Historically Speaking
Organized lobbying by individuals, interest groups, and associations actually predates the Republic. During the colonial era, merchants, manufacturers, religious and ethnic minorities, and other groups hired agents to lobby (try to influence) members of the British Parliament for favorable legislative treatment. These eighteenth-century lobbyists used many of the strategies and tactics still employed today: Cultivating relationships with key members of Parliament, organizing letter-writing campaigns, drafting legislation, making financial contributions, and forming coalitions with like-minded lobbyists and associations. Some went as far as lobbying members of Parliament at their own homes, a practice that would be frowned upon today.
The Revolutionary Period
As the relationship between the colonies and the British government deteriorated, more public interest organizations began to appear. The Bill of Rights Society was a radical English group dedicated to bringing suffrage to the colonies; their primary tactic was to attack government officials. In response to the passage of the Stamp Act of 1765, patriot Sam Adams founded the Sons of Liberty, a secretive group of laborers, tradesmen, and merchants committed to repealing unjust British laws. The Sons gained notoriety throughout the colonies for orchestrating the Boston Tea Party and other acts of protest.
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention weren't exempt from outside pressure and lobbying. A decision was made early on to hold the convention in secret and behind locked doors so as to prevent lobbyists and other special interest groups from influencing the proceedings. The delegates didn't even keep an official record of the proceedings because they feared that their intentions would leak out and attract lobbyists.
It wasn't long after the Constitution was ratified that interest groups, associations, and organizations began to flourish. Most of these groups, like the National Trades Union, had narrow self-interests. A few, however, such as the Anti-Slavery Society and the American Temperance Union, aimed to transform society. As the country underwent rapid expansion and industrialization following the Civil War, new business and commercial entities emerged. These large-scale corporations and trusts hired armies of lobbyists — paid agents whose sole purpose was to influence the legislative process — to block Congress from passing laws and regulations hostile to their industries. These lobbyists weren't above showering lawmakers with cash and gifts in exchange for favorable treatment.
A Questionable Reputation
Not surprisingly, it was around this time that lobbyists began to develop an unflattering reputation with the public and in the press. Poet Walt Whitman referred to them as “crawling serpentine men, born freedom sellers of the earth.” The Nation Magazine, one of the country's most influential and respected journals, described a lobbyist as “a man whom everybody suspects; who is generally during one half of the year without honest means of livelihood; and whose employment by those who have bills before a legislature is only resorted to as a disagreeable necessity.”
Some good did come from special interest lobbying during this time, however. Pressure from various activist organizations and associations brought about much-needed electoral reforms, child labor and wages-and-hours laws, anti-trust and business regulations, a federal income tax, and women's suffrage, among other things.
The nineteenth-century Dictionary of American Politics contained the following unflattering definition for lobbying: “Lobby, The, is a term applied collectively to men that make a business of corruptly influencing legislators. The individuals are called lobbyists. Their object is usually accomplished by means of money paid to the members, but any means that is considered feasible is employed.”
Perhaps the most successful interest group from that era was the Anti-Saloon League, the driving force behind the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment, which from 1919 until its repeal in 1933 banned the sale of alcohol in the United States. The group left nothing to chance during its twenty-year quest to outlaw alcohol consumption, publishing monthly newsletters, staging rallies at the Capitol, forming local temperance groups, organizing letter-writing campaigns, making political contributions to friendly lawmakers, and targeting hostile members of Congress who lived in districts where the citizens favored prohibition. Many historians consider the Anti-Saloon League the most successful single-issue group in U.S. history.
