Casting Our Votes, and How We Won the Right
by Rick Perlstein, whose book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus will be published in January.
The Washington Post, November 6, 2000, Style, C02
The Right To Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
By Alexander Keyssar
Basic. 467 pp. $ 30
Of all the impressions that Campaign 2000 has left on me, the most inspiring came at a presidential rally for Ralph Nader last month at Madison Square Garden. The highlight was a performance by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. He apologized that he hadn't had time to write a new song for the occasion and launched into an old one instead--"with the permission," he added, "of the author." The song was "The Times They Are A-Changin.' " He ended, then intoned: "Vote proud! Vote strong!" Afterward, there was a parade: That night was the deadline to register to vote in New York, so new voters marched their registration forms directly to the post office, across the street from the Garden, to the accompaniment of a brass band. A William Jennings Bryan rally in 1896 could hardly have been more exciting.
Voting, nothing more: After all those scandals, all that mediocrity, after all this anger and disillusionment, the thought of this single act can still make Americans feel electric. But you don't read a lot about voting rights in works of U.S. history. Alexander Keyssar's "The Right to Vote" is the first scholarly survey of the subject, in fact, since 1918. And the reason this subject hasn't had a roundup since is very much a part of the story it tells--a tale that boldly overturns almost everything you think you know about Americans' most taken-for-granted right. For what Keyssar argues is that our universal suffrage almost didn't come about at all.
He begins with an enormous irony: The Constitution "did not grant anyone the right to vote." Instead--debate on this particular subject falling to quick compromise during an overpowering spell of Philadelphia humidity--the framers decided to leave the question to the states. The requirements states first settled on followed common law and the prejudices of the day: Voting was limited to adult white men who owned a measure of property. This was not too controversial--at the heart of the republican ideology of the founders was a belief that the votes of those without the means to support themselves "would be tempted," as the English legal scholar William Blackstone once put it, "under some undue influence or another."
They would, in other words, be bought. And how democratic was that? What followed, however, was the inspiriting story you learned at your schoolmaster's knee: State after state through the early 19th century convened the constitutional conventions that collectively made America "the first country in the Western world to significantly broaden its electorate by permanently lowering explicit economic barriers to political participation." But you didn't learn what happened next, which was that the United States then became the first country to instill "a prolonged period during which the laws governing the right to vote become more, rather than less, restrictive."
States expanded the franchise for a number of reasons. Urbanization made many propertyless citizens powerful; new states sought settlers; competitive parties sought to install themselves on politics' cutting edge--and, as tensions increased between North and South, states sought to legitimize military conscription by granting potential soldiers the vote. Conspicuously missing was a desire to beneficently empower the expanding class of wage earners in America's new industrial economy. Just the opposite, in fact; late-19th-century politicians distrusted the democratic abilities of these unskilled, often immigrant factory workers as much as the Founding Fathers would have. Smug in their sense of American exceptionalism, they proudly presumed that such a benighted class would never grace our shores. Thus the controversial argument at the center of Keyssar's book: If the leaders of Jacksonian America had known that an industrial revolution would follow the Civil War, they never would have expanded suffrage in the first place.
Keyssar goes on to describe what he describes as a "guerrilla war." Elites of the late 19th century couldn't simply repeal the state resolutions that overturned property restrictions. Instead came the familiar story of redemption in the South (the "white primary," the "grandfather clause," the poll tests, the reading comprehension tests--vouchsafed by the indifference of conservative Supreme Courts); and the far less familiar story of the "Redemption of the North" (the epithet is original with Keyssar): corruption measures to "purify the ballot box," ostensibly neutral but "aimed largely at particular ballot boxes and particular voters"; long ballots that imposed de facto literacy tests; pauper disqualifications; and the cruel backlash against the women's suffrage movement.
The Gilded Age equivalent of talking heads--highbrow scribes in publications such as the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly--wrote things like: "the men who . . . overthrew all restrictions on the electoral franchise in the first half of this century only did so, democratic as they were, because they saw plainly that the change would rob neither property nor intelligence of its supremacy." Now that it had, these worthies argued, it was time to unscramble the egg. This very newspaper once recommended the disenfranchisement of "poor white" Southerners and white "sansculottes" in the North.
This kind of revisionism can be a hard sell; we love our country. And to be sure, a leavening feature of Keyssar's study is the constant, courageous presence of radical democrats who make their appearance when the hour is darkest. But Keyssar handles the job with aplomb--no more so than in his most dramatic case study. As it happened, the first state to harbor a large constituency of unwashed, foreign-born proletarians of the sort early Americans could not abide was Rhode Island. And, not coincidentally, Little Rhodie was the most recalcitrant state about extending democracy. The situation ended violently. In a long section, Keyssar presents the riveting, forgotten story of 1841-1843's "Dorr War," in which the low-born followers of one Thomas Dorr formed a rump constitutional convention to vote themselves political rights, countered by a hastily formed conservative Law and Order Party. The Dorr group eventually stormed the state arsenal with cannons in an unsuccessful attempt to seize their suffrage by coup.
To students of U.S. political development, this counter-history matters a great, great deal. One of the hoariest chestnuts is that no working-class political movement has succeeded in America precisely because the American working class was unqualifiedly granted political rights. That cliche will fade in proportion to the number of people who read and take seriously this book. So will the number of people who take their vote enough for granted never to cast it all. Tomorrow's election: Vote strong, vote proud.