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The First Federal Campaign Finance Bills
- Penn State University Press
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ROBERT E. MUTCH The First Federal Campaign Finance Bills Early in 1839, a congressional investigation into campaign fund-raising at the U.S. customhouse in New York first brought to public attention a problem in democracy that we still are trying to solve: Who should pay for our politics? By 1839, the deferential political system of the colonial era, in which government was the almost exclusive province of the old mercantile and landed elites, was well on its way out, at least in the North. Under that system, the upper classes provided the great majority of candidates for elective office and candidates paid their own campaign expenses. The transition to a more democratic system—of broader suffrage, organized parties, and professional politicians who did not have personal or family wealth— required a new way of financing campaigns. As politicians were no longer people who had money, they had to raise money. One of those new ways was revealed by the House investigating committee. Shortly after Andrew Jackson became president, the Democratic party, or at least his faction of that new organization, began raising money from U.S. government employees by assessing them a small percentage of their salaries. This was the beginning of what became perhaps the largest source of campaign funds for both political parties in the nineteenth century. Political assessments were made possible by the still-evolving spoils system, which was itself an indirect way of funneling public funds into party treasuries. Response to this new fund-raising practice will be examined here by looking at congressional debates over the first attempts to prohibit it. But assessments were not the primary concern even of the first bills to address them. Those bills were aimed instead at imposing much broader restrictions on the political activity of government employees. Calls for such restrictions were not new at all. Attempts to curb electioneering by government employees go back to the first years of the American republic, and more than a ROBERT E. MUTCH 31 century before that in Britain. The fear then was not of parties and spoils but of patronage used to create subservient legislatures and build unchecked executive power. Assessments on government employees may have been new, but they were first seen as an incremental expansion of some very old practices. Which is why some very old arguments were used against them. Congressional debates on the first campaign finance bills did raise some issues that look very much like those in today’s reform debate—complaints of excessive government power, warnings about business and foreign money in elections , and appeals to the First Amendment—but in other ways they would not have been out of place in seventeenth-century England. “Regular taxation . . . for the support of party elections” Before 1839. Although political assessments did not become public knowledge until the House investigating committee released its report on the New York customhouse, they were well known to political insiders. Senator Daniel Webster delivered one of the first attacks on the practice in 1834, going out of his way to do so in a report on an appropriations bill. It is worth noting, though, that he did not charge that government employees actually were being assessed. What he said was that if government officers were contributing “by regular and proportionate rate . . . to objects of a party character . . . nothing can be [a] greater abuse of official station.” Webster’s caution on this point suggests that the practice still was so new, or so well concealed, that he had no evidence to back up an accusation.1 John Barton Derby showed no such caution in his 1835 account of his experiences as a deputy surveyor of the customs. He claimed that in the summer of 1830, he and other officers at the Boston customhouse were assessed about 5 percent of their salaries. The purpose of the assessment was to help repay debts incurred by the editor of the Jacksonian newspaper, the Boston Statesman, for its efforts in the 1828 presidential campaign. This apparently was the first time “the Tax”—Derby’s term—had been imposed in Boston, and by his account it was not well received. The idea was first mentioned at a meeting of government officers in Boston. Because those officers “obtained their offices through the distinguished exertions of the Statesman and the party which sustained it,” it was “incumbent” on them to “club together, and annually, by an assessment” help retire the debt. Unfortunately for [3.17.6.75] Project MUSE...