Historical American Political Finance Data at the National Archives

One afternoon years ago, after I had worked there long enough for the librarians to realize I was serious, an overloaded U.S. government archivist invited me to just go back into the stacks myself to search for a file that I wanted to see. I found it with little trouble, but the fleeting peek into that tantalizing inner sanctum made a deep impression: For the first time I glimpsed the breathtaking expanse of the federal government’s hoard of reports from American political parties detailing their contributions and expenditures from the high Progressive Era down to the mid-nineteen seventies, when the Federal Election Commission started up.

When they were first compiled, a very few researchers consulted these records. But almost no one in either history or political science followed in their footsteps. In recent years I and a few other researchers have used some, but their sheer volume and numbing pages of detail make consulting and copying them prohibitively expensive. More than a few also resist copying because of the way they are bound or very faintly printed. As a result, narratives in American history, politics, and economics by even the very best researchers often bear an uncomfortable resemblance to donuts: At or near their center lurks a gigantic hole that no amount of sugary speculation can really fill. They have almost nothing to say about the financing of even the most dramatic of American political campaigns or events. The cost in theoretical terms for the social sciences is for sure many times greater, though, for when whole ranges of real facts disappear, fantasy knows no limits.

The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 heightened the urgency of finding realistic and serious approaches to studying how politics and economics really interact. It also brought forth an organization that was willing to tackle that problem head on instead of simply talking about it or wringing its hands: INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, headed by Dr. Robert Johnson. When I took over as its Research Director, I thought of the many feet of records at the National Archives that document facts that figure in virtually no histories or case studies. I was delighted that Dr. Johnson immediately saw how opening up that vast trove of virtually unused data could turbo charge work in not one, but several disciplines: Not just economics, political science, or history, but even literary studies, since so many American intellectuals occasionally proffered at least small contributions to political parties, too, which their biographers are only sometimes identify.

Realizing this hope required solving two other problems: gaining the cooperation of the National Archives and finding someone who could do the work to the high technical standard that INET felt was required. The hope was to make the data as far as possible machine searchable, though I knew from my own experience that individual files were sometimes very faint or bound in unusual ways.

INET was lucky to surmount both problems quickly. Dr. Richard McCulley, who was then in charge of the section of the National Archives where the records were now housed, responded enthusiastically to our first overture. A trained historian, he and others also recommended Jeremy Bigwood as the person with the skill and experience in multi-modal photo reproduction to actually produce the records. Without these two gifted individuals, I have no doubt that the project would never have been completed. Any number of problems, including, in the final stages, closures of the Archives due to Covid, probably would have ended it. But thanks to them, INET did complete the project.

There are too many riches in these files to dwell on now. But some cautions are in order. It is silly to suggest that they contain the whole financial history of American politics for the period they cover. They don’t; any number of local, state, and regional political contributions are missing.¹ The Archives also contains rosters of contributors for individual congressional races that we could not incorporate into this series. And, one must remember, the data are about formal political contributions, not the other parts of the spectrum of political money that ordinary mortals find harder to see, such as stock tips, personal investments, or consulting contracts.² But these files do provide an overwhelming amount of new data on many of the most important people and events in American history. For example, they contain many more contributions than even the large New Deal era Congressional investigations published during the New Deal period. Analysts can also sift through much larger files of contributions to Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and William Howard Taft than were easily available before.³ The funders of Woodrow Wilson’s second term are also here in abundance. Aware of the controversies about the relation of American Liberty League during the New Deal to earlier campaigns by many of its leaders to find alternative tax revenues by ending Prohibition, we included the files from those campaigns, too. The files for Richard Nixon’s campaigns include many pages of documents that appear never to have been published previously and should add considerably to what is known about his financial backers. The list could go on and will surely lead to major discoveries as individual researchers work with them.

Anyone with experience in archives is familiar with the pitfalls of relying on inventories and indexes to locate documents. Often such guides are like geological layers, in which the various levels don’t quite cohere and sometimes dangerously intermingle. Some boxes carry more than one identifying symbol or number and the official lists may be different from what is actually in the stacks. Sometimes a few files listed cannot be found anywhere. As far as possible, the reference system and layout of the records here follows as closely as possible what a researcher would find if she or he were actually dealing with the boxes of documents themselves.

The collection also includes one PDF of campaign contributions to presidential candidates in 1976. These originally were published by the Federal Election Commission, but for unexplained reasons they appear to have disappeared from the Commission’s website. I had purchased a microfilm; we have copied it and added it in here. Note that records for the major party national committees, which would also have influenced the final campaign, are not included. So the usual yellow flag of caution about totals waves again.

Jeremy Bigwood has also been kind enough to add notes below to help researchers understand the organization of the records. His “Technical Notes” follow.

Technical Notes

Jeremy Bigwood

The PDFs contained in this 2 TB external drive are digital copies of records of campaign contributions to and expenditures of US political parties from approximately 1912 to 1974. There is also one PDF for the presidential campaign of 1976, as mentioned in Thomas Ferguson’s Preface above. The original records for all but the latter are now at the Center for Legislative Archives at US National Archives’ (NARA) located in Washington, DC and are a subset of NARA’s Record Group 233.

Content:

These records are disclosures of the registered financing of political action committees and parties as stipulated by the campaign finance reforms passed by the US Congress during the Progressive Era and their subsequent amendments. Some state campaign records are also in the collection. The records detail individuals and entities that funded or were paid by legal US political entities and movements between 1912 and 1974. The warnings in the general introduction to the project by Ferguson above on the incompleteness of these records need to be taken extremely seriously. State and local contributions of all kinds were rarely reported.

The original records are held in 461 containers, 230 of them in Hollinger “document boxes” and 231 in bound volumes of a variety of sizes as well as a single microfilm. The quantity of records found in a single container can range from a handful to over two thousand pages.

Hardcopy formats:

The records themselves are comprised of a variety of both handwritten and typed paper, newspaper, photostats and mimeographs. Documents range in size from approximately 7 x 5 cm to over 43 x 28 cm. Some are extremely faint.

Post-processing:

These records were digitized starting in 2012 using various cameras and scanners over a nine- year period. Images were edited in the Photoshop Lightroom program and expressed as Adobe Acrobat Professional and ABBYY PDF formats, which were subsequently text-recognized in each of those formats and then combined into a single PDF. The results of text-recognition have been far from perfect. We recommend doing digital queries using a search program or using Acrobat Search before drilling down into the data. We also recommend that you use a fast computer – or two (so you can look at two sets of documents at a time) and extract all the records onto a hard drive and index them using a professional search program such as DTSearch.

Numbering of the containers:

Many of the boxes and volumes in this collection were labeled out of sequence and some of these were labeled with identical numbers (a common phenomenon when groups of records are not stored in the same place). The box and volume numberings were made put into a more logical order by this project to avoid confusion and each container is clearly marked.

Some boxes and volumes were “missing.” Some of these may have been destroyed when the records were held in a Congressional washroom, misfiled at the National Archives, or may never have existed. The boxes that are missing are numbers 49, 137, 138, 139, 140, 162, 166 and 167.

The missing volumes are 19, 22, 24, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34 and 36.

Contents of the external hard drive:

In the external hard drive can be found three folders:

• The first is “A- INDEXES-FINDING AIDS.” This contains three files that describe some of the contents of the collection.
• “B- RECORDS BY YEAR” – this contains records by year – a separate folder for each year. Some boxes contain records that were created over several years – all in the same box or volume – and often this fact is not represented on the labeling of said box or volume. If the contents of a single box or volume contain material created over several years, you will find that same box in each of those “year” folders. Using a digital query, you may also find references to dates one to three years past the dates of the records themselves. These are the expiration dates of licenses of the Notary Publics who attested to the authenticity of the documents and are not relevant researchers.
  
• “C- ALL_BOXES_AND_VOLS” – contains all the boxes and volumes – by number. This may be the most useful for querying the whole collection with a search program.

Labeling of the PDFs:

The PDFs are labeled as follows:

233-NWL-14768-b003-1920, where:

233 = NARA Record Group (all collections of documents are placed in record groups). NWL = Center for Legislative Archives (collections in NARA from the US Congress). 14768 = NARA assignment identifying number for the collection.

b003 = Box number three. If it were a volume, it would be “v” instead of “b.” 1920 = the year that the records were created.

233-NWL-14768-v003-1918-9 is Volume three which contains records from a date range of 1918-1919.

Working with DTSearch:

Using DT Search or other search programs to query these records is clearly the fastest way to get results. Not all of the text-recognition has been effective, but this gives you a good idea of what is present in these records. The following image shows some of the results listed for a search of “J.P. Morgan:”

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¹ See, e.g., Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money- Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Chapter 4, though the files presented in the INET collection relevant to that discussion add substantially to what was known about cases discussed there.

² See the discussion of the “Spectrum of Political Money” in Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, “How Much Can the U.S. Congress Resist Political Money? A Quantitative Assessment,” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper No. 109 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp109

³ Congressional committees issued reports on contributions for various campaigns, but the published versions of those reports reported selectively; often purporting to present total donations by some subset of the largest donors. The reports here show everything that was collected, which, to repeat, was never every contribution made in the campaign at all levels.

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