The Fourteenth Amendment’s clauses on citizenship rights, due process, and equal protection make it one of the most important parts of the US Constitution. In a curious and highly consequential twist, the amendment’s reference to “persons” came to include corporations. This would have surprised those who crafted this Reconstruction-era amendment to enforce the citizenship rights of Black Americans and specifically to overturn the notorious 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship rights to people of African descent in America.
The extension of the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations as legal “persons” was first done in an 1880 California case called In re Tiburcio Parrott. Corporate personhood would eventually be endorsed by the Supreme Court and become a major “shield against state regulation” for corporations.
Legal historian Evelyn Atkinson reveals the “striking power of corporations in shaping the federal courts interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.” They did it first by challenging an anti-Chinese law.
Here’s how it happened. In 1878, California’s Workingmen’s Party and the Farmer’s Alliance came together to draft a new state constitution. These nativist forces wanted, explains Atkinson, to “curb the threat of Chinese labor by securing jobs for white men and to limit the power of large corporations.” The resulting new constitution was ratified the next year. It prohibited corporations from employing “coolies,” as migrant Chinese laborers were typically classified. White working class forces saw Chinese labor and corporations as “intertwined threats that challenged free white labor and threatened popular democracy.” “Coolieism” was seen as another form of slavery, threatening to reduce white laborers to the same status.
Tiburcio Parrott challenged California’s new constitutional prohibition under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. Parrott, son of one of the wealthiest men in San Fransisco, employed Chinese laborers in his toxic quicksilver mine and believed he could hire “whom he pleased and pay what he pleased.” The local Chinese consul joined Parrott’s suit; Chinese mercantile interests and labor contractors were just as interested in the issue, as were Chinese laborers themselves.