The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  Not surprisingly, the first concrete steps prompted by the war involved soldiers. In 1942, with five million men and women already mobilized in the armed forces, Congress—building on Civil War and World War I precedents—took steps to permit these soldiers to vote, creating the machinery for ballots to be distributed overseas and at military bases across the nation. By the 1940s, most states already had laws that permitted absentee soldiers to register and vote, but the Soldier Voting Act of 1942, as well as its successor in 1944, went a step further, standardizing and federalizing that right. These acts also reignited the process of stretching the definition of residence as a voting qualification: during and after the war, new laws and court decisions permitted some soldiers to vote in the towns where they were stationed, exempted inhabitants of soldiers’ homes from residency restrictions, and even allowed veterans who were students to vote in municipalities where they attended school.38

  The significance of the Soldier Voting Acts, however, went beyond matters of residence. When the legislation came before Congress in 1942, liberal legislators seized the occasion to include a provision exempting any soldier from having to pay a poll tax: although many Southerners correctly viewed this provision as an entering wedge in the battle for poll tax repeal (one wrote to his daughter that “all white people in Alabama are buying pistols and other ammunition in preparation for the race war which is coming”), the idea of taxing soldiers in the field was so unpalatable that southern congressmen did little to block its passage. Several states even passed laws temporarily abolishing the poll tax for all soldiers. To be sure, southern state governments, after bitter fights in Congress, retained administrative control over absentee voting and thereby were able to limit the number of black soldiers who actually cast ballots. Nonetheless, the Soldier Voting Act was an important step. The federal government’s disapproval of poll taxes had become a matter of law, and the wartime climate of opinion contributed to the repeal of the poll tax in Georgia in 1945 as well as to the postwar passage of state laws exempting veterans from poll taxes.39

  A far more significant victory for black voting rights came in 1944, with the Supreme Court’s stunning decision that the white primary was unconstitutional. By 1920, racially exclusive primary elections in the Democratic Party had become the norm not only in all southern state elections but in nearly every county in the South: since electoral outcomes invariably were determined in primaries, this was an extremely tidy and efficient vehicle for black disfranchisement. The legal journey that led to its demise was a circuitous one, a shuttle between Washington and Texas that stretched back into the 1920s. The first legal blow against the white primary was struck in 1927, when the United States Supreme Court overturned the primary law in Texas on the grounds that it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Lone Star State then turned around and adopted a new law that did not mandate but merely sanctioned a Democratic Party rule restricting its primaries to whites. The Court responded in 1932 by declaring that law too to be unconstitutional. Unwilling to surrender, the Democratic Party of Texas, ostensibly acting on its own initiative as a private political association, elected to bar blacks from membership in the party—which meant that they could not participate in primary elections. The Court accepted this practice in Grovey v. Townsend in 1935, repeating a line of argument from Reconstruction-era cases that private rather than state actions were not subject to federal oversight. Although the Court’s 1927 and 1932 decisions had signaled an incipient willingness of the federal judiciary to intervene in voting rights cases, Grovey v. Townsend represented a triumph for the stubborn ingenuity of white supremacists in the South.40

  In 1944, however, the Supreme Court reversed Grovey v. Townsend. In a new case, Smith v. Allwright, the Court concluded that the exclusion of nonwhites from membership in the Democratic Party in Texas was indeed unconstitutional. The Court grounded its decision (and its willingness to overturn a judgment made only nine years earlier) in the implications of a 1941 electoral corruption case, United States v. Classic et al., in which it had ruled that the Constitution’s implicit guarantee of a right to vote (in article 1, sections 2 and 4) applied to primaries as well as general elections. Consequently, when “the privilege of membership in a party . . . is also the essential qualification for voting in a primary,” party rules, sanctioned by law, become “the action of the state,” subject to the requirements of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Democratic Party thus was not a “voluntary association,” free to adopt regulations that discriminated on the basis of race.41

  The Court’s abrupt about-face (the majority opinion acknowledged that none of the facts had changed since Grovey) had multiple sources, some of them—as always—unacknowledged in the legal prose. One key was that the composition of the Court had changed dramatically between 1935 and 1944: only two of the justices who had ruled in Grovey were still on the Court at the time of Smith, and several of Roosevelt’s appointees were experienced, liberal, Democratic politicians, well attuned to the politics of black suffrage. The New Deal justices appointed by Roosevelt, moreover, were far more willing than their predecessors to assert the power and jurisdiction of the federal government: the Court’s willingness to extend federal authority over state voting laws was entirely in keeping with its actions in other domains.

  Of perhaps equal importance, the justices were not immune to events transpiring in the world around them: much as they were sensitive to the exigencies of the Great Depression in other landmark rulings, they were well aware of the links between the ideological dimensions of World War II and the exclusion of blacks from voting in the South. One shrewd contemporary commentator, Supreme Court reporter Arthur Krock of the New York Times, attributed the decision in Smith v. Allwright directly to the wartime shift in thinking about racial equality in the United States. In analyzing the case, Krock observed that “the real reason” for the decision was “that the common sacrifices of wartime have turned public opinion and the court against previously sustained devices to exclude minorities from any privilege of citizenship.”42

  The impact of the Smith decision was rapid and far-reaching. Indeed, pioneering attorney and then Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case with William H. Hastie, later stated that he regarded it as his most important victory, more important than the famous school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Although many African Americans remained reluctant to test the new legal order, tens of thousands began to line up to register for Democratic primaries throughout the South. Several states truculently attempted to circumvent the Court’s decision by repealing all laws governing primary elections (thus ostensibly restoring political parties to the status of voluntary associations or “private clubs”) and by continuing to hold racially exclusive elections, but the courts brought an end to those efforts through subsequent rulings.

  The white primary, probably the most efficacious method of denying the vote to African Americans, was dead. Enraged by this development, white southern politicians fumed at the federal courts and vowed to resist the intrusion of the federal government into their affairs: they immediately began constructing and reinforcing other techniques for disfranchisement, including extensive racial gerrymandering and physical intimidation. “The best way to stop niggers from voting,” pointed out Mississippi’s diehard Senator Theodore Bilbo, “is to visit them the night before the election.” This pattern of resistance would persist for decades, perpetuating discrimination against black voters, but the wall of exclusion had been seriously breached: between 1940 and 1947, the percentage of southern blacks registered to vote quadrupled from 3 to 12 percent and the numbers continued to rise thereafter.43

  The war also generated pressures for Washington to ease the restrictions on immigrants from Asia. Under existing law, Asian migrants were few in number and could not become American citizens. This discrimination became a wartime diplomatic issue because China was an ally, India was strategically located, and the Japanese attempted
to mobilize support throughout Asia by portraying the United States as an anti-Asiatic nation fighting with Britain to restore Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself lobbied American congressmen to endorse repeal of the Chinese exclusion laws, while critics of American immigration policies maintained that successful prosecution of the war would be hindered by racial discrimination against Asians. An Indian scholar, for example, wrote thatHitler’s justification of Nazi oppression in Europe is supposedly based on the right of the mythically superior Nordic to superimpose his Kultur on the other so-called inferior peoples of Europe. If the United States is successfully to combat such dangerous ideas, it can ill afford to practice racial discrimination in its relations with Asiatic countries. . . . America cannot afford to say that she wants the people of India to fight on her side and at the same time maintain that she will not have them among her immigrant groups.

  These diplomatic and ideological concerns, coupled with the presence in the armed forces of thousands of men of Chinese, Indian, Korean, Filipino, and even Japanese descent, led Congress to reconsider the ban on Asian immigration and citizenship. Between 1943 and 1946, almost all of those bans were lifted. Within a few years, the courts had taken the further step of nullifying state laws that obstructed the enfranchisement of naturalized citizens from particular (generally Asian) nations.44

  The energy unleashed by the war carried over into its aftermath. Although the movement to repeal the poll tax fizzled, black organizations continued to pressure the federal government, while the growing number of African-American voters in the North made clear that they would use their political leverage to back candidates and parties that endorsed full citizenship for blacks. Returning black veterans in the South (as well as Mexican-American veterans in Texas and elsewhere) sought to make good on the nation’s rhetorical promises. Throughout the region, black veterans lined up—often very publicly—to register to vote in general elections and in Democratic primaries; in Birmingham, a column of ex-soldiers marched through the city’s streets to the registrar’s office, much as earlier generations of soldiers had done during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The rejections that these veterans often encountered—ranging from closed registration offices to grotesquely rigged literacy tests to violent beatings—attracted widespread national attention. In Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina, blacks who had voted or engaged in civil rights events were killed; in other episodes, overly assertive veterans were murdered. Perhaps more flagrantly than ever before, men who had risked their lives for the nation were being denied their political rights.45

  These developments, coupled with other outbreaks of racial violence in the South, led President Truman to create a national Committee on Civil Rights in late 1946. Chaired by Charles Wilson, the president of General Electric, the committee, Noah’s Ark-like, counted among its members two African Americans, two women, two labor leaders, two businessmen, and two Southerners (Frank P. Graham, the liberal president of the University of North Carolina, and M. E. Tilley of the Women’s Society of Christian Services). The extraordinarily honest report issued by the committee, entitled To Secure These Rights (a phrase taken from the Declaration of Independence), was a self-conscious milestone in the history of the federal government’s stance toward voting and civil rights. Invoking the precedents of the Revolutionary period and Reconstruction, the report proclaimed that the nation stood once again at a critical juncture: although “the right of all qualified citizens to vote” was “considered axiomatic by most Americans,” the franchise in fact was “barred to some citizens because of race; to others by institutions or procedures which impede free access to the polls.” It singled out for attention the disfranchisement of blacks in the South and Native Americans in several western states, as well as discriminatory naturalization laws that kept men and women from some nations from becoming citizens.46

  The committee’s recommendations for addressing these problems were straightforward: it proposed congressional action to abolish poll taxes as voting prerequisites, to protect the rights of “qualified persons” to participate in federal elections, and to bar discrimination based on race, color, or “any other unreasonable classification” in state and federal elections. The committee also urged New Mexico and Arizona to enfranchise “their Indian citizens,” and called for a modification of the naturalization laws “to permit the granting of citizenship without regard to the race, color, or national origin of applicants.” To promote enforcement of these laws and others already on the books, the committee also recommended strengthening the civil rights section of the Justice Department .47

  More important, perhaps, than these specific proposals was the committee’s underlying and deliberate message: “the National Government of the United States must take the lead in safeguarding the civil rights of all Americans.” Sensitive to the constitutional issues involved and to the political freight of states’ rights, the committee nonetheless was calling for federal guarantees of the right to vote, for what amounted to a nationalization of the franchise. The report justified federal action on three grounds: first, that suffrage limitations and discrimination were producing a “moral erosion” of the nation, particularly in the South; second, that discrimination had negative consequences for the economy; and third, that the international interests of the United States were jeopardized by limitations on democracy at home.48

  This last factor was stressed repeatedly and was grounded not in the threat of Nazism but in the new ideological rivalry of what soon would be labeled the cold war. In the emerging hostile competition with the Soviet Union, racial discrimination in the United States was an Achilles’ heel of the American claim to represent truly democratic values. The committee’s report cited a letter from Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson noting that “the existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States is a handicap in our relations with other countries.” The report reprinted a press dispatch indicating that “Communist propagandists in Europe” were successfully scoring points with other nations by publicizing incidents of racial discrimination in the American South; it also pointed out that men and women around the non-European world were acutely sensitive to the ways in which their relatives and countrymen were treated in the United States. Faced with a global propaganda war, the United States could not afford to let states’ rights and regional histories poke holes in the fabric of democracy. “Interference with the right of a qualified citizen to vote locally cannot today remain a local problem,” the report concluded. “An American diplomat cannot forcefully argue for free elections in foreign lands without meeting the challenge that in many sections of America qualified voters do not have free access to the polls. Can it be doubted that this is a right which the national government must make secure?”49

  President Truman may well have gotten more than he bargained for from his Committee on Civil Rights. A moderate on racial issues, he had voted for repeal of the poll tax but was hardly a member of the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing. In addition, he found himself caught in a political crossfire as he looked ahead to the presidential election of 1948: although reluctant to antagonize the southern wing of his own party, he needed the votes of northern blacks—who were being courted both by the Republicans and by the much more liberal Henry Wallace. Practical politician that he was, Truman responded to this dilemma with compromise, issuing executive orders to desegregate the armed forces and promote fair employment practices by the federal government, while declining to press for the full range of reforms advocated by his Committee on Civil Rights. This stance helped Truman’s election effort—despite the defection of both Dixiecrats and Wallace supporters—and it solidified the identification of black voters with the Democratic Party.50

  But the president’s stance also left the campaign for black voting rights without strong leadership in the federal government. For a decade following the publication of the civil rights committee’s report, Washington in fact did little to follow up on the call
for national suffrage regulations and an end to racial discrimination in voting. Whatever efforts were made in Congress were blocked by powerful southern politicians who, thanks to their seniority, chaired key committees. These same conservative politicians tried, with some success, to turn the dynamics of the cold war against reform, arguing—with a bit of truth and a great deal of hyperbole—that Communists were prominent in the civil rights movement. Without a strong push from Washington, southern blacks made only modest gains: their attempts to register and vote were consistently met with discriminatory education tests (such as explicating clauses of the Constitution to the satisfaction of a white registrar), legal challenges, procedural obstacles, outright refusal, and sometimes violence. In some urban areas, significant numbers of African Americans did register and vote, and they even succeeded in electing blacks and liberal whites to office. Yet most rural blacks—lacking education and resources, economically and physically intimidated—remained disfranchised. In 1956, in the South as a whole, barely one quarter of all black adults were registered to vote; in 1960, the percentage was only a few points higher.51

  “Our Oldest National Minority”

  The most immediate impact of the president’s Committee on Civil Rights—and perhaps of World War II itself—may well have been on Native Americans rather than African Americans. Although all Indians had been granted citizenship in 1924, the states with the largest Native-American populations had continued to balk at granting them suffrage. Several states had challenged the ability of reservation Indians to meet residency requirements, and Colorado in 1936 maintained that Native Americans were not state citizens. These obstacles had been removed gradually through court decisions, but as the Committee on Civil Rights pointed out, Arizona and New Mexico still disfranchised the great majority of their Native-American residents. Within a year of the report’s publication—and within a few weeks of one another—both states ceased such practices.52