In the early 1970s, the executives of the First National Bank of Boston spent hundreds of thousands of the bank's dollars on ads opposing statewide efforts to raise their personal income taxes. When frustrated Massachusetts legislators banned this sort of corporate spending, the executives sued, arguing that “corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals.” In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Supreme Court held for the first time that the First Amendment protects all political speech, even ads paid for by a corporation. Surprisingly, the first corporation to take advantage of this decision was not the bank, but the city of Boston--a municipal corporation that spent nearly a million dollars on a new referendum in the fall of 1978.This article discusses the history of the 1978 referendum, one pitting municipal corporations against business corporations. It argues that the referendum and the discourse surrounding it made it intuitive for Bostonians that all corporations, banks and cities, are representative institutions. Corporations can “speak” only by spending money, and the leaders of Boston and the bank justified spending other people's money by pointing to the internal elections that put them in office. But voters were skeptical of the argument that “corporate democracy” alone could guarantee that elected executives spoke with the consent of the people they purported to represent. The article offers a novel contribution to the historiography of modern business and politics: a legal history of how corporations--municipal and financial--became politicized in the wake of evolving First Amendment free-speech doctrine.

中文翻译：

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企业民主：企业如何在 1970 年代波士顿证明他们的发言权

在 1970 年代初期，波士顿第一国民银行的高管们将数十万美元用于反对在全州范围内提高个人所得税的广告。当沮丧的马萨诸塞州立法者禁止这种公司支出时，高管们提起诉讼，称“公司与个人拥有相同的第一修正案权利”。在波士顿第一国民银行诉贝洛蒂案中，最高法院首次裁定第一修正案保护所有政治言论，甚至包括由公司支付的广告。令人惊讶的是，第一个利用这一决定的公司不是银行，而是波士顿市——一家市政公司，它在 1978 年秋季为新的公投花费了近一百万美元。本文讨论了 1978 年的历史公投，一种是市政公司与商业公司的竞争。它认为，公投和围绕它的讨论让波士顿人直观地认识到，所有公司、银行和城市都是有代表性的机构。公司只能通过花钱来“说话”，波士顿和银行的领导人通过指出让他们上任的内部选举来证明花别人的钱是正当的。But voters were skeptical of the argument that “corporate democracy” alone could guarantee that elected executives spoke with the consent of the people they purported to represent. 这篇文章为现代商业和政治史学提供了一个新颖的贡献：关于公司——市政和金融——在不断发展的第一修正案言论自由原则之后如何变得政治化的法律史。