Mississippi led the way in 1890. Unnerved by the federal government’s consideration of a Federal Elections Bill, Senator James Z. George, who had played a key role in the state’s violent redemption from Republican rule, led a campaign to hold a constitutional convention that would transform Mississippi’s suffrage laws. The impulse for restriction came largely from the state’s elites and black-belt counties, and initially was opposed by Democrats and Populists in predominantly white locales. After granting concessions to the white counties on apportionment and other issues, George and his allies secured passage of provisions that would remove blacks from Mississippi political life while technically adhering to the Fifteenth Amendment. These provisions included a sharp increase in the residency requirement (“the negro is . . . a nomadic tribe,” opined the state’s attorney general), the institution of a two-dollar poll tax, and the imposition of a literacy test that required potential voters to demonstrate that they could understand and interpret the Constitution.61
In short order, other states followed suit, adopting—in varying combinations—poll taxes, cumulative poll taxes (demanding that past as well as current taxes be paid), literacy tests, secret ballot laws, lengthy residence requirements, elaborate registration systems, confusing multiple voting-box arrangements, and eventually, Democratic primaries restricted to white voters. Criminal exclusion laws also were altered to disfranchise men convicted of minor offenses, such as vagrancy and bigamy. These restrictions sometimes were written into state constitutions; elsewhere they simply were passed as statutes by state legislatures. (See Tables A.10, A.11, A.13, A.14, A.15.) The overarching aim of such restrictions, usually undisguised, was to keep poor and illiterate blacks—and in Texas, Mexican Americans—from the polls. “The great underlying principle of this Convention movement . . . was the elimination of the negro from the politics of this State,” emphasized a delegate to Virginia’s constitutional convention of 1901-1902. Literacy tests served that goal well, since 50 percent of all black men (as well as 15 percent of all whites) were illiterate, and even small tax requirements were a deterrent to the poor. Notably, it was during this period that the meaning of poll tax shifted: where it once had referred to a head tax that every man had to pay and that sometimes could be used to satisfy a taxpaying requirement for voting, it came to be understood as a tax that one had to pay in order to vote.62
Many of the disfranchising laws were designed expressly to be administered in a discriminatory fashion, permitting whites to vote while barring blacks. Small errors in registration procedures or marking ballots might or might not be ignored at the whim of election officials; taxes might be paid easily or only with difficulty; tax receipts might or might not be issued. Discrimination also was built into literacy tests, with their “understanding” clauses: officials administering the test could, and did, judge whether a prospective voter’s “understanding” was adequate. “Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose,” intoned future Senator Carter Glass at Virginia’s constitutional convention of 1901-1902. “That, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for—to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.” Discrimination, as well as circumvention of the Fifteenth Amendment, was also the aim of the well-known grandfather clauses that exempted men from literacy, tax, residency, or property requirements if they had performed military service or if their ancestors had voted in the 1860s. The first southern grandfather clause was adopted in South Carolina in 1890; with exquisite regional irony, it was modeled on the anti-immigrant Massachusetts law of 1857.63
Such laws were not passed without controversy. Contrary to twentieth-century images of a monolithic solid South, there was substantial white opposition to new restrictions on the franchise: many upcountry whites, small farmers, Populists, and Republicans viewed such laws as a means of suppressing dissent, a self-interested and partisan grab for power by dominant, elite, often black-belt Democrats. Legislation thus was not always enacted when first proposed, and there were at times prolonged and bitter debates about the dangers of “reform.” Egalitarian voices were raised, insisting that it was “wrong” or “unlawful” to deprive “even one of the hum-blest of our citizens of his right to vote . . . no matter how humble, or poor, or ignorant, or black, he may be.” Critics also maintained that “it is safer, easier, and more practicable to govern ignorant people as fellow-citizens than as subjects.” More commonly, apprehensions were voiced about the laws’ potential to disfranchise whites. A delegate from a predominantly white county in Texas asked whether a proposed poll tax had a “covert design” since “it afflicts the poor man and the poor man alone.” Proponents of suffrage restriction, however, drowned such objections in rhetoric stressing the urgency of black disfranchisement while assuring whites that their political rights would not be subverted. “I told the people of my county before they sent me here,” declared R. L. Gordon at Virginia’s constitutional convention in 1901, “that I intended . . . to disfranchise every negro that I could disfranchise under the Constitution of the United States, and as few white people as possible.”64
Despite such claims, many advocates of so-called electoral reform were quite comfortable with the prospect of shunting poor whites aside along with African Americans. One little-noticed irony induced by the Fifteenth Amendment was that it led southern Democrats to resurrect class, rather than racial, obstacles to voting, a resurrection that was altogether compatible with the conservative views and interests of many of the landed, patrician whites who were the prime movers of disfranchisement. “I believe in the virtue of a property qualification,” proclaimed Gordon of Virginia, who, as noted earlier, openly decried his state’s embrace of manhood suffrage in 1850. Gordon’s views apparently were shared by politicians in Alabama, who altered the preamble to the state’s constitution in 1901, relabeling suffrage a “privilege” rather than a “right.” As Tables A.11 and A.13 reveal, Alabama’s progressive constitution of 1875 had expressly banned both property and education requirements for suffrage; the new constitution imposed an amalgam of the two. Similarly, a New Orleans newspaper attacked manhood suffrage as “unwise, unreasonable, and illogical,” and Louisiana’s disfranchising laws targeted not only blacks but a political machine supported by working-class whites, many of them Italian. One Alabama disfranchiser publicly avowed his desire to eliminate “ignorant, incompetent, and vicious” white men from the electorate, while a Virginia delegate revived the notion of virtual representation in an attempt to mitigate the significance of legislation that would keep many whites from the polls. Such statements, moreover, were not mere window dressing designed to mask the racial intent of the new laws; as historian J. Morgan Kousser has pointed out, it was far riskier for politicians to publicly sanction white disfranchisement than to demand black exclusion.65
Indeed, the late-nineteenth-century effort to transform the South’s electorate was grounded solidly in class concerns as well as racial antagonism. Not only was the disfranchisement of poor whites palatable to many of their better-off brethren, but the exclusion of black voters also had significant class dimensions. Ridding the electorate of blacks was a means of rendering most of the agricultural laborers of the rural South politically powerless, of restoring the “peasantry” to its pre-Civil War political condition. Taking this step would permit post-slavery agriculture to be organized and economic development to be promoted while landowners and businessmen wielded unchallenged control of the state.
To be sure, the upper classes were not alone in advocating black disfranchisement: the movement was actively supported by many poor and lower-middle-class whites, just as the Know-Nothing effort to disfranchise immigrants was backed by some native-born workers. Yet the presence of a racial and political schism within the lower classes did not blunt (though it did complicate and dis
guise) disfranchisement’s class edge. In the Black Belt, cotton-growing counties that remained at the core of the South’s economy, a large majority of the laboring population was vulnerable to the new laws; in the region as a whole, the threat of a troublesome electoral alliance between blacks and poor whites could be eliminated. As historians have long noted, the political order of the new South was structured by class as well as racial dominance. In the words of an Alabama trade unionist, “the lawmakers . . . made the people believe that [the disfranchising law] was placed there to disfranchise the negro, but it was placed there to disfranchise the workingman.”66
The laws, of course, worked. In Mississippi after 1890, less than 9,000 out of 147,000 voting-age blacks were registered to vote; in Louisiana, where more than 130,000 blacks had been registered to vote in 1896, the figure dropped to an astonishing 1,342 by 1904. Throughout the region the black electorate was decimated, and many poor whites (as well as Mexican Americans) shared their fate. Just how many persons were barred from the polls is impossible to determine, but what is known is that both registration and turnout (calculated as the percentage of votes cast divided by the number of men of voting age) dropped precipitously after the electoral laws were reconfigured. By 1910, in Georgia, only 4 percent of all black males were registered to vote. In Mississippi, electoral turnout had exceeded 70 percent in the 1870s and approached 50 percent in the decade after the Redeemers came to power: by the early twentieth century, it had plummeted to 15 percent and remained at that level for decades. In the South as a whole, post-Reconstruction turnout levels of 60 to 85 percent fell to 50 percent for whites and single digits for blacks. The enlargement of the suffrage that was one of the signal achievements of Reconstruction had been reversed, and the rollback had restored the southern electorate to—at best—pre-Civil War proportions. Just as Henry Wilson and his allies had predicted, the South successfully took advantage of the narrowness of the Fifteenth Amendment to circumvent and undermine its intent. 67
What this meant for the history of the twentieth-century South is well known: the African-American population remained largely disfranchised until the 1960s, electoral participation remained low, and one-party rule by conservative Democrats became the norm. Viewed through a wider lens, these developments also signified that in a major region of the United States the nineteenth-century trend toward democratization had been not only checked, but reversed: the increasingly egalitarian institutions and convictions forged before the Civil War were undermined, while class barriers to electoral participation were strengthened or resurrected. The legal reforms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created not just a single-party region but a class-segmented as well as racially exclusive polity. Large segments of the rural, agricultural working class—America’s peasantry—were again voteless, and industrialization, which became increasingly important to the region after 1880, took place in a profoundly undemocratic society.
All of which, it must be noted, took place without great protest from the North. Although Republican politicians and newspapers routinely criticized the disfranchising laws, the Federal Elections Bill of 1890 was never revived, and scattered efforts to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—by reducing the congressional representation of southern states—garnered little support. As important, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of all of the major techniques of disfranchisement. In 1898, for example, it ruled that Mississippi’s literacy test did not violate the Fifteenth Amendment because the law creating the test was not, on its face, designed to discriminate against blacks. This constitutional standard, applied widely in the Gilded Age and during the Progressive era, flew in the face of both the consequences of the disfranchising laws and the explicitly discriminatory intentions proclaimed by their authors. Making enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment even more difficult, the Court also ruled that the federal government had the power to charge states, but not individual actors, with violations of the amendment’s principles: an individual who interfered with an African American’s attempt to vote was beyond the reach of federal law.68
The only exceptions to the Court’s extraordinary willingness to ignore the realities of southern political life arose in 1915, when it ruled that grandfather clauses in Oklahoma and Maryland were so blatantly discriminatory that they violated the Fifteenth Amendment. By 1915, however, the South’s new electoral structures were solidly in place, and grandfather clauses, in any case, were only minor building blocks of the system. The North in effect tolerated disfranchisement in the South—in part from weariness, in part due to the partisan interests of the Democratic Party, and in part because Northerners too had been losing faith in democracy.69
FIVE
The Redemption of the North
The great bulk of the American people have ever since the country was settled been property-owners, taxpayers, and people of considerable intelligence and business experience, and the reason that the establishment of universal suffrage by the abolition of the property qualification came about so easily was that it made no practical change in the seat of the sovereignty. It left power just where it had always been. The additions it made to constituencies, in the shape of ignorant and penniless voters, were so trifling that they attracted no attention and produced no change in the character either of legislation or administration. It is only now in our own day, and only in the great cities, that the possibility of the severance of political power from intelligence and property has been brought home to people as a practical question, and the results of the rule of mere numerical majority been made visible. If this severance had existed when the Government was founded, the republican form would assuredly never have been adopted; or, had it been adopted, it could never have been maintained, and the country would long since have gone the way of the South American republics. No such men as formed the bulk of the earlier settlers would ever have attempted the formulation of a political system in which the power was to be lodged in the hands of the proletariat; and the men who formed and 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.
—ANONYMOUS, Nation, 26 APRIL 1877
LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS was a rough-and-tumble sport, acutely partisan, engaging the energies and attention of millions of people. National elections were closely contested; control of Congress changed hands frequently; presidents were elected by razor-thin margins and sometimes with less than a majority of the popular vote. In the West as well as the North, politics was a mass activity, shaped by increasingly professional party organizations: public demonstrations and parades were common; electoral turnout was high; urban political machines, both Republican and (more often) Democratic, traded services for the votes and loyalty of hundreds of thousands of city dwellers. Although party identifications were strong, third parties frequently cropped up and remarkably often gained substantial influence in state and local governments. The Greenback Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, the Grange, the Farmers’ Alliances, the People’s Party, the Socialist Party—all wielded local or even statewide power at some point between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century.
The issues animating political life were big ones, sparked by the rapid spread of industrialization, fanned by class and interest-group conflict. The tariff and the money supply (which affected prices and the availability of credit) were issues in every national election. Railroad rates and regulation often dominated state political contests. City dwellers fought over the development and financing of increasingly necessary water, sewer, and transport systems. Embedded in all such issues were conflicts over corporate power and uncertainty about the proper role of the state: farmers and shippers pressed the states and Washington to protect them against the predations of railroads that controlled access to markets; workers sought legislation to shorten the hours of labor; small businesses cried out against monopolies; an
d urban consumers demanded regulation of utility companies. To be sure, not everything was high seriousness and political economy: the sale of liquor, for example, was a life-and-death issue in many elections. Yet on the whole, politics revolved around the myriad consequences of the increasingly evident triumph of industrial capitalism.
After 1900—or after the critical election of 1896, which yielded a new and long-lasting partisan alignment—the tone of political life shifted, although the dominant issues remained the same. The fate of the South was settled (removing one key contentious issue from the political arena), the Republican Party securely dominated much of the Northeast and Midwest, and third-party rebellions became infrequent. Electoral turnout fell, North and South, while the major political parties suffered a decline in enthusiasm and loyalty. The apocalyptic language of late-nineteenth-century politics—a language of crisis and perceived conflict—gave way to a more metallic and optimistic language of problem solving and expertise. Progressive reformers sought to tame, without frontally challenging, corporate power, utilize the state to contain economic conflict, and bureaucratize instruments of governance. Progressives also continued efforts to cleanse politics of corruption, diminish the influence of parties, and make public administration more efficient. Thanks in part to these reformers’ efforts and those of their late-nineteenth-century predecessors, most key features of the modern American state had been erected by 1920, on the foundation of an equally modern national, industrial economy.
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