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.

Before getting too upset about the initially eye-popping sums candidates spend to win elections, law professor (and current member of the Federal Election Commission) Bradley A. Smith advises us to put campaign costs in perspective. Americans, he notes, spent two or three times more on potato chips than on electing candidates in the mid-1990s. For Smith, the potato chip example is only one illustration that ought to settle fears about “obscene” and “runaway” campaign expenses. Perspective, however, is unlikely to move those convinced that big donors drive the political agenda. Convinced that money and politics is a far more nefarious combination than fat and salt, campaign finance reformers will no doubt carry on their search for new ways to limit spending and contributions, continuing the Progressive Era crusade to eliminate money's degrading influence on democracy.

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.

It was a typical election year in Philadelphia. The nation's freedom lay at peril, and everything depended on thousands of day laborers, up for sale at one to five dollars apiece on election day. That, at any rate, was what one observer warned Republicans in 1868. “Whichever party is the most plentifully supplied with the ‘root’ will command the vote of these honest ‘Bones and Sinews,’ in spite of fate!” he predicted. “The democracy for once, are in funds to repletion, & they intend to ‘win or die’!”

“It is a cesspool, it is a source of infection for the body politic,” Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) warned his fellow senators in 1973 about the private financing of elections. “[I]f it doesn't stop, there are going to be good men in this hall right here today who are going down the drain, not that you are guilty, not that you have done anything wrong, but that the public is disenchanted with all of us, and they are going to want somebody new and say I want a fresh one here.” From 1971 through President Nixon's resignation in 1974, Congress enacted the boldest campaign finance reforms in American history, including strong disclosure laws, public financing for presidential elections, contribution and spending limits, and an independent enforcement commission. Despite these reforms, after only a decade under the new laws, citizens still felt that campaign finance was corrupt.