The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  Losing Faith

  The Civil War and the crisis surrounding black voting rights provided only a temporary check against the current of antidemocratic sentiments that first roiled the political waters in the 1850s. By the middle of the 1870s, a scant few years after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, leading intellectuals and politicians voiced deep reservations about universal or manhood suffrage—which is how they described the breadth of the franchise in the wake of the Civil War. Although many had been abolitionists and had supported the republican drive for black enfranchisement, these critics publicly lamented the expansion of the franchise that had occurred before midcentury and opposed universal suffrage in terms far more sweeping and systematic than the Know-Nothings had done. Their criticisms of a broad suffrage were not mere revivals of early-nineteenth-century conservatism. Grounded in the realities of industrial, capitalist society, they constituted a more modern critique of democracy, capable of influencing and justifying voting laws well into the twentieth century.

  The most influential critics of universal manhood suffrage were clustered in the cities of the Northeast, particularly Boston and New York. From Protestant, often elite, backgrounds, generally Republican but only loosely tied to the party, they constituted a somewhat self-conscious intelligentsia, publishing their views in widely read journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and the North American Review. Among their ranks were historian Francis Parkman, editor E. L. Godkin, descendant of two presidents Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and somewhat later, prominent Ivy League academics. Yet the pendulum swing away from unrestricted suffrage was never confined to this small group of reformist intellectuals or the class to which they belonged; across the nation, political figures voiced similar concerns. So too did newspapers: the Washington Post in 1899, for example, urged that “poor white” Southerners, and white “sansculottes” everywhere be disfranchised. Such sentiments even took root among the more settled and established segments of the working class. As was often true, restrictions on suffrage for those at the bottom of the social ladder received backing from men who were only one rung up.1

  One source of this conservative reaction was the dismal course of events in the South: not only was Redemption gaining ground, but reports were widely circulated (though largely inaccurate) that Reconstruction governments elected with black votes were incompetent and corrupt. The key precipitants of this ideological swing, however, resided in the North, in the dramatic—even shocking—transformations in economic and social life that inescapably reverberated into politics. Between 1865 and 1900, the United States became the leading manufacturing nation in the world, and its industrial output eclipsed that of agriculture. While the country’s population rose from roughly thirty-five million to nearly seventy-five million, nonfarm employment tripled: at the turn of the century, more than ten million people worked in manufacturing, mining, construction, and transportation.2

  When Americans who had come of age in the 1840s and 1850s gazed outward after the Civil War, what they saw was unfamiliar and disturbing: new industries, large and impersonal workplaces, private corporations wielding enormous economic and political power, and economic panics that created new problems such as mass unemployment. They saw abandoned farms, railroads crisscrossing vast stretches of country, and—distressingly—cities of unprecedented size and complexity. In 1870, only New York and Philadelphia had populations greater than 500,000; by 1910, there were eight, three of which contained more than a million people. Moreover, these cities increasingly were governed by political organizations, or machines, as critics called them, that the traditional elites could not control or even understand.

  What Americans also witnessed—and apparently feared—was the extremely rapid growth of an immigrant working class. Interrupted by the Civil War, the flow of immigrants that had begun in the 1840s resumed quickly after Appomattox: the nation’s expanding industries needed labor, and that labor was supplied by men and women from Europe and to a far lesser extent Asia and Mexico. Between 1865 and World War I, nearly twenty-five million immigrants journeyed to the United States, accounting for a large proportion of the nation’s World War I population of roughly one hundred million. The vast majority of these immigrants were propertyless workers rather than settlers. The Irish and Germans continued to arrive, joined by growing numbers of southern and eastern Europeans: men and women who did not speak English, whose cultures were alien, and most of whom were Catholic or Jewish. By 1910, most urban residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the nation’s huge working class was predominantly foreign-born, native-born of foreign parents, or black.3

  In the eyes of many old-stock Americans, this mass of immigrant workers was an unwelcome addition to the electorate. Poor, uneducated, ignorant of American traditions, the foreign-born men peopling the nation’s industries seemed to lack the judgment, knowledge, and commitment to American values necessary for salutary participation in elections. It was not their foreignness alone or their class position by itself that rendered them suspect; rather it was the combination of the two, the melding of class and cultural attributes and interests, the fusion of poverty, dependence, ignorance, difference, and militance. One sign of immigrants’ unsuitability as voters was their apparent inclination toward radicalism. These were the voters who backed “demagogue” Ben Butler’s quasi-populist, anti-establishment campaigns in Massachusetts in the 1870s, as well as Knights of Labor and socialist candidates in later decades; these were the men who allegedly tossed bombs at Haymarket in 1886, who struck and rioted against the railroads in 1877, at Pullman in 1894, and Lawrence in 1912. It was likely not a coincidence that several prominent attacks on universal suffrage were published immediately after the strikes of 1877 and Butler’s 1878 campaign.

  Equally compelling evidence of their unfitness was the support that poor, foreign-born voters gave to political machines, to so-called boss rule. The clientelist politics of the machines, grounded in ethnic loyalty and the exchange of favors for votes, appeared to be a plague, incubated in immigrant neighborhoods and infecting the entire body politic. By the late 1860s, this political plague had brought the notoriously corrupt Tweed ring to power in New York, and in subsequent decades, only slightly less notorious machines were flourishing in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and San Francisco.

  Critics of manhood suffrage thus anchored their views in the claim that the democratic principles so widely celebrated in earlier decades had been rendered obsolete or even hazardous by changes that had occurred in the composition of the electorate. The unnamed author of the 1877 article published in the Nation (quoted at the opening of this chapter) offered the (probably accurate) historical argument that “the republican form would assuredly never have been adopted” and “restrictions on the electoral franchise” would never have been removed before 1850 had previous generations faced the prospect of putting power “in the hands of the proletariat.” America’s most celebrated historian, Francis Parkman, made the point more vividly in “The Failure of Universal Suffrage,” a widely read article published in 1878:A New England village of the olden time—that is to say, of some forty years ago—would have been safely and well governed by the votes of every man in it; but, now that the village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses, and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder, to whom the public good is nothing and their own most trivial interests everything, who love the country for what they can get out of it, and whose ears are open to the promptings of every rascally agitator, the case is completely changed, and universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing.

  Perhaps consciously, Parkman’s retrospective analysis clearly echoed Chancellor Kent’s famous prediction in 1821 that a broad franchise would endanger the nation once manufacturing had taken hold.4

  Indeed, opponents of universal suffrage consistently couch
ed their opinions in language redolent with class, ethnic, and racial hostility; in telling contrast to the 1850s, anti-Catholic language was rare and muted.5 “Universal Suffrage can only mean in plain English,” wrote John Quincy Adams’s grandson, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “the government of ignorance and vice:—it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast; an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.” In 1883, eminent geologist Alexander Winchell denounced the “evils which germinate in the American system of universal suffrage.” The United States must “diminish the power of the worst classes . . . to deny the existence of classes among us is to dispute with the multiplication table.” Writing from New York in 1890, Edward Godkin, editor of the influential and widely read Nation, lamented that “it was unfortunate that the change in the constitution of this state in 1846, establishing universal suffrage, occurred simultaneously with the beginning of the great tide of emigration which followed the Irish famine. Its result was that the city was soon flooded with a large body of ignorant voters.” Early in the twentieth century, writer and former diplomat William L. Scruggs concluded that “in its last analysis, universal suffrage is but another name for a licensed mobocracy; and a licensed mobocracy is nothing less than ‘organized anarchy,’ pure and simple.” A decade later, another critic decried the fact that “the improvident, the ignorant, the vicious, the stupid, the lazy, the drunken, the dirty—the whole mass of scum and dregs of society” had the same electoral power as “the mature, the useful, the industrious, the intelligent.” In Texas, Mexican immigrants were described as a “political menace,” as “foreigners who claim American citizenship but who are as ignorant of things American as the mule.”6

  Aside from their ignorance and vices, what was objectionable about these voters was that they purportedly were prone to voting illegally, irresponsibly, and against the interests of their betters. Charges of corruption and naturalization fraud were repeated endlessly: electoral outcomes were twisted by “naturalization mills” that, with the aid of “professional perjurers and political manipulators,” transformed thousands of immigrants into citizens in the weeks before elections. ( Just how substantial—or insubstantial—such charges may have been is discussed in detail later in this chapter.) Moreover, even if their votes were legal, they were inappropriately cast, bartered for jobs or favors from a boss. “The suffrage is nothing to [the immigrant],” observed reformer and labor economist John R. Commons, “but a means of livelihood.” Several critics, including Winchell, offered an updated Blackstonian specter in which a working-class, rather than aristocratic, demagogue took advantage of the poor: universal suffrage, he maintained, “establishes the way to demagogism. The ignorant, uncultured, or dissipated voter most willingly yields to the persuasions of one of his own class.”7

  Others stated unabashedly that the voting poor constituted a threat to property. “There is probably no sweeter experience in the world than that of a penniless laborer . . . when he learns that by casting his vote in the right way he can strip the rich merchant or shipowner of a portion of his gains,” wrote one critic. Universal suffrage “gives power to the communistic attack on property,” concluded Parkman. “Communism and social chaos are the only possible finality of such a tendency,” echoed Winchell. Framing the matter more broadly—and probably more accurately—Parkman concluded that the “masses” had values antithetical to the American tradition: “Liberty was the watchword of our fathers, and so it is of ourselves. But, in their hearts, the masses of the nation cherish desires not only different from it, but inconsistent with it. They want equality more than they want liberty.”8

  Faced with the “evils” stemming from a broad suffrage, these critics utterly repudiated the notion, so prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century, that voting was a right or even a natural or inalienable right. As early as 1865, Godkin maintained that the franchise was “not a right, but a trust committed to each individual more for the benefit of the rest of the nation than for his own.” That same year, a Maryland court ruled that suffrage was not “among the rights of property or person”; it was instead “a matter of mere state policy.” Parkman was even more hostile, deriding the “theory of inalienable rights” as “an outrage to justice and common sense,” reflecting a “superstition . . . respecting the ballot.”

  The means are confounded with the end. Good government is the end, and the ballot is worthless except so far as it helps to reach this end. Any reasonable man would willingly renounce his privilege of dropping a piece of paper into a box, provided that good government were assured to him and his descendants.9

  Thirty years later, such opinions remained current: an editorial in the Outlook (a Christian “family newspaper”), for example, juxtaposed the theory of suffrage as a right with the notion that it was a matter of efficacy, a “means to an end.” “One view is that suffrage is a natural right: that it is the prerogative of the freeman: that every man of sound nature, mentally and morally, and of full age, has a right to an equal share with his fellow men in the government of the State of which he is a member.” In contrast, the “other view,” which the Outlook endorsed, The implication of this reasoning was unmistakable: if suffrage was simply a “means to an end,” and if broad suffrage produced poor governments, then it was perfectly legitimate to narrow the portals to the voting booth. Ironically, perhaps, rejecting the notion that suffrage was a right was made easier by the contemporaneous agitation for women’s suffrage: reversing the “slippery slope” argument, critics argued that since women did not vote, suffrage obviously was not a right.10

  is that suffrage is simply a means for exercising the functions of government . . . that no one has a right to share in this government unless he is competent to know what are the rights of his fellow-citizens and to take whatever action may be necessary for their protection; that suffrage is merely means to an end and that end a just government, and that whatever conditions of suffrage at any particular time and in any particular community will secure the best government are the conditions which the community should adopt and maintain.

  Not everyone bought this restrictionist logic, even among the elite. Many supporters of black suffrage in the South continued to insist that voting was a right, as did advocates of women’s suffrage; moreover, some liberal Northerners publicly took issue with democracy’s critics. One particularly pointed rebuttal came from John Martin Luther Babcock, who in 1879 published “The Right of the Ballot: A Reply to Francis Parkman and Others Who Have Asserted ‘The Failure of Universal Suffrage. ’” Babcock, a minister and erstwhile poet from Groton, Massachusetts, was alarmed by the burst of attacks on “universal suffrage, or what in this country is called such,” particularly since the attacks emanated from “an element that claims to be the ‘best’ in our society.” Babcock’s “reply” to Parkman and others was multipronged. He argued that “the idea of human rights” was “the safeguard alike of society and of man. . . . One may be willing, for the sake of discrediting the ballot, to repudiate the idea of natural rights; but he must also be willing to repudiate the most inspiring lessons of our history.” Zeroing in on the class dimensions of Parkman’s views, Babcock pointed out that the ballot was a necessary bulwark against exploitation, that the “poor multitudes may be oppressed with safety” if they lack “political power.” A broad franchise, moreover, was in the interest of all classes because it would “unite the different elements of society in harmonious fellowship” and because without it the polity would contain “the seeds of violent dissolution.” Babcock acknowledged the imperfections and corruption of contemporary political life but insisted that such flaws were not peculiar to a democratic “system of government.” The “republic,” he claimed, would be “perfected . . . by establishing justice and equity among men,” not by the “overthrow” of “natural rights.”11

  Babcock’s arguments were echoed and supplemented by numerous other writers and political figures. Most insisted t
hat suffrage was indeed a right, that society “should give the ballot to every man simply because he is a man.” Only slightly less common was the argument (drawing in part on the writings of John Stuart Mill) that possession of the franchise was educational, that it would serve to stimulate and uplift the poor and the ignorant, creating a wiser and sounder polity in the not-too-distant long run. Some defenders of democracy dismissed the fear that “working men will unite in support of measures intended for their benefit as a class, without regard to the welfare of other classes”: the working class, they insisted, simply was too diverse and divided to form an electoral bloc. Others, including former abolitionist and Republican Congressman George W. Julian, maintained that the “evils which now blacken our politics” ought to be blamed not on universal suffrage but on “corporations,” “capitalists,” and “a mercenary and corrupt leadership.” The notion that men with property were the best custodians of the republic in fact seemed to fly in the face of the track record of the era’s robber barons: “wealthy men control our railroad corporations,” a contributor to the Nation pointed out. “What has been the degree of honor and regard for the public good with which these institutions have been managed?”12

  The intellectual counterattack against critics of universal suffrage made clear that northern liberals, “literary men,” those who in later decades would be called opinion makers, were deeply divided over the issue. There were passionate advocates of a broad franchise just as there were passionate critics, and there is no way to tell how many men, literary and otherwise, fell into each camp. What was noteworthy about this public debate—which foreshadowed and then mirrored debates in statehouses across the country—was not the relative strength of the two camps but rather that the debate took place at all. Within a few years of passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, a significant segment of the intellectual community was announcing its distrust of democracy and rejecting the claim that suffrage was a right. The discourse had changed, and the breadth of the franchise—particularly extension of the franchise to the poor, uneducated, and foreign-born—was once again a live issue.