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Journal of Policy History 14.1 (2002) 1-3



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Introduction: Does Money Buy Policy?

Paula Baker


Money in politics is a funny thing. By legend and cliché, money is the "mother's milk of politics," that which keeps party machinery working and campaigns running. It is also the focus of generations of suspicion and complaint. From the advent of the "spoils system" in the early nineteenth century to the PACs and "soft money" of today, there appear to be few takers for the proposition that money does not stain what ought to be the majesty and purity of politics. Money, unlike the suffrage, introduces inequality among citizens. Money gives its favored candidates and policies an unfair advantage for the public's attention. Money is the appearance, if not the fact, of corruption.

Such sentiments may be widely yet lightly held. Only on rare occasions--perhaps during the early twentieth-century furor over the connections between business and politics--has the matter of money and politics seemed to ascend fairly high on the scale of public priorities. Rather, it is an issue that has animated people in or near the political action. Even then, it has usually taken dramatic events--President James Garfield's assassination and Watergate, for example--to bring reforms into focus. For the wider public, the idea that money has too large a role in American politics rests alongside the sense that there are more important issues.

In this historians perhaps mirror public sentiment. While campaign finance has been a fairly consistent interest of political scientists, few historians have given the subject sustained attention. Matthew Josephson told lurid stories about the venality and greed of late nineteenth-century politicians (which Mark Walgren Summers, in this issue and elsewhere, places in a more realistic light); tales of Mark Hanna's fund-raising wizardry are a standard feature of [End Page 1] accounts of the election of 1896. Campaign finance merits some discussion in a great number of accounts of elections and politicians, but Clifton K. Yearley's 1970 The Money Machines stands out as a sustained treatment of the subject. 1

Still, there are signs of growing interest in the history of campaign finance, and that history ought to be of interest to policy historians. A few questions emerge immediately. Does money buy policy in a direct way? Studies of contemporary legislators cast doubt on the idea of systemic influence. The essays in this collection suggest that historically, too, a few politicians may have been on the take, but that selling policy to the highest bidder was not standard procedure. Some early nineteenth-century legislators worried about the corrupting power of patronage and, to a lesser extent, assessments of government workers (though not enough of them did so to block the practices). Later in the nineteenth century, newspaper editors retold wild stories about the wealth of the opposition, but party leaders got wealthy benefactors to open their wallets with difficulty. And then, their luck was best with businessmen who already supported the party's program. The Franklin Roosevelt 1936 campaign rejected contributions aimed at lessening labor's influence on the Democratic party. 2

It is nonetheless hard to put aside the assumption that large amounts of money must somehow have a loud voice. If nothing else, the time it takes to raise money must have some impact--perhaps in dissuading good people from running for office; perhaps in taking unpopular positions. Democrats and Republicans alike in the 1960s and 1970s decried the amount of money they needed to raise and the time they had to spend raising it--time that otherwise, presumably, would go to the public's work. Nineteenth-century candidates, Summers points out, also needed to pay their share to their party's coffers. Earlier in the century, personal wealth seemed perhaps even more important to a political career. How the fund-raising barrier to entry to a political career stacks up against others--say, a willingness to campaign and seem to get nowhere near the respect deserved--remains unclear.

To put the money and political influence question another way, has reform...

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