The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  The history of suffrage in the United States was also shaped by forces that opposed or resisted a broader franchise, forces that at times succeeded in contracting the right to vote and often served to retard its expansion. Once again, most of these forces or factors have long been recognized: racist and sexist beliefs and attitudes, ethnic antagonism, partisan interests, and political theories and ideological convictions that linked the health of the state to a narrow franchise.

  One important factor, however, has received little or no attention: class tension. The concept of class, of course, has long carried heavy ideological freight and at times has been the great unspoken word in America’s officially classless society. Yet class conflict and class differences have played a vital role in many chapters of American history, and the right to vote is no exception. A wide-angle look at the full span of suffrage history—considering all restrictions on voting rights throughout the nation—strongly suggests that class tensions and apprehensions constituted the single most important obstacle to universal suffrage in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s. Contrary to a great deal of received wisdom about the history of American politics and labor, the formation and growth of an industrial working class, coupled with the creation of a free black agricultural working class in the South, generated a widespread, potent, and sometimes successful opposition to a broad-based franchise in much of the nation. In 1898, in the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts—to cite one of many little-known examples—this opposition was sufficiently strong that striking textile workers were threatened with disfranchisement because their employers claimed that the strikers had accepted public relief and consequently were “paupers” who could not legally vote.23 This incident, as well as others like it, does not appear in standard histories of suffrage.

  A caveat: to emphasize the significance of class is not to diminish the salience of race, gender, or ethnicity, all of which have been central to the history of voting rights; nor is it to substitute a monocausal interpretation for more complex or nuanced interpretations of the past. Race, class, gender, and ethnicity (a category that can house religion as well) have always been overlapping, dynamic, intertwined dimensions of identity and experience. Race and ethnicity are common determinants of class position, while class often has structured the significance of gender, racial, and ethnic boundaries. Historically, the formation of an industrial working class in the United States has been shaped by the presence of racially or ethnically distinctive supplies of labor, as well as by the gendered segregation of jobs and the reconfiguration of women’s work. Class, race, gender, ethnicity, and religion all have played a part in the history of the right to vote in the United States, and their interaction lies at the heart of this narrative. But the particular role of class in this history is both fundamental and relatively unexamined.

  It is class—and its link to immigration—that shapes the periodization of the story. There were, in fact, four distinctive periods, or “long swings,” in the history of the right to vote in the United States. The first was a pre- and early industrial era during which the right to vote expanded: this period lasted from the signing of the Constitution until roughly 1850, when the transformation of the class structure wrought by the Industrial Revolution was well under way. The second period, stretching from the 1850s until roughly World War I, was characterized both by a narrowing of voting rights for men and by a mushrooming upper- and middle-class antagonism to universal suffrage. (That antagonism also retarded the achievement of women’s suffrage.) The third era, lasting until the 1950s, was contoured differently in the South than in the North, but throughout the nation was marked by relatively little change in the formal breadth of the franchise; in the North this period also was distinguished by innovative efforts to mitigate the power of an unavoidably growing electorate. The fourth period, inaugurated by the success of the civil rights movement in the South, witnessed the abolition of almost all remaining restrictions on the right to vote. During each of these periods, the right to vote was contested; at times, the breadth of suffrage was a major political issue; at stake always was the integration (or lack of integration) of the poor and working people into the polity. That these same themes and dynamics remain prominent early in the twenty-first century suggests that the United States may now have entered a fifth period of this history, an era of contestation in a polity with an already broad franchise and widespread democratic norms.

  To describe the history of the right to vote in these terms—as a protracted yet dynamic conflict between class tensions and the exigencies of war, with a trajectory far from unilinear—is to suggest that the experience of the United States has been less unique or exceptional than has oftentimes been claimed.24 Wars, class tensions, ethnic antagonisms, and shifting gender roles have been staples of the Western experience over the last two centuries, and it is hardly surprising that conflicts over the franchise that constitute such a well-known feature of European and Latin American history had counterparts on this side of the Atlantic and north of the Rio Grande. Social class shaped the evolution of voting rights not only in Britain, Uruguay, and Japan but in New York and Texas. Wars influenced the breadth of the suffrage in the United States, as well as in Norway, France, and Germany. Gender was a critical issue everywhere. Race and ethnicity separated the enfranchised from the disfranchised not only in the United States but—as the recent history of Europe makes clear—wherever there has been migration or empire.25

  Indeed, almost all of the forces and factors that shaped the history of the right to vote in the United States were present in other nations. The American story, contrary to popular legend, was not a unique amalgam of the frontier, the democratic spirit, and egalitarian principles; it was not an exceptional example of democratic destiny and idealism.

  Yet the history of suffrage in the United States is certainly distinctive in many ways, several of which merit bold headlines. The United States was indeed the first country in the Western world to significantly broaden its electorate by permanently lowering explicit economic barriers to political participation. De Tocqueville was not hallucinating when he described (and seemed overwhelmed by) a vibrant, powerful democratic spirit in the early nineteenth century. The United States also was exceptional, however, in experiencing a prolonged period during which the laws governing the right to vote became more, rather than less, restrictive. Finally, despite its pioneering role in promoting democratic values, the United States was one of the last countries in the developed world to attain universal suffrage. Linking and accounting for these headlines is one of the tasks of the tale that follows.

  Telling this tale, exploring the complex evolution of the right to vote, should shed light on both the strength and fragility of democratic institutions in the United States. In so doing, it leads inescapably to the reframing of portraits of key episodes in American political history—including the dramatic successes of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, the debates surrounding the Fifteenth Amendment during Reconstruction, the rise of urban political machines, the programmatic efforts of “good government” reformers, the institutionalized dominance of a two-party system after 1896, the political thrust of the New Deal, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, examining this slice of our past might help us to understand that most distinctive and paradoxical feature of contemporary American politics: the low, class-correlated turnout of voters. America’s formally democratic institutions are ones in which many—often most—Americans do not participate. The nation’s public culture celebrates the insignificance of class boundaries, yet the wealthy and well educated are far more likely to go to the polls than are the poor and those lacking education.26 These are paradoxes that history has created—and can also illumine.

  PART I

  The Road to Partial Democracy

  The same reasoning which will induce you to admit all men who have no property, to vote, with those who have, . . . will prove that you ought to admit women and children
; for, generally speaking, women and children have as good judgments, and as independent minds, as those men who are wholly destitute of property; these last being to all intents and purposes as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed, clothe, and employ them, as women are upon their husbands, or children on their parents. . . . Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end of it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.

  —JOHN ADAMS, 1776

  It seems to me sir, that we should not abandon the principle that all men are to have some participancy in the affairs of government, particularly when they may be called upon to contribute to the support of that government. These people . . . are subject to pay taxes, they are liable to be called on to perform road labor and various other duties; and, sir, they . . . when the tocsin of war has sounded, rally to the field of battle. Shall we say that such men shall not exercise the elective franchise?

  —MR. DAVIS OF MASSAC, ILLINOIS,

  AT THE ILLINOIS CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1847

  AT ITS BIRTH, THE UNITED STATES was not a democratic nation—far from it. The very word democracy had pejorative overtones, summoning up images of disorder, government by the unfit, even mob rule. In practice, moreover, relatively few of the new nation’s inhabitants were able to participate in elections: among the excluded were most African Americans, Native Americans, women, men who had not attained their majority, and adult white males who did not own land. Only a small fraction of the population cast ballots in the elections that elevated George Washington and John Adams to the august office of the presidency.1

  To be sure, the nation’s political culture and political institutions did become more democratic between the American Revolution and the middle of the nineteenth century. This was the “age of democratic revolutions,” the epoch that witnessed the flourishing of “Jacksonian democracy.” The ideal of democracy became widespread during these years, the word itself more positive, even celebratory. Owing in part to these shifting ideals and beliefs—and also because of economic and military needs, changes in the social structure, and the emergence of competitive political parties—the franchise was broadened throughout the United States. By 1850, voting was a far more commonplace activity than it had been in 1800.

  Yet the gains were limited. Longstanding historical labels ought not obscure the restricted scope of what was achieved. The American polity may have been set on an unmistakably democratic course during the first half of the nineteenth century, but the United States in 1850 stood a long way from “universal suffrage.” Significantly, that phrase had begun to appear in public discourse, but the institution lagged far behind. Indeed, some Americans who had been enfranchised in 1800 were barred from the polls by midcentury. Change was neither linear nor uncontested: the sources of democratization were complex, and the right to vote was itself a prominent political issue throughout the period.

  ONE

  In the Beginning

  Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers—but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, The Casket, or

  Flowers of Literature, Wit and Sentiment (1828)

  AS THE MEN WHO WOULD LATER BE CALLED “the framers” of the United States Constitution trickled into Philadelphia during the late spring of 1787 (most of them arrived late), they had weighty issues on their minds: whether the Articles of Confederation should be revised or replaced with an altogether new plan of government; how the federal government could be made stronger without undermining the power of the states; resolving the already brewing conflict over the apportionment of representatives between large and small states; and contending with the freighted and divisive matter of slavery. Although the Revolutionary War had been won and independence achieved, a great deal still appeared to be hanging in the balance: as James Madison portentously noted, “it was more than probable” that the plan they came up with would “in its operation . . . decide forever the fate of Republican Government.”1

  With George Washington presiding and the energetic, carefully prepared Madison shaping many of the terms of debate, the fifty-five delegates to the convention wrestled, in closed sessions, with these and many other issues throughout the hot and humid summer. That they would succeed in devising a constitution acceptable to the twelve states that had sent them (not to mention Rhode Island, which had declined the invitation to attend) was far from certain; several impasses were reached in the first two months of deliberation, and by the end of July, many of the delegates were frustrated, impatient, and tired. Eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, described by one of his fellow delegates as “the greatest philosopher of the present age,” trudged wearily back and forth to the sessions, occasionally having to be carried in a sedan chair.2

  By mid-September, a constitution had been drafted and signed, and delegates began returning home to promote its ratification. The Articles of Confederation were to be scrapped; the increased—but restrained—powers of the federal government had been specified; the issues of state representation and slavery had been compromised; and a great many details outlining the operation of a new republican government had been etched in parchment. What British leader William E. Gladstone a century later would call “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain of man” was complete. The Western world’s most durable and perhaps most celebrated written blueprint for representative government was soon to become the fundamental law of North America’s new nation.

  Remarkably, this new constitution, born in celebration of “republican government,” did not grant anyone the right to vote. The convention’s debates about suffrage, held during the doldrums of late July and early August, were brief, and the final document made little mention of the breadth of the franchise. Only section 2 of article 1 addressed the issue directly: it declared that in elections to the House of Representatives “the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” More obliquely, section 1 of article 2 indicated that the legislature of each state had the right to determine the “manner” in which presidential electors would be selected, while article 4 entrusted the federal government with a vague mandate to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Otherwise, the Constitution was mute—from which much would follow.

  The Received Legacy

  For more than a decade before the founding fathers arrived in Philadelphia, individual states had been writing their own suffrage laws. These laws almost everywhere were shaped by colonial precedents and traditional English patterns of thought. The linchpin of both colonial and British suffrage regulations was the restriction of voting to adult men who owned property. On the eve of the American Revolution, in seven colonies men had to own land of specified acreage or monetary value in order to participate in elections; elsewhere, the ownership of personal property of a designated value (or in South Carolina, the payment of taxes) could substitute for real estate.3

  Both in England and in the colonies, property requirements had long been justified on two grounds. The first was that men who possessed property (especially “real property,” i.e., land and buildings) had a unique “stake in society”—meaning that they were committed members o
f (or shareholders in) the community and that they had a personal interest in the policies of the state, especially taxation. The second was that property owners alone possessed sufficient independence to warrant their having a voice in governance. As Henry Ireton had argued in England in the seventeenth century, “if there be anything at all that is the foundation of liberty, it is this, that those who shall choose the law-makers shall be men freed from dependence upon others.” And the best way to be “freed” from such dependence, or so it was believed, was through the ownership of property, especially real estate. Conversely, the ballot was not to be entrusted to those who were economically dependent because they could too easily be controlled or manipulated by others. Such control may have seemed particularly plausible in the six colonies in which voting was viva voce—although advocates of secret paper ballots pointed out that disfranchisement was not the only solution to that problem. Indeed, implicit in the argument for independence was another notion, often unspoken but especially resonant in the colonies, where economic opportunities were believed to abound: that anyone who failed to acquire property was of questionable competence and unworthy of full membership in the polity.4

  These concerns also prompted other restrictions on voting. Many colonies instituted residency requirements to exclude transients who presumably lacked the requisite stake in the colony’s affairs;5 for similar reasons, some made citizenship, of England or the province, a prerequisite for voting.6 To guarantee that those who were dependent could not vote, several colonies formally barred all servants from the polls, while others expressly excluded paupers. Women too were prohibited from voting because they were thought to be dependent on adult men and because their “delicacy” rendered them unfit for the worldly experiences necessary for engagement in politics.7 In addition, there were limitations on the franchise that had more to do with social membership in the community than with a person’s independence or stake in society. Freedmen of African or Amerindian descent were denied the ballot in much of the South.8 In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, only members of the Congregational Church could vote; in the eighteenth century, Catholics were disfranchised in five states and Jews in four.9