The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  There were other reasons as well for the slowdown in efforts to narrow the breadth of the franchise, reasons tied to structural changes in political life and governmental institutions. One such change was a piecemeal erosion of popular control over government agencies and decisions. Proposals for de-democratizing government, particularly municipal government, had been a staple of “reform” thought in the late nineteenth century: “the elective principle is not the proper one to be generally applied in large centres of population,” urged Frank Goodnow, an influential commentator in 1897. One means of translating such ideas into action was a structural reform that became extremely popular during the Progressive era: the replacement of mayors and ward-based aldermen with appointed city managers and commissioners elected at large in nonpartisan contests. Sponsored by businessmen throughout the nation, this structural innovation vitiated the influence of political machines and their working-class constituents, while favoring wealthy probusiness candidates who could mount citywide campaigns. Openly designed on a corporate model, the commission-manager structure removed many policy decisions from direct popular influence. By the 1920s, more than 600 city governments had been restructured in this way, and by the late 1960s, almost half of the nation’s cities were governed by city managers and commissioners. State and county governments too witnessed a proliferation of appointed commissions and managers, often with broad powers over domains such as water resources, utilities, policing, and transportation. One key demand of many Progressive reformers was “the short ballot”—a reduction in the number of offices for which one voted—and the short ballot meant fewer officials directly accountable to the populace.13

  Similarly, it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the federal government began to entrust major policy responsibilities to commissioners and agency heads who were appointed for lengthy terms and (often) could not be removed by elected officials. The prototype of such institutions was the Interstate Commerce Commission, created in 1887 to regulate railroad practices (such as rebates and discriminatory rates) that had become the object of widespread public rage and the focus of bitter political conflict. Several decades later, the hottest political issue of the era, the monopolization of industry, was entrusted to the Federal Trade Commission, while control of the nation’s money supply (and interest rates) was vested in the powerful Federal Reserve Board. Created in the name of efficiency and expertise, such agencies served in part to insulate important policy decisions from popular control.

  These new institutional arrangements became increasingly important in the twentieth century, taking the nation down a path presciently suggested in 1879 by a worried critic of universal suffrage in the Atlantic Monthly (see the introduction to Part II, “Narrowing the Portals”). “The subjects of voting can be much reduced,” the unnamed commentator had proposed. Although American political life had countercurrents as well (such as the Progressive-era provisions for initiatives and referenda, direct primaries, and the popular election of senators), there was an unmistakable drift, at all levels of governance, toward a more managerial state and a shrinking spectrum of decisions that could be directly affected by elections.

  The power of individual voters was limited further by the organization of political life and competition. Put simply, the choices open to voters narrowed. In the 1920s, single-party dominance was the rule in many states, and even after the electoral realignment of the 1930s put an end to Republican control of the industrial Northeast and Midwest, numerous states remained uncompetitive. Moreover, everywhere voters typically had a choice between only two parties—and two parties that were not all that unlike each other. The rebellious third and fourth and fifth parties that flourished in the late nineteenth century—mostly local but some rising to regional and national strength—gave way to the reification and institutionalization of a two-party system. In some states, such as Ohio and Illinois, dissident or “un-American” parties were banned from the ballot, and in New York in 1920, the legislature refused to seat elected Socialists. More commonly, third-party movements were discouraged by rules prohibiting fusion tickets and limiting the appearance and placement on the ballot of non-major party candidates. Such laws had been pioneered by Republicans as a means of undercutting the Populists in the 1880s and 1890s, but the model long outlived the Populist revolt. In 1947, for example, the Wilson-Pakula Act in New York took direct aim at the coalition-building efforts of left-leaning Congressman Vito Marcantonio by making it nearly impossible for a candidate belonging to one party to even enter the primary of another party. Later in the twentieth century, the two-party system further was incorporated into the state through a system of partial public financing of electoral campaigns that was effectively available only to the major parties.14

  One revealing variant of this pattern involved the election of state appellate court judges. Between 1846 and 1912, nearly all states opted for an elected judiciary—in part owing to popular pressure to make judges accountable to the people, and in part because political leaders, as well as leaders of the bar, sought to enhance the legitimacy and authority of the courts. This formal democratization, however, was undercut in several stages by the introduction of nonpartisan elections for judges and by the rise of merit screening of potential nominees by bar associations and committees of lawyers in the 1930s and 1940s. Although ostensibly designed to improve the quality and independence of the judiciary, these innovations also served to diminish its popular accountability. Voters were left choosing among candidates about whom they knew little (since party labels had been a critical source of information) and whose views already had been approved by the legal establishment. The upshot was a sharp decline in voting for judges and a virtual guarantee that incumbents would remain on the bench as long as they wished. By 1940, at least two states (California and Missouri) had partially returned to a system of appointing state court judges.15

  Other techniques for limiting the impact of democratization also were available, such as gerrymandering. Whether gerrymandering was more common in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth is unclear, but certainly it was deployed with frequency to control or influence electoral outcomes. Similarly, malapportionment often served to diminish the political power of the immigrant and ethnic working class. In many states, rural counties and districts were systematically overrepresented (relative to their population) in one or both branches of the state legislature .16

  Against this changing institutional backdrop, as historians and political scientists have long noted, organized interest groups became increasingly prominent political actors. This trend, begun in the late nineteenth century, became far more pronounced in the twentieth: lobbyists, representing organized interests such as bankers and individual industries, became a permanent presence in Washington and state capitals, while the interest groups themselves became significant constituencies for political leaders. The state served as a broker among organized interests, who played an increasingly active role in shaping government decisions. What this meant, of course, was that those who had the resources and skills to do so acquired a voice—often a loud voice—that spoke to government officials through nonelectoral channels. The locus of policy formation was shifting from the hustings to the hearing room or the headquarters of regulatory commissions and agencies.17

  This broad assembly of changes in politics and the structure of government gradually took the wind out of the sails of advocates of further suffrage restriction. Franchise restriction had always had risks: it violated the nation’s official commitment to democracy and opened the door to partisan reprisals and further exclusions. After 1920, fewer people seemed to think that those risks were worth taking. The perceived threats to the established order that loomed so large in the 1870s and 1890s lost their vivid coloration and seemed increasingly manageable without further shrinking the electorate.

  The stasis of voting law between 1920 and World War II also was grounded in an altogether different phenomenon: the absence of
significant pressure to expand the franchise. The dynamics of war were not in play; the alignment of political parties favored stability; and, importantly, grassroots movements were weak. In the North and West, both the social composition and social location of the disfranchised were such that collective action was highly unlikely. With the exception of Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics, the disfranchised did not constitute coherent, distinctive, or easily identifiable social groups. Although liberal intellectuals and organs of opinion (such as the New Republic, cited earlier) frequently registered their dismay over the scope of legal disfranchisement, mobilizations of the illiterate or the itinerant were improbable.

  Equally improbable was collective action on the part of paupers, felons, people who had lost their naturalization papers, or individuals who had difficulty navigating their way through byzantine registration laws. Such legal restrictions had an unmistakable class bias, but they did not disfranchise the working class per se; most of the working class indeed was enfranchised, and the proportion rose as immigration slowed and the children of immigrants came of age. Those who remained outside the polity were numerous, but they were scattered, socially marginal, transient, or (in theory, at least) only temporarily disfranchised. As a result, they were unlikely either to organize or to attract the interest of any major political party. Partisan pressure to expand the franchise was confined to eliminating financial barriers to voting in a few northern states and smoothing out some of the rougher edges of registration requirements.

  The South was the potential exception to this pattern—since blacks constituted a very large and identifiable bloc of disfranchised voters—and some African Americans, particularly in the cities, actively pursued changes in the suffrage laws. Eschewing Booker T. Washington’s advice to accept Jim Crow and concentrate on self-advancement (and tacitly embracing the position of W.E.B. DuBois that voting rights were essential to black freedom), these men and women attempted to vote and pressed—usually through the courts—for an end to poll taxes, the white primary, and discriminatory literacy tests. But the activists were small in number. Most southern blacks lived in a predominantly rural world where collective action was exceedingly difficult; thanks to sharecropping and the crop-lien system (which kept them in a state of debt peonage), they also were propertyless, economically dependent on those who controlled political life, fearful of reprisals, and often resigned to an all-encompassing and seemingly inescapable system of repression.

  The structure of southern politics, moreover, provided few opportunities for prying open the doors to the polls. Although rife with factionalism and ideological conflict, the state Democratic parties did not countenance dissent on race: although alliances between poor whites and blacks always were theoretically possible, no white faction that dared to support black enfranchisement could hope to survive long enough to build a coalition with prospective African-American voters. Nor did national politics afford much of an opening. The Republican Party in the 1920s had no need of the black vote (or the South) to win national elections, while the Democrats had no partisan incentive to rock the boat of black disfranchisement. This tableau began to shift only in the 1930s when, thanks to black migration and the popularity of the New Deal, the African-American vote in the North became larger, more contested, and potentially critical to some electoral outcomes. Yet voting remained a matter of state law, and despite the egalitarian rhetoric of both parties, neither was eager to promote federal seizure of one of the cornerstones of states’ rights. 18

  The final years of the 1930s, however, did witness the emergence of a significant, if unsuccessful, political effort to expand suffrage in the South: the movement to abolish the poll tax. Building on actions sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the movement was galvanized by southern white liberals—most of them intellectuals and activists rather than political leaders—who came together to foster a drive to abolish the tax qualification. They were actively supported by New Dealers (including Eleanor Roosevelt and at times the president himself), who were frustrated by conservative southern opposition to economic and social reform; the cause also was promoted by organized labor, which viewed the poll tax as a key to the low wages of southern workers and therefore a threat to labor’s welfare nationally. Members of this broad coalition—an interregional pressure group rather than a grassroots movement—were convinced that the poll tax was not only “un-American” but an impediment to social and economic progress in the South. Eliminating it, they believed, would enfranchise poor whites and blacks, democratize politics in the South, and hasten the downfall of conservatives who controlled key committees in the House and Senate.19

  After the failure of attempts to promote poll tax reform within southern states (other than the scattered victories mentioned earlier), the loosely coalescing movement turned its attention to Washington and to Congress. There advocates of repeal faced a significant legal obstacle: the Supreme Court in 1937, in Breedlove v. Suttles, had unanimously upheld Georgia’s poll tax qualification for state and local elections. The reformers filed a lawsuit challenging the poll tax in federal elections alone, but it too was rebuffed by the courts in the early 1940s. Congressional supporters then drafted legislation making it unlawful for a poll tax to be imposed in any national election: they maintained that the tax bred corruption and that it was an “arbitrary . . . qualification by which large numbers of citizens are prohibited from voting simply because they are poor.” Less euphemistically, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee cited Senator Carter Glass’s speeches at the Virginia Constitutional Convention forty years earlier as irrefutable evidence that poll taxes were adopted to disfranchise blacks and thus violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.20 (See Chapter 4.)

  Conservative southerners fought the bill tooth and nail, couching their opposition in constitutional terms: Congress, they argued, lacked the authority to pass legislation altering a state’s voting qualifications. Such action only could be carried out by the states themselves or through the unwieldy process of amending the federal Constitution. Thanks in part to the new political climate generated by World War II (to be discussed later in this chapter), the House of Representatives passed the bill, but it then was killed by a southern filibuster in the Senate. This frustrating legislative scenario was repeated several times in subsequent years, until efforts to repeal the poll tax through federal legislation were abandoned. But the battle lines had been drawn and the first shots fired in a resurgent struggle to nationalize suffrage and eliminate discrimination in the South.21

  Franklin Roosevelt and the Death of Blackstone

  The 1930s also witnessed an extraordinary series of events—or nonevents—revolving around the political rights of the very poor. As noted in earlier chapters, paupers in nearly a dozen states were disfranchised in the nineteenth century, reflecting both disciplinary attitudes toward the poor and the belief that men and women considered dependent ought not vote. Such laws remained on the books, with little controversy, until the crisis of the Great Depression transformed millions of workers into relief recipients who could be legally labeled as paupers.

  The drama began in fall 1932, a grim moment when the nation seemed frozen in depression, thousands of people were starving, millions were jobless, and more than a few were beginning to take to the streets in protest. As the bitter election campaign between Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover was drawing to a close, Mrs. E. F. Wellman, the Republican chair of the Board of Registration in Lewiston, Maine, acquired a list of relief recipients from the town’s overseers of the poor and proceeded to strike 350 recipients from the rolls of eligible voters. According to Mrs. Wellman, Maine’s pauper exclusion clause rendered these men and women ineligible. Her action appeared to be the start of a process that would disfranchise 1,000 voters in Lewiston alone and thousands more in other cities and towns in Maine.

  A counterattack came quickly. Enraged at what he regarded as an unjust and partisan act, Herbert E. Holmes
, the Corporation Counsel of Lewiston and a Democratic candidate for the state senate, immediately sent a telegram to President Hoover:Republican organization here has invoked obsolete pauper law . . . to strike from voting lists about one thousand unemployed voters. . . . Believed here to constitute first step in nation-wide campaign to disfranchise unemployed and prevent them from voting in national election. I urge you to advise local officials against this injustice to hapless victims of existing emergency.

  Hoover did not respond. Republicans in Maine, however, insisted that politics had nothing to do with the registration board’s action: they were simply enforcing the state constitution. One of the state’s leading newspapers defended Mrs. Wellman, pointing out that Mr. Holmes “is not the judge of whether a law has become ‘obsolete.’”22

  The uproar in Lewiston was followed by a Republican attempt to disfranchise an additional 129 relief recipients in Waterville, Maine. It too provoked heated commentary in the national press and in other states that had pauper exclusion provisions. The commentary was self-satisfied in Massachusetts, where a prescient state legislature had enacted a law early in the depression specifying that no one would be “deemed” a pauper who “to the best of his ability, has attempted to provide for himself and his dependents . . . and who, through no crime or misdemeanor of his own, has come into grievous need and receives aid or assistance given temporarily.” Yet numerous other states had not been so prescient, and, as the New York World-Telegram noted, many could invoke the pauper exclusion clauses in their constitutions to disfranchise victims of the depression. This would be, the World-Telegram concluded, “the worst irony” that could “befall a man if, in addition to losing his job, he was deliberately robbed of his vote.” That worst irony, however, turned out to be rare: relatively few of the unemployed were barred from voting in 1932. The Democratic vote in Maine, despite the efforts of Mrs. Wellman, was significantly higher than it had been in the 1920s.23