At a seminar in Chicago in the late 1980s shortly before local elections, the local news was covering a window smashing/shooting incident at a candidate's campaign headquarters. A local said to us out-of-towners, “Welcome to politics, Chicago style.” He went on to joke about their fine traditions of ballot box stuffing and party machine politics. This was simultaneously bizarre and horrifying to someone like me accustomed to tame and clean elections. I'd long known that politics and elections were different in the west from that in the south, east, and Chicago, but how and why were one of those mysteries that I didn't give much thought to except to note occasionally seeming anomalies. For example, why was Kansas once a hot-bed of progressive politics? How could the Californian Republican Earl Warren have been the Chief Justice of the most progressive Supreme Court ever? And what's the deal in Montana that lobbed a shot (spitball?) at Citizen's United
As the 41st state, Montana was a relative latecomer. In 1889, the same year Washington achieved statehood and before:
Idaho: 1890
Wyoming: 1890
Utah: 1896
Oklahoma: 1907
Arizona: 1912
New Mexico: 1912
Natural resource, “cowboys & indians”, and/or Mormon territories. And populations in tune with the rising progressive movement of that time. For example, woman's suffrage had been established in Wyoming before statehood and retaining it was a non-negotiable condition for joining the union.
In Montana, William Andrews Clark was buying his way into positions of political power before statehood. While extremely ruthless and gifted at business, he wasn't very good at the art of politics even in Montana of the early 1890s. Time and again losing out to the machinations of Marcus Daly, his chief mining business rival. The shenanigans of Clark and others led the Montana legislature to pass anti-corruption legislation in 1895. Probably weak tea as Clark violated the law in 1899 to win a US Senate seat, a charge he didn't exactly deny, but it was the US Senate and not Montana law enforcement that unseated Clark. Two years later he won the other Montana Senate seat, served his six year term, and thereafter was addressed as Senator. Possibly, as the 2nd richest man in the country, a title was all he lacked and desired.
Without the presence of Clark* who retired to New York City and Daly who died in 1900 and their mine holdings sold off to single, Rockefeller controlled trust entity, Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, the bribery and corruption in Montana continued on. It reached an intolerable level by 1911 when the People's Power League was formed.
Forty-one men from towns all over Montana adopted a straight-forward plan to assure that political power was returned to the citizens of the state. They would free themselves from the strangle-hold of megalithic corporations housed in New York and New Jersey by assuring the voter's right to nominate candidates in an open primary starting with the president and continuing down to local officials. Fairness would be guaranteed in campaigns and elections by barring corporate money from influencing the outcome.
The odds were against them. The Legislature was bought and paid for by the Amalgamated Copper Company. It would never pass the laws needed to implement the plan. Undaunted, the legal minds of the People's Power League drafted three Initiatives while the newspapermen went to work on 'public opinion.'
The initiatives all passed in 1912 and became known as
The Montana Corrupt Practices Act, 1912
What's prohibited:
Section 25. No corporation, and no person, trustee, or trustees owning or holding the majority of the stock of a corporation carrying on the business of a bank, savings bank, cooperative bank, trust, trustees, surety, indemnity, safe deposit, insurance, railroad, street railway, telegraph, telephone, gas, electric light, heat, power, canal, aqueduct, water, cemetery, or crematory company, or any company having the right to take or condemn land or exercise franchise in public ways granted by the state or by any county, city or town, shall pay or contribute in order to aid, promote or prevent the nomination or election of any person, or in order to aid or promote the interests, success or defeat of any political party or organization. No person shall solicit or receive such payment of contribution from such corporation or such holder of a majority of such stock.
How enforced:
Section 50. In like manner as prescribed for the contesting of an election, any corporation organized under the laws of or doing business in the state of Montana may be brought into court on the ground of deliberate, serious and material violation of the provisions of this act. The petition shall be filed in the district court in the county where said corporation has its principal office, or where the violation of law is averred to have been committed. The court, upon conviction of such corporation, may impose a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars, or may declare a forfeiture of the charter and franchises of the corporation if organized under the laws of this state, or if it be a foreign corporation may enjoin said corporation from further transacting business in this state, or by both such fine and forfeiture or by both such fine and injunction.
One hundred freaking years later, the People's Power League has once again had to step up and fight for the perfectly practical and sensible law that people the wanted. All because five misguided, bought and paid for, and/or corporate power ideologues on the US Supreme Court don't respect will of THE PEOPLE at their finest. Want to return to the days of Senators like William A Clark instead of some of the truly outstanding public servants
Montana elected to the US Senate after 1912.
Statements from the founding members of the Montana People's Power League remain relevant today. A particularly interesting one with current political resonance is:
"Whether through fear or for favor, control of the republican state convention was yielded to the political department of the Amalgamated Copper mining Company--the same interests that...dictated the nomination of both the Democratic and Republican legislative tickets in Ravalli and most other counties in the state, were in the saddle... This great, overshadowing company, lusty offspring of Standard Oil, together with the half dozen other great combines that would dominate the national and all state governments, is now desperately striving to entrench itself in legislative halls from which the waves of insurgency are beating it back. In most states the people are apparently alive to the situation. What's the matter with Montana?"
With Koch Industries such a power today in Kansas, isn't that part of the answer to Thomas Frank's question,
What's the matter with Kansas? It was the Hamilton Western News's man that penned those words in 1911. His name was Miles Romney,** a distant relative of Mitt Romney.
*Clark County, Nevada was named in honor of WA Clark who selected Las Vegas as the whistlestop for the railroad line from SLC to LA and made good money off subdividing and sell property lots there. His daughter Huguette Clark was recently in the news.
**He was a first cousin to Mitt's grandfather Gaskill Romney and not a direct descendent of the polygamous Miles Park Romney, Gaskill's father. His son, Miles Romney, Jr. continued the family newspaper and served in the Montana House of Representatives, 1966-1970.