Free Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It by Jeffrey D. Clements, Bill Moyers Page B

existence.” 28 A corporationtoday is chartered from the state just as in 1809 when a unanimous Supreme Court held that “a body corporate as such cannot be a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution.” 29
    For nearly two hundred years, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that corporations were entitled to the rights of citizens under the Constitution’s “privileges and immunities” clause. In 1839, the Court said, “The only rights [a corporation] can claim are the rights which are given to it in that character, and not the rights which belong to its members as citizens of a state.” 30 Fifty years later, the Court said that the term
citizens
in the Constitution “applies only to natural persons, members of the body politic owing allegiance to the state, not to artificial persons created by the legislature, and possessing only such attributes as the legislature has prescribed.” 31
    At least until recently, the vigilance of American leadership about corporate power did not waver as corporations became more dominant in our economy. “Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters,” warned President Grover Cleveland. 32 Theodore Roosevelt sought to end “a riot of individualistic materialism” and successfully called for a ban on corporate political contributions: “Let individuals contribute as they desire; but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making contributions for any political purpose, directly or indirectly.” 33 President Roosevelt said he “recognized that corporations and combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that it is folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them without thoroughgoing control.” 34
    This vigilance did not mean that powerful corporations simply accepted or cooperated with the public’s “thoroughgoing control.” As those who came before us well understood, concentrated power and aggregated wealth in corporations have always ledcorporations to seek “rights.” An assertive, vigilant citizenry and leadership has always been needed to push back.
    Until the success of the Powell-Chamber of Commerce plan, the
Santa Clara
line of “corporate person” cases was rendered largely meaningless by the people’s rejection of corporate rights throughout the twentieth century. The Republicans under Theodore Roosevelt restrained corporate power with effective antitrust enforcement, labor laws, environmental laws, and laws banning corporate political spending. In Roosevelt’s words, “There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.” 35 Democrats under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt likewise regulated corporate power to ensure the strength of the people and the country as a whole. And Republicans, Democrats, and Independents came together to amend the Constitution in 1913 to weaken the corporate hold on government by requiring senators to be elected by the people rather than appointed by state legislatures.
    Finally, in a 1938 dissenting opinion, Justice Hugo Black, a former Alabama senator, demolished the idea that corporations were “persons” with rights under the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. While he wrote in dissent, the clarity of his expression about corporations and persons sounded a warning to any justice who might try to slip corporate rights into the Constitution with “glittering generalities” and glib citation of
Santa Clara.
His lengthy dissenting opinion examined the words, history, meaning, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment:
I do not believe that the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations…. A constitutional interpretation that is wrong should not stand. I believe this Court should now overrule previous decisions which interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to include corporations.
Neither