The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  PART III

  Toward Universal Suffrage—and Beyond

  A NEW ERA IN THE HISTORY OF THE RIGHT TO VOTE began after World War I. The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment brought the prolonged struggle for women’s suffrage to an end, nearly doubling the size of the nation’s electorate. At roughly the same time, there occurred a marked slowdown of legal and political initiatives to shrink the polity. The flurries of activity that had been so visible since the 1850s—the movements and countermovements, the recurrent state constitutional debates, the writing and revising of complex legislation aimed at blacks, immigrants, and workers, among others—subsided in the 1920s. For several decades thereafter, the broad contours of suffrage law remained remarkably stable.

  That stability would disintegrate in the 1960s. Pressures that had been mounting since World War II—reinforced by socioeconomic change, an inspired grassroots movement, and the ideological climate of the cold war—fractured the edifice of voting law and precipitated a broad reconstruction of the legal principles governing the franchise. This transformation began with efforts to remedy the nation’s most glaring limitation on suffrage, the exclusion of African Americans from political life in the South. But it did not end there. In the course of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the right to vote was effectively nationalized for the first time in the history of the United States, and the ability of individual states to keep men and women from the polls was severely limited by newly democratic rules emanating from Congress and from the federal judiciary. By the early 1970s, the United States, formally at least, had something very close to universal suffrage.

  SEVEN

  The Quiet Years

  The Council of State Governments investigated state suffrage laws, and their results show a poor substitute for the “universal suffrage” guaranteed by the Constitution. Citizens may be disqualified from voting for more than fifty reasons, and every state except Michigan has at least one provision for disqualification. Alabama has twenty-five and South Carolina twenty-eight. On the credit side, Illinois and Pennsylvania have only one each, and Vermont two. The average is about six. Convicted felons are barred in forty states. Lesser crimes that are punished by disfranchisement range from betting on an election to wife beating. Treason, electoral bribery, bigamy, perjury, adultery, malfeasance in office, receiving stolen goods, and miscegenation are all reasons for losing the right to vote in at least one state. Five states bar Indians and Rhode Island specifically bars Narragansett Indians. Insane persons, idiots, illiterates, incompetents, soldiers, sailors, and “immoral persons” are generally disfranchised. Disqualification of paupers, the infamous poll taxes in eight states, and some amazing registration and residence requirements make the list almost complete. Add to this the terrorism which prevents Negroes and unpopular minorities from voting, and the wonder is that anyone is left to go to the polls.

  —The New Republic, 1940

  Stasis and Its Sources

  In 1928, William B. Munro, a professor of political science and history at Harvard, published an article in the Forum entitled “Intelligence Tests for Voters.” Munro, a past president of the American Political Science Association, echoed E. L. Godkin in wistfully concluding that “universal suffrage has come to stay.” Munro continued,But this does not mean that universal suffrage will always continue to be interpreted as excluding nobody. On the contrary there is every reason to expect that it will gradually be trimmed at the edges, as have so many other principles in the American philosophy of government.

  For Munro, redefining universal suffrage—so that it would not be universal—was desirable because “the complexities of government” had increased so rapidly thatabout twenty percent of those who get on the voters’ list have no business to be there. Taking the country as a whole, the total number of these interlopers must run into the millions. There are enough of them to swing an election. Can rational men be fairly expected to place unwavering faith in a system of suffrage which commits the destinies of a great nation into such hands as these?

  Munro acknowledged that there was not “even a remote possibility” that the United States could eliminate the “interlopers” by reinstituting property qualifications, but he believed that the problem could at least begin to be solved if all states followed the recent example of New York and instituted “intelligence tests” for voters: “by eliminating the least intelligent stratum of the applicants for suffrage, as New York State is now doing,” the nation would heighten the competence of the electorate and avoid the “revulsion from the extreme implications of democracy” that seemed to be sweeping Europe.1

  Munro was not alone in his beliefs. Many Americans in the 1920s and 1930s remained skeptical (at best) of universal suffrage, and the rise of fascism, as well as the threat of socialism, in Europe only deepened their concern. Even before the trauma of the Great Depression cast doubts on the viability of both capitalism and democracy, numerous American intellectuals and political leaders believed that they saw in Europe an updated version of the Blackstonian nightmare: an excess of democracy leading to mobocracy that in turn would degenerate into dictatorship. Munro himself complained that “the world suffered from a democracy complex” in the years just after World War I. A United States Army training manual in the late 1920s warned its readers that democracy gave birth to “demogagism,” “anarchy,” and “communistic” attitudes toward property.2

  Those who held such views, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, saw intelligence or literacy tests as a critical check against the power of the mob and the “extreme implications” of democracy. A 1924 article in the Educational Review also praised New York’s law, insisting that “illiteracy, practically synonymous with ignorance, should have no place in the voting population of America.” A few years later, Dr. William J. Hickson, director of the “psychopathic” laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, asserted that limiting the vote to “those of superior intelligence” would help eradicate crime, and in 1931, Professor Harrison R. Hunt of Michigan State College urged the annual meeting of the Eugenics Research Association to support the limitation of suffrage to the nation’s “natural aristocrats.” “One might almost say,” observed the professor, “that it is self-evident that men are created unequal.” Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the New York Times reported with pride the workings of New York’s requirement that all new voters either present evidence of their education or pass an intelligence test, in English, designed by the state department of education. Thousands of people failed the test each time that it was given, and thousands more were believed to have foregone the opportunity to vote because they chose not to be tested. New York City’s superintendent of schools was convinced that the state’s experience with the test was “so satisfactory that other states will rapidly follow our lead.”3

  Other states in fact did not follow New York’s lead: Oregon, in 1924, was the last state to institute any kind of literacy test for voting, bringing to a halt a movement that had begun in Connecticut in 1855. Indeed, New York itself, through its supreme court, rebuffed a 1934 effort by the Honest Ballot Association to require literacy of all (not just new) voters, and several states made provisions for assisting illiterate voters at the polls. Yet if the pendulum was no longer swinging toward franchise restriction, neither did it travel very far in the opposite direction. No states that had literacy qualifications for voting repealed them in the decades following World War I; in the 1940s, eighteen states (seven in the South) continued to exclude voters who could not demonstrate their literacy in English. In the South, the administration of these laws was designed primarily to exclude blacks: as Senator Theodore Bilbo observed in 1946, in Mississippi “a man to register must be able to read and explain . . . a Constitution that damn few white men and no niggers at all can explain.” As late as 1959, the Supreme Court, in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Electors, upheld the legitimacy of state laws that made the ability to read and write a qualification for voting.4

 
The nation’s experience with literacy tests was emblematic of the broader history of suffrage from 1920 until World War II—and in some respects, until the early 1960s. Despite skirmishes large and small, partisan as well as ideological, there were few major changes in the laws governing the right to vote. In the South, where suffrage had provoked the most bitter and violent conflicts, the dense web of restrictions woven between 1890 and 1910 continued to disfranchise nearly all blacks and many poor whites. The diverse techniques that southern states had adopted to insure white supremacy remained in force, and the federal government—ostensibly respecting the right of states to set their own suffrage laws—colluded in the fiction that the Fifteenth Amendment was still the law of the land.5

  Indeed, the most significant legal reforms in the South before World War II had a greater impact on whites than on blacks. These were the decisions by three states (North Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida) to repeal their poll taxes. (Georgia, in addition, responded to the exigencies of the Great Depression by eliminating the disqualification of citizens who were delinquent in paying property taxes.) The poll tax, of course, had a class, as well as racial, thrust, and, once white Democratic primaries had been instituted in the one-party region, some critics believed that the poll tax served primarily to keep poor whites out of politics. Consequently, opposition could be mounted that would not be fatally tarred with the brush of race. In North Carolina in 1920, white voters from the west voted overwhelmingly to abolish the poll tax (and to lower the residency requirement), despite some opposition from the eastern Black Belt.6

  More flamboyantly, Huey Long, in the 1930s, spearheaded a movement to abolish Louisiana’s tax: he did so both to enhance his support among poor whites and to undercut the power of conservative sheriffs who bought votes by paying the poll taxes of poor voters. Long dismissed opposition claims that repeal would open elections to blacks, arguing that registration laws and the white primary were sufficient obstacles to black enfranchisement. Persuaded by Long’s appeal to class interest, a huge majority of Louisiana’s white voters supported repeal. A few years later, in Florida, the poll tax was repealed by a coalition of liberals led by Claude Pepper and by Miami politicians who were fed up with the corruption that the poll tax was facilitating. In each of these states, poll tax repeal was the consequence of political conflicts among whites and had the effect of increasing the number of white voters. Although blacks also registered in significant numbers in Florida’s cities, Huey Long’s prediction was largely accurate: other racially exclusive laws kept the vast majority of blacks in all three states from voting, whether they paid their poll taxes or not. The legal armor of the white South was only slightly dented.7

  Similarly, in the North, the patterns of inclusion and exclusion established before World War I endured, with some trimming and stitching around the edges. Immigrants who sought to vote continued to face relatively high barriers to citizenship, including literacy tests, a sharply increased naturalization fee, and limitations on their political views. In the 1920s, Arkansas (as noted in Chapter 5) put an end to the nation’s faltering experiment with alien voting; moving in the opposite direction, California eliminated its ban on voters of Chinese descent in 1926, and Oregon followed suit a year later. Rhode Island in 1928 liberalized its franchise by eliminating the property qualification for municipal voting, and Pennsylvania eliminated its taxpaying requirement in 1933. By 1940, there were no poll taxes in the North, although property and tax qualifications for voting on bond and assessment issues persisted in numerous states, including Michigan, Utah, Nevada, and Montana. Paupers continued to be excluded in a dozen states; the “insane” and “incompetent” were disfranchised nearly everywhere; and convicted felons faced an array of detailed laws that kept them from voting during and after periods of incarceration.8

  In fact, most of the legal changes that occurred during this period were relatively technical and dealt with issues of residence and registration. All states retained residency qualifications, typically of one year but ranging from six months (in rural states, mostly in the Midwest) to two years (in a handful of southern states in addition to Rhode Island); nearly all had shorter county and district residency requirements as well. Modifications of the residency laws generally involved their application to unusual or anomalous cases: students, soldiers, inmates of institutions, migrant workers, absentees, and people who owned two homes or had difficulty furnishing proof that they had any domicile at all. In most northern states, the drift of the law was mildly expansive, as state courts tried to protect the right of individuals to vote somewhere; in addition, provisions for absentee voting became more flexible. Still, students who were not demonstrably independent of their parents usually could not establish legal residency where they attended school; neither could soldiers where they were stationed; nor could inhabitants of mental institutions and poorhouses. In quantitative terms, the significance of the laws affecting anomalous cases paled in comparison with the durational requirements themselves: the United States remained a highly mobile society, and residency rules, both state and local, continued to keep large numbers of voters from the polls.9

  Voter registration laws, already widespread by 1920, became nearly universal by 1940: only Arkansas, whose state constitution prohibited such procedures, lacked some scheme for registering and enrolling voters prior to elections. In numerous states, detailed and complex registration rules remained a procedural obstacle to voting, much as they had been prior to World War I. There were, however, two broad trends in these laws between 1920 and the 1950s. The first, lessening a procedural burden that had generated vociferous complaints and partisan conflict, was the spread of permanent rather than periodic registration systems: voters who did not change their place of residence remained on the registry lists and did not have to repeat the process of registering before each election or every two or four years. (In some states, voters were dropped from the rolls if they did not cast their ballots during a defined period.) The second trend was toward the increasing uniformity of registration rules within states: although initially targeted at large cities, registration laws, usually at the insistence of urban politicians, were made applicable to all prospective voters within a state. In 1934, the Supreme Court for the first time affirmed the constitutionality of registration schemes. Upholding a decision by the Indiana Supreme Court (Blue v. State ex rel. Brown), the justices ruled that state registration laws were legitimate as long as they were reasonable and uniform.10

  On the whole, thus, the years between 1920 and World War II constituted—with a few exceptions—a period of stasis in the legal and political history of the right to vote. To a considerable degree, this stasis reflected a relaxation of elite and middle-class apprehensions about the breadth of the franchise. Although the men and women who had favored restrictions on the right to vote did not suddenly discover a new enthusiasm for universal suffrage, neither did they press for more severe limitations. William B. Munro’s call for action struck a much shallower chord than Francis Parkman’s had a half century earlier.

  That this was so stemmed in part from the success of the laws already in force and from the political stability of the era of “normalcy.” In the South, there was little perceived need for action, because the disfranchising laws of earlier decades were working well: only a tiny fraction of the region’s blacks voted, and single-party rule was secure. Similarly, in the Northeast and Midwest, the Republican Party retained a strong grip on most states through the 1920s; meanwhile, concerns about the immigrant working class were eased by the sharp drop in immigration that began during World War I and was perpetuated by the restriction acts of 1921 and 1924. (The virtual cessation of Asian immigration lowered the temperature in the West.) Throughout the nation, moreover, those who had feared a broad franchise were reassured by the uneventful passage of women into electoral politics.

  Conservatives, in all likelihood, were also reassured by the ongoing decline in electoral participation that had begun after the e
lection of 1896 and accelerated by the 1920s. In the South, turnout plummeted to roughly 20 percent in presidential elections, and even in the North, it fell to less than 60 percent, a sharp contrast to late-nineteenth-century elections in which more than 80 percent of potential voters cast their ballots. In nonpresidential years, the vote totals were even lower. How much of this drop was due to indifference or the lack of party competition, rather than legal restraints, was—and remains—unclear, but there is no doubt that fewer people were casting their ballots and that turnout was lowest (outside of the South) among women, immigrants and their children, and the poor.11

  As historians have noted, the decline in turnout produced some peculiar, yet temporary, handwringing among its political beneficiaries. In the 1920s, mainstream northern newspapers, commentators, and politicians (there was very little handwringing in the South) lamented the fall in electoral participation and even debated the merits of making voting compulsory. Scholars began studying nonvoting, and civic organizations sponsored Get Out the Vote campaigns in 1924 and subsequent election years. Even President Calvin Coolidge got into the act. In 1926, in a remarkable speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, Coolidge pointed out both that turnout had been extremely low in 1924 (when he was elected) and that in 1922 not a single senator had received the votes of a majority of eligible voters. “Citizenship in America,” Coolidge declared, “is not a private enterprise but a public function. . . . The shirking of ” the “responsibilities of citizenship” constituted “a serious danger” to the nation. Precipitated by the mistaken perception that turnout was falling because respectable middle-class citizens were not bothering to vote, these laments became less frequent once studies revealed that nonvoters were disproportionately poor and working class: the potential voters who had been feared most were not wielding electoral strength in proportion to their numbers. Indeed, after the 1920s, public expressions of concern about declining participation acquired a ritualistic tone, while turnout itself, despite a brief upturn in the 1930s, continued its long-run slide and retained its class skew.12