Corporate Rule: A Hidden History

Colonial Corporations
Corporations after the American Revolution
The Corporate Return to Power
Corporate Regulation
Corporations and Global Trade

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As the result of the War, corporations have been enthroned. ... An era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands... and the Republic is destroyed."
– Abraham Lincoln, 1864

Only one year after the Civil War ended, individual states began to compete for corporate charters, and the income which charters generated. At the same time people’s movements against corporations were growing in strength. These movements were fueled by fear and resentment of concentrated corporate power that had boomed as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War.

This raging struggle led President Rutherford B. Hayes to say in 1876: "This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations."

In 1886, ten years after President Hayes spoke those words, the relationship between United States citizens and their corporate creations changed even more dramatically: corporations became "natural persons" under the law, sheltered by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. It all started here in California in a court case titled "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad". Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court let the state court ruling stand with these words: "The Court does not wish to hear the arguments on whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." Sixty years later, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote, "There was no history, logic, or reason given to support that view."

Ironically, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to guarantee freed slaves treatment as legal persons under the law, rights that were not enforced until the 1950s. When women tired to argue they were protected as persons under the fourteenth amendment (Minor v. Happersett 1874) they were told the 14th amendment only applied to black males. The Fourteenth Amendment ruling has radically changed the nature of corporations in the United States and the world, as other countries have followed our lead.

"Corporate persons" won other Bill of Rights protections in the decades that followed. First Amendment, free speech protections making it virtually impossible to prohibit corporate campaign contributions. The Fourth Amendment now protects corporations from inspections to ensure worker safety.

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