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INTRODUCTION
The Tillman Act of 1907(1) barred corporations from contributing money to political campaigns and was the first federal law restricting corporate involvement in the electoral process. The law marked the birth of federal campaign finance law,2 which ever since has embraced restrictions on corporate political activity.3 What type of corruption is threatened by corporate money in elections to warrant this long-standing tradition in campaign finance law?
The prevailing wisdom is that the corporate contribution ban and subsequent regulation of corporate involvement in elections were motivated primarily by the desire to limit the power and influence of big business. In Federal Election Commission v. Beaumont,4 which upheld the constitutionality of the federal contribution ban as applied to a nonprofit advocacy corporation, Justice David Souter's majority opinion stated that the Tillman Act "grew out of a popular feeling in the late 19th century that aggregated capital unduly influenced politics . . . . [T]he momentum was for elections free from the power of money . . . ."5 In Corf v. Ash,6 an earlier Supreme Court decision that held that the federal contribution ban created no private right of action for shareholders, the Court explained that the Tillman Act was intended "to eliminate the apparent hold on political parties which business interests . . . seek and sometimes obtain by reason of liberal campaign contributions."7 corporate political corruption, in this view, comes from excessive corporate power: corporations may become "Frankenstein monsters," threatening to dominate over the public interest by their insatiable desire to maximize profit for shareholders.8 Courts, legal scholars,9 political scientists,10 and historians" have all argued that restrictions on corporate politics, such as the contribution ban, are motivated primarily by this fear of excessive corporate power.
This Article challenges the prevailing wisdom about the origins of the corporate contribution ban, arguing that concerns about excessive corporate power, while salient, were overshadowed by a different conception of corporate political corruption. At the turn of the century, when Congress and the states first adopted bans, corporate political contributions were also understood to be corrupt because they amounted to a misuse of "other people's money": company executives were opportunistically misappropriating the company owners' money to purchase legislation benefiting the executives themselves. Corporate contributions were widely portrayed in the...