Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

In striking down the existing campaign-finance laws, the courts eviscerated a century of reform. After a series of campaign scandals involving secret donations from the newly rich industrial barons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Progressives had passed laws limiting spending in order to protect the democratic process from corruption. The laws were meant to safeguard political equality at a time of growing economic inequality. Reformers had seen the concentration of wealth in the hands of oil, steel, finance, and railroad magnates as threatening the democratic equilibrium. The Republican William McKinley’s elections in 1896 and 1900, for instance, were infamously lubricated by donations raised by the political organizer Mark Hanna from big corporations like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. In a growing backlash to the corruption, at President Theodore Roosevelt’s behest, Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907, which banned corporate contributions to federal candidates and political committees. Later scandals resulted in further restrictions limiting spending by unions and the size of individual contributions, and requiring public disclosure. By overturning many of these restrictions, the Citizens United decision was in many respects a return to the Gilded Age.

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