid either with wages or a party patronage position (especially one that allowed its holder to generate graft income from it) or both. Providing such a large number of patronage positions was not easy for a political machine to accomplish; but the cost was worth it in light of the benefits that flowed from winning electoral contests.

The organisational systems developed by machines to administer their wide-ranging and complex operations were as sophisticated as those deployed by the country’s most impressive private corporations. Indeed Gilded Age political machines rivaled the great corporate entities in size and influence. They were themselves business entities, obsessed with inputs and outputs. The inputs were the voters. A major task of every political machine was to ensure that the flow of this “raw material” was steady and that its “quality” was reliable. The outputs were the products of elections: patronage jobs, contracts, franchises, city services, graft. The inputs (the voters) cost money. Output brought in money. The managers of these parties, in reality the CEOs of political enterprises, spent their time balancing inputs and outputs, investments and revenues, not so much in the interest of profit maximisation as in the interest of staying in power. Their work was political economy of the truest sort.

This dedication to fundraising does not mean that political parties can be understood simply as slaves to the “monied interest.” Parties were complex 12 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

political organisations whose origins predated the full-fledged development of capitalism in the United States and whose purposes and functions remained independent of those governing private corporations. Indeed, one vector of late-nineteenth-century reform expressed the frustration of business leaders who felt unable to make government by machine conform sufficiently to their wishes.27 Nevertheless, the machines’ incessant search for money widened substantially the access of private interests to public funds, public policy, and public power. This access helps us to understand why foreign observers of American politics in the late nineteenth century were frequently shocked by what Daniel Rodgers has called the “porosity” of American urban governments to private influence.28 The roots of this porosity lie not in the moral deficiencies of individual men but in the deficiencies of a Constitution that had made no provision for funding what had become a very expensive and decentralised system of elections.

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Graft and corruption became the obsession of reform-minded groups who themselves lived through the era of machine politics. Indeed, other than the Civil War and industrialisation itself, there was arguably no more important issue in late-nineteenth-century US politics than the corruption of public institutions by the allied force of party machines and private economic interests. The political passion of many groups of reformers, from the Mugwumps through the Progressives and beyond, became to institute reforms to wall the state off from society. Just to glance at a list of anti- corruption measures enacted into law sometime between the 1870s and the 1920s is to appreciate the energy devoted to this task. These reforms include the following: the creation of a civil service, first in the federal government, defined as jobs in the government that could not be influenced by patronage considerations; the introduction of the Australian, or secret, ballot to prevent parties from unduly influencing the votes of individual citizens; the assumption by governments of the task of printing and distributing ballots and other costs associated with voting; limiting the size of campaign contributions that candidates and corporations could make to political parties; embracing the initiative, referendum, recall, and the direct election of US senators as mechanisms to strengthen the citizen-government relation and diminish the influence of political parties on policy and public appointments; the mass disenfranchisement of “suspect” voters, a movement epitomized by stripping Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 13

the vote away from the vast majority of African Americans in the South and sizable number of immigrants in the North; embracing women’s suffrage in the hope that it would inject “womanly virtue” into a system corroded by “male corruption”; reorganising municipal and state systems of taxation and expenditure to make them more transparent and accountable and less vulnerable to exploitation by political machines; and the substitution of an appointed officialdom of “disinterested” public servants for corrupt elected officials who were deemed to be too beholden to party bosses.29

These reforms, and the groups of reformers who stood behind them, exerted pressure on the political parties and political machines. But most reforms did not go far enough. Money in campaigns seemed like a pool of water, able to force its way through any hole or structural weakness in the dam that reformers were building to prevent private funds from swamping democratic practice.30 Few reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seemed willing or able to contemplate the radical measure of drying up this pool completely by insisting that all campaign expenditures be paid for exclusively by government. Henry George seemed to be heading in that direction when he observed, in 1883, that the “great sums for election purposes” required by political parties threatened democracy itself. George wanted America to become a place in which “any citizen may run for office without expense.”31 The logic of this argument would seem to have pushed George toward an idea as bold and as simple as the “single tax” idea that had already brought him fame: namely, that government itself bear the entire cost of elections.32 But George’s proposed remedies were timid and piecemeal: he believed that the assumption by government of the costs of election machinery would cancel one large set of expenditures, and that the government could greatly reduce the costs of the second set (campaigning) through a ban on a few pricey practices: torchlight processions, candidates treating all saloon customers to a round of drinks, and halls charging fees for political meetings.33

Was a completely publicly financed system of elections simply too radical a measure for George or anyone else to contemplate? Were the sheer number of electoral units in the American republic and the frequency of elections within each of those units simply too great to permit one to imagine how government could possibly pay for and administer every electoral contest? Or would government’s entry into this area of politics have involved such extensive controls on what could be spent or such arbitrary distinctions about 14 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

who would be eligible for government money and who not so as to violate constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection? In searching through political debates during the Progressive era, one can find a politician here and there – sometimes even a prominent one – willing to declare that private financing of campaigns ought to be eliminated altogether. But this movement never seemed to gain momentum.34 In 1909, the State of Colorado actually did pass a law declaring that the “expenses of conducting campaigns to elect State, district and county officers at general elections shall be paid only by the State and by the candidates themselves.” The contributions of the candidates were to be limited to 25–40 percent of the salary for the office for which they were running.35 This measure never took effect, however, as the state Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional without even according the law a full and public review.

Not even in the ranks of labour or the left does one discern a loud cry for a ban on private money in elections. The left focused instead on creating socialist or labour parties that would be by definition free (or so it believed) of the taint of capitalist money, and that would work for a future in which a broad redistribution of wealth would render controls on campaign expenditures superfluous.36 The left offered no panacea for politics in the here and now, however, as the reformer William Ivins shrewdly pointed out as early as 1887. For a third party to remain competitive with the Democrats and Republicans across a series of elections, Ivins had argued, it was necessary for it “to have a very complex Machine, and frequently a very expensive one.”37 This insight eluded the socialist William Weyl who in 1913 rejected a proposal for government-funded campaigns in favor of one that the Socialist party had already instituted: raising campaign funds through subscription fees levied on party members.38 How fees from a hundred thousand odd (and mostly poor) socialists could counter the millions of dollars that a score of robber barons could throw at elections was a question that Weyl did not see the need to explore.39

In place of complete bans on private funds, reformers hoped that a combination of partial bans and transparency requirements would significantly reduce the influence of money on elections. The Progressives, in particular, had great faith in the power of information: with clarifying statistics on the extent of private and corporate underwriting of campaigns in hand, the American people (Progressives believed) would rise up and throw out of office all those who had allowed themselves to be purchased Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 15

in this way. The vigour and honesty of American politics would thereby be restored. A close inspection of these Progressive laws reveals, however, that they were shot too full of holes. “The fact is,” wrote the political observer Frank R Kent in the 1920s on the eve of one such law’s passage, “that nowhere in the country has there been devised a legal method of effectually limiting the amount of money that may be spent in political fights. No law has yet been enacted through which the politicians cannot drive a four- horse team.”40

The perceived failure at efforts to curtail the influence of money on elections helps to explain why the democratic upheaval that began to take shape soon after Frank Kent wrote these words, through a political movement of working-class and poor Americans coalescing around Franklin D Roosevelt, expressed no interest in continuing the fight for campaign finance reform. I have in mind, of course, the labor insurgency of the 1930s, led by a new and quite radical federation, the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO). How, we might ask, did the CIO handle the question of campaign finance during the years of its insurgency? Though its rhetoric was deeply anti-corporate, it did not call for limits to be placed on private contributions to political parties; nor did it insist on public funding for presidential campaigns. Instead, it dedicated itself to raising sums of money large enough to enable the Democrats to compete successfully against the Republican Party, whose coffers had been filled by contributions from America’s wealthiest individuals and families.

The CIO believed that it could deposit enough money in Democratic Party coffers and put enough highly motivated election worker volunteers in the streets to neutralize the Republican Party’s natural financial advantage. It had acceded to a kind of monied pluralism as the basis of American politics. In this system, any group could bring its money to the election table and place its bets on the candidates of its own choosing. If a player with smaller pockets played his hand well enough, he could win. In the short term, and in the highly unusual political circumstances brought on by the Great Depression, this was a clever strategy. In the 1930s and 1940s, it brought the labour movement an impressive string of victories. But the strategy faced much greater obstacles over the long term, since the funds that it would be able to put into play election after election would likely pale beside those accessible to the corporations and the rich. 16 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

New Dealers understood this financial vulnerability all too well. After the Democratic Party raised sums of money in 1928 and 1932 that almost matched what the Republicans had assembled, the money gap widened substantially in 1936, when the Democrats campaign chest of $5.2 million amounted to less than 60 percent of what the Republicans had raised. The sharply drawn class lines of the 1936 election had prompted a precipitous drop in campaign contributions to the Democratic Party from bankers and Wall Street brokers, who were now giving more than 90 percent of their election money to the Republican Party.41 As important as the labour movement was to that election, the amount of money it raised for Roosevelt was less than what five families – the du Ponts, the Mellons, the Pews, the Rockefellers, and the Sloans – had given to the Republican candidate, Alf Landon.42 Labour money simply wasn’t enough to sustain a campaign, which is why Roosevelt and his advisers, even during the heyday of the Democratic Party’s “class politics” period, were always open to working with other groups that could bring additional money, election workers, and votes into the Democratic Party.

This need for additional campaign monies helps to explain the New Dealers’ willingness to cooperate with political machines, several of which gained new life during the New Deal era as they converted job-rich New Deal programmes into new sources of patronage. The Democratic Party of those years was equally solicitous of segments of America’s business elite. It could not compete across the board with the Republican Party for support of the country’s business community, but it could make headway through a focus on discreet portions of this community that had reason to be drawn to FDR’s Democratic Party. Brewers and distillers owed the Democratic Party a big debt for the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Tobacco growers and manufacturers (such as R J Reynolds), almost all of whom were in the Southeast, appreciated the New Deal’s large investments in the South’s agricultural and infrastructural development and its respect for the region’s economic and racial hierarchies. Department store owners in the Northeast, such as the Filene, Gimbel, and Straus families (owner of Macy’s), had been persuaded by their exposure to a progressive brand of urban politics in their region that the future of the American economy lay with a high-wage, mass-consumption economy that the New Deal had pledged to bring into being. In New York City and state in particular, this brand of urban politics also opened doors to well- heeled Catholics and Jews who, despite their economic achievements, found making headway in the Protestant-dominated worlds of Wall Street and the Republican Party tough going. Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 17

When Franklin Roosevelt moved from the governor’s mansion in New York to the White House in 1933, he brought the cultural openness of the Empire State’s progressive politics with him to Washington. That openness helped to draw Wall Street firms with Jewish leadership, such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, into the Democratic orbit; three thousand miles away, Roosevelt exercised a similar influence among Jewish movie makers who were reshaping US cinema. Finally, the Roosevelt Administration found a surprising depth of support within the Texas business elite, both among oilmen, whose location in a capital-intensive industry with an international orientation led them to believe that they could thrive in a New Deal state, and among construction magnates, such as the Brown Brothers of Brown and Root, whose early support for the young Congressman Lyndon Johnson enabled them to garner lucrative New Deal contracts to build dams and generate electrical power in Texas.43

Roosevelt continued to solicit funds from portions of America’s business elite throughout the entire period during which rhetorically he castigated the wealthy as “money changers” who had betrayed the country and who had to be kept out of the “high seats” they had formerly occupied in “the temple” of American civilisation.44 Continuing to seat them at the table meant giving them a role in shaping Democratic Party legislation. The New Deal, as a result, developed a politics that mixed populist policy and business opportunity, and this mixture limited the possibilities for populist, or working-class, reform. Business interests were integral to, and shaped the politics of, the Democratic Party coalition throughout the New Deal era. Money does not always rule. Its power is not guaranteed. Democratic insurgencies always occur. But the gains of insurgents can be hard to preserve in an electoral system constantly in need of more cash.

***************

The ability of private, monied interests to penetrate American politics has always been an issue larger than the morality and rectitude of individual politicians; it is grounded in structural features of the American electoral system, in particular its decentralised character, the number and frequency of its elections, and in the absence of any provision in the Constitution for providing public funds for this system, a constant need for private monies. The democratic nature of this electoral system always created opportunities for electoral upheaval and democratic assertiveness: from 18 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

the days of Andrew Jackson in the nineteenth century to the days of FDR in the twentieth to the campaigns to elect Barack Obama in the twenty-first century, democratic movements found in electoral contests a way of making themselves heard in American politics and of insisting that America be bent to their – the people’s – will. The Constitution, they insisted, demanded nothing less. But these democratic uprisings have proved difficult to sustain over time. As “normalcy” returns, the powerful structural features of the American state have made one insurgent movement after another look to elites for funds to sustain the movement’s electoral momentum. Meanwhile, uprooting the monied basis of this system has seemed too difficult a challenge to undertake, which is why this campaign made such little progress even during the period of time, 1870s to 1920s, when political corruption attracted as much, if not more, attention than any other issue in American politics.

The Citizens United decision has made the problem of money in politics worse. But the problem was a serious one prior to 2010. In 2008, for example, the Obama campaign attempted to diffuse the influence of big money within its ranks by assembling one of the most innovative, comprehensive, and technologically sophisticated systems of grassroots fundraising in American history. The amount raised from small donors, both in absolute and relative terms, was extraordinary. But the Obama campaign also spent more money than any of its predecessors, Democrat or Republican. To be “free” to raise and spend so much cash, the Obama campaign declined to accept government funds and the restrictions on private campaign fundraising that the acceptance of public monies now entails.45 By thus increasing its dependence on private financing, Obama gave opportunities to bankers, Wall Streeters, and others to exercise influence in his administration. Any analysis of the Obama presidency, beginning with how the Obama administration handled the banking crisis of 2008, must take such influence into account. Of course, Obama and his machine lieutenants attempted, in 2012, to remobilise his grassroots supporters and to persuade them to pitch in with new contributions, so as to keep the “interests” at bay. But the history of democracy in America demonstrates how hard this is to do over the long term.

One positive effect of the Citizens United decision of 2010 has been to sharpen, once again, anger in the United States at the influence of money on elections and politics. In 2016, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 19

articulated and mobilised that anger. Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, made a decision early in his campaign to accept only small donations. Remarkably, he raised $43 million for his run through the Democratic primaries from donations averaging a mere $27 each.46 Sanders actually raised more money than his heavily bankrolled opponent, Hillary Clinton, for stretches of the campaign. There is no doubt that Sanders inspired many young voters to enter politics for the first time, while persuading older, cynical voters to re-engage with America’s democratic process.

Amidst the media circus that daily surrounds the Trump administration, it is easy to forget that the Trump campaign began in 2015 as populist revolt within the Republican Party. Trump tilted hard against neoliberal orthodoxies within the party celebrating free trade and the unrestricted movement of capital, goods, and labour across America’s borders – policies, he alleged, that benefited elites at the expense of the average (white) American working man. He condemned the nation’s capital as a place dominated by corrupt interests, and pilloried his opponents in the Republican primary as “little” men who had sold themselves to powerful, billionaire backers. Trump presented himself as the only candidate able to speak the truth about American politics. His own wealth was so great (so he claimed) that no one could exert financial influence over him. Only he was in a position to drain what he liked to call the Washington swamp.

That Trump was then (and still is) involved in all kinds of political deals that may well be corrupt, and that his own financial independence has likely been compromised over the years by a high level of indebtedness to Russian billionaires, should not be allowed to obscure the populist platform on which Trump ran. Nor should we think that a full exposure of links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and punishment of those who forged those links, will by itself restore America to a pristine democratic state. Imagine for a moment that Clinton had won in 2016 and was now president. Clinton had once been an insurgent herself. But her long, bruising career in politics taught her many things, none more important than this: money is the lifeblood of American democracy. To be victorious in a presidential election required a candidate to wage an eighteen-month campaign, three quarters of it fought out in state-by-state primaries in which outcomes were often decided by incomprehensibly small numbers of voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and elsewhere. A successful campaign of this sort, Clinton had long ago concluded, required endless amounts of cash, deep pocketed donors, and a 20 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

willingness to give one’s financial angels access to political power. A Clinton victory in November 2016 would have advanced a number of important causes: equality between men and women; a broadening of opportunity across America’s colour line; a just plan of immigration reform; and an accelerating commitment to protecting the planet from rising temperatures. But it would not have solved the problem of money in American politics and its compromising effects on American democracy. To the contrary, Clinton’s own career exemplifies how costly success in America’s democratic system has become.

Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 21

Notes This essay is adapted from Chapter 5 of my recent book, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

1. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). 2. For exemplary work in this new history of American capitalism, see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Nelson Lichtenstein The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Julia Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest For An Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012). See, also, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 3. For an important exception to this neglect of money and politics, see Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 4. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Linda K Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Nancy F Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Books, 2012); Reeve Huston, “Rethinking 1828: The Emergence of Competing Democracies in the United States,” in Democracy, Participation, and Contestation: Civil Society, Governance, and the Future of Liberal Democracy, ed. Emmanuel Avril and Johann N Neem (New York: Routledge, 2015), 13–24; Andrew W Robertson, “Democracy: America’s Other ‘Peculiar Instituiton,’” in Democracy, Participation, and Contestation: Civil Society, Governance, and the Future of Liberal Democracy, 69–80. 5. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 348-349. See, also, Gordon S Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005). 6. Gary J Kornblith and John M Murrin, “The Dilemmas of Ruling Elites in Revolutionary America,” in Ruling America, 27–63; Matthew Josephson, The Politicos, 1865–1896 (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 64–68; Leonard D White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (New York: Macmillan, 1951); Leonard D White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829– 1861 (New York: Macmillan, 1954). 22 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

7. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 8. Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (New York: Macmillan, 1902), II: 47. 9. Keyssar, Right to Vote. 10. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New Administrative State: The Expansion of National Adminisrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 26. 11. Joel H Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 82; Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 516; Richard McCormick, “Political Development and the Second Party System,” in The American Party Systems, 2nd edition, ed. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 90–116; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Short Happy Life of American Political Parties,” in Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 256–276; E E Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1942). 12. Josephson, Politicos, 69. 13. James Bryce, preface to Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, by Ostrogorski, 1:xlii. 14. The Nation 1204 (July 26, 1888), 66. Richard L McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); McCormick, “Political Development and the Second Party System,” in The American Party Systems, 90–111; Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991); Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics; Ronald P Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Robert Vincent Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Josephson, Politicos; Bensel, The American Ballot Box. 15. Thomas E Will, “Political Corruption: How Best to Oppose,” The Arena 10 (November 1894), 846; Jesse Macy, Party Organization and Machinery (New York: The Century Company, 1904), 220–222; Louise Overacker, Money in Elections (1932; New York: Arno Press, 1974), 31. I have multiplied these actual nineteenth-century figures by a factor of 25 to give a rough approximation of what the purchasing power of these sums would be in 2018 dollars. Between 1840 and 1890, the value of one dollar was worth anywhere from 19 to 31 times the value of one dollar today; www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/, accessed 15 February 2018. 16. Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics; Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party; John Niven, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Donald B Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren (New York: Times Books, 2005); Edward Morse Shepard, Martin Van Buren (1899; reprint, New York: AMS, 1972). Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 23

17. United States Congress, House, Committee of Investigation on the Subject of the Defalcations of Samuel Swartout and Others and the Correction of the Returns of Collectors and Receivers of the Public Money, Report No. 313 (25th Congress, 3rd sess., 1839), 249–250; Robert E Mutch, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts: The Making of Federal Campaign Finance Law (New York: Praeger, 1988), xvi. 18. City of Philadelphia, Department of Public Works, The Political Assessment of Officeholders, a Report on the System as Practised by the Republican Organization in the City of Philadelphia, 1883–1913, M L Cooke, director. 19. William Mills Ivins, Machine Politics and Money in Elections in New York City (1887; New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1970), 54–57. 20. John McDonald, Secrets of the Great Whiskey Ring (Chicago: Belford Clarke and Co., 1880); C K Yearley, The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860-1920 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970). 21. G F Howe, Chester A. Arthur: A Quarter-Century of Machine Politics (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1934), 49; William Hartman, “Politics and Patronage: The New York Customs’ House, 1852–1901,” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1952), 352. 22. Josephson, Politicos, 94–95. 23. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, II: 285–86, 292. 24. Yearley, The Money Machines, 104. 25. Ibid., 104-5; Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865– 1900 (New York: Knopf, 2007), passim. 26. M R Werner, Tammany Hall (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co, 1928); Gustavas Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, 2nd ed. (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1917); Ivins, Machine Politics and Money in Elections in New York City, 58, passim; Bensel, American Ballot Box, 11-13. 27. Schattschneider, Party Government, 134–142. 28. Daniel T Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 152–159. 29. On civil service reform, see Carl Russell Fish, The Civil Service and the Patronage (1904; New York: Russsell and Russell, Inc., 1963); Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961); Margaret Susan Thompson, The “Spider Web”: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). On other efforts to reform the political system, see John W Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: the Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 87–221; Yearley, Money Machines, chapters 6–10; Robert H Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Arthur Stanley Link and Richard L McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983). On the maternalist politics of suffrage, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Sonya Michel and Seth Koven, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993). 24 Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History

30. Chester Lloyd Jones, “Spoils and the Party,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 64 (March 1916), 66–76. 31. Henry George, “Money and Elections,” North American Review 136 (Feb 1883), 201, 206. 32. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (San Francisco: W.M. Hinton & Co., 1879). 33. George, “Money and Elections.” 34. No one took seriously the 1904 call by Tammany lieutenant William Bourke Cockran for the federal government to pay for campaign expenses itself and thereby “do away with any excuse for soliciting large subscriptions of money.” Nor did President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 call on Congress to provide “an appropriation for the proper and legitimate expenses of each of the great national parties” fare any better among those who had dedicated themselves to the cause of campaign finance reform. Indeed, one such reformer, Perry Belmont, dismissed Roosevelt’s “radical measure” as a ploy to distract Congress from passing campaign disclosure laws that were likely to embarrass this anti-trust president by revealing his own dependence, in the election of 1904, on big contributions from a small number of corporate donors. Mutch, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts, 35; Theodore Roosevelt, “Seventh Annual Message,” December 3, 1907, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3779 (accessed August 6, 2009). See also US Congress, Senate, “Campaign Contributions: Testimony before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Privileges and Elections, June 14, 1912, to February 25, 1913, Pursuant to S. Res. 79,” 62nd Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), passim; Henry F Pringle,Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 357–358. 35. Jones, “Spoils and the Party,” 74; Colorado State Legislature, Session Laws of Colorado, “An Act Concerning Campaign Expenses of Political Parties and Contributing Thereto,” Ch. 141 (1909), 303–305. 36. Overacker, Money in Elections, 202. 37. Ivins, Machine Politics, 53. 38. Walter E Weyl, “The Democratization of Party Finance,” American Political Science Review 7 (February 1913), 178–82. 39. He may have been transfixed by the example of the German Social Democratic Party, which used this system to raise millions of Deutsche marks from its multi-million person membership. See Overacker, Money in Elections, 145, 201. 40. Frank R Kent, The Great Game of Politics: An Effort to Present the Elementary Human Facts about Politics, Politicians, and Political Machines, Candidates and Their Way, for the Benefit of the Average Citizen(1940; New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1923), 114. 41. Overacker, “Campaign Funds in the Presidential Election of 1936,” American Political Science Review 31 (June 1937): 485. 42. Ibid., 492. 43. Ibid., 487–90; Thomas Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” and Steve Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question,’” both in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3–31, 55–84; Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, “Introduction,” in Ruling America, 22–24; Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 468; Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 264–84; Robert A Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (New York: Knopf, 1982), 531-671. Democracy and Money in America: An Intimate History 25

44. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Comp. Samuel I Rosenman. Vol II. (New York: Random House, 1938), 12. 45. Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Forgoes Public Funds in First for Major Candidate,” The New York Times, 20 June 2008; www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/ politics/20obamacnd.html, accessed 15 February 2018. 46. Clare Foran, “Bernie Sanders’s Big Money,” The Atlantic, 1 March 2016; www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-fundraising/471648/, accessed 14 March 2018. PREVIOUS EAAS ECCLES PLENARY LECTURE

2012 Therapeutic Communities and Community Healthcare in 1960s America, by Martin Halliwell

2014 Lincoln’s Just Laughter: Humour and Ethics in the Civil War Union, by Richard Carwardine

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