Curbing Campaign Cash: Henry Ford, Truman Newberry, and the Politics of Progressive Reform by Paula Baker (review)

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision (2010), which affirmed that independent political expenditures by corporations and unions are protected as free speech, led many people to the conviction that the need for genuine campaign-finance reform had reached crisis proportions. Baker's Curbing Campaign Cash examines the initial campaign-finance regulations, vividly demonstrating that the current crisis about the role of money in politics took root in many of the Progressive Era's federal finance regulations that continue to shape ongoing reform attempts.

Baker's focus is the 1918 race between industrialist Thomas Newberry and auto giant Henry Ford for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate. Astonished that he had lost, Ford charged that Newberry essentially bought the seat, an accusation upheld when Newberry was convicted under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. That conviction was overturned, however, when the Supreme Court ruled in Newberry v. United States that Congress had no jurisdiction to regulate primary elections, a decision that impeded subsequent efforts for campaign finance reform and allowed southern states to create whites-only primaries.

In Baker's hands, what could have been a deadly dry, technical, and confusing story becomes a lively and provocative tale about the role of money, power, and hubris in American politics. Baker asks the hard questions: Does big spending threaten free government and the republic? Even if vast campaign spending is legal, is it ethical? Do spending limits encourage equality among candidates and protect voters from too much "seductive" publicity, or are such reforms "less an urgent democratic project" than "a masquerade, with plain political self-interest disguised as the public good" (7)? Is big spending more wasteful than corrupt, or even influential? Should a nation that annually spends billions on soft drinks, movies, and other luxuries "begrudge campaign managers a few million to elect a president" (148)?

Baker incorporates a variety of disciplines to explore these questions fully. This inclusive and diversified approach makes Curbing Campaign Cash particularly compelling. In laying out the legal, economic, and political history of campaign finance reform, especially in the chapter entitled "Laws and Effects," Baker details the roles of the press and of advertising, the power of personality, and the history of business. She also impressively untangles the philosophical and ethical goals of the reformers during the Progressive Era who first tried to tame to beast that modern elections were becoming.

Baker's writing style is a delight. She speaks, for example, of campaign expenditure reports "filled out with a whimsical understanding of bookkeeping" (61), and describes a candidate's position on prohibition as "slightly moist" (142). What she fails to provide, not surprisingly, are answers to the provocative questions that she raises concerning the practical and moral conflicts that attend campaign finance. Instead, she presents the contest between Ford and Newberry as the initial test of federal campaign finance-reform regulations, and a crystallization of the ongoing problems surrounding the role of money in political campaigns.