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| Long title | An Act to prohibit corporations from making money contributions in connection with political elections. |
|---|---|
| Nicknames | Corporate Donations Abolition Act of 1907 |
| Enacted by | the59th United States Congress |
| Effective | January 26, 1907 |
| Citations | |
| Public law | 59-36 |
| Statutes at Large | 34 Stat. 864b |
| Legislative history | |
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The Tillman Act of 1907 (34 Stat. 864) was the firstcampaign finance law in theUnited States. The Act prohibited monetary contributions to federal candidates by corporations and nationally chartered (interstate) banks.
The Act was signed into law by PresidentTheodore Roosevelt on January 26, 1907, and was named for its sponsor,South Carolina SenatorBen Tillman.
In 1905, a New York state investigation into ties between the major insurance companies and Wall Street banks accidentally discovered evidence that theNew York Life Insurance Company had made a $48,700 ($1.7 million in modern dollars[1]) contribution to Theodore Roosevelt's1904 presidential campaign. This discovery was followed by daily revelations about other corporate contributions. The presidents of all the big insurance firms, and many of the smaller ones, testified that they had made corporate contributions to the Republican presidential campaigns of 1896, 1900, and 1904. "[I]t is obvious,"The New York Times said, "that a deterrent, an actual prohibition, is needed to shut off the corrupting stream that flows from corporation treasuries."[2]
TheTimes and theNew York Daily Tribune both called on Congress to reintroduce a bill to prohibit corporate contributions that formerNew Hampshire Republican SenatorWilliam E. Chandler had drafted in 1901.[3] With the investigation and the media focusing attention on his 1901 bill, Chandler tried to get one of his fellow Republicans to reintroduce it in the upcomingFifty-Ninth Congress. When none of them agreed to do so, he turned to his old friend Tillman, who introduced the bill in the Senate. President Roosevelt joined the growing support for such a prohibition in his December 1905 message to Congress: "All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law."[4] Tillman got the Senate to pass the bill, without debate, in 1906, and the House passed it, also without debate, in 1907.[5]
Chandler's original bill had two provisions; the first would have prohibited any corporation engaged in interstate commerce from contributing to election campaigns at any level, national, state, or local; the second would have prohibited any corporation from contributing to presidential and congressional elections. (At the time that would have covered only elections to theHouse of Representatives;U.S. senators were not popularly elected until the adoption of theSeventeenth Amendment in 1913.) The bill that Congress passed in 1907 was more narrow in scope.
The Senate struck out the first provision, which rested on Congress's broad authority toregulate interstate commerce. The Senate instead prohibited corporate contributions based on Congress's authority to regulate elections to the House of Representatives. The final bill prohibited national banks and federally chartered corporations from contributing to election campaigns at any level, national, state, or local, and prohibited “any corporation whatever” from making contributions in elections for president and the House of Representatives.[6]
Most states soon passed their own laws banning corporate campaign contributions.[7] The state laws were first tested with the rise of theProhibition movement, when state governments sued breweries that had used corporate funds against ballot measures to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages. The first case brought under the Tillman Act,United States v. United States Brewers’ Association, 239 F. 163 (1916)[1], was also a Prohibition case, but it was about contributions to candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The breweries raisedFirst Amendment objections to the state and federal laws, but the courts rejected them and upheld the laws.[8]
