The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  73 Holli, Reform in Detroit, 191-193; McSeveney, Politics of Depression, 67-69; the Pennsylvania registration law (Public Law 49) was passed 17 February 1906, and was followed by Public Law 395 (1907). Bureau for Research in Municipal Government, Report of the Commission to Revise and Codify the Election Laws of Pennsylvania (n.p., 1911), Appendix G. On New York, see Alexander C. Flick, ed., History of the State of New York, vol. 7 (New York, 1935), 203, 206-208, 220; Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893-1910 (Ithaca, NY, 1981), 48-54, 106-109, 114-118, 125-127, 243-263; Scarrow, Parties, 82-83. For the complex and contested evolution of registration laws in Pennsylvania, see Harris, Registration, 63-68, 78-81, 363; Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom, A History of Pennsylvania (University Park, PA, 1980), 357-361, 419; Paul B. Beers, Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday: The Tolerable Accommodation (University Park, PA, 1980), 28-29, 63; Woodruff, “Election Methods,” 181-204; “The Ills of Pennsylvania,” Atlantic Monthly 88 (1901): 558-566; Bonnie R. Fox, “The Philadelphia Progressives: A Test of the Hofstadter-Hays Theses,” Pennsylvania History 34 (October 1967): 372-394; Digest of the Election Laws of Pennsylvania (As Compiled for Smull’s Legislative Handbook) (Harrisburg, 1916).

  74 Steven P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840-1985 (Berkeley, CA, 1988), 93-97, 249-250; Richard M. Abrams, Conservatism in a Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics, 1900-1912 (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 50-51; for an example of the machine adapting to new registration rules, see New York Times, 4 October 1908.

  75 Daggett v. Hudson, 3 N.E. 538 (Ohio 1885); The People ex rel. Smith v. District Court of the Third Judicial District, 78 P. 679 (Colo. 1904); People ex rel. Grinnell v. Hoffman, 8 N.E. 788 (Ill. 1886); People ex rel. Frost v. Wilson, 62 N.Y. 186 (N.Y. 1875); Kineen v. Wells, 11 N.E. 916 (Mass. 1887); Harris, Registration, 305-313. Primary elections—to provide for the direct and ostensibly more democratic selection of candidates—were becoming common throughout the nation during this period. Although it could be claimed that primary elections were purely party affairs and thus that the parties themselves could regulate the right to vote in primaries, both the courts and legislatures increasingly insisted that suffrage rules in primaries be identical to those in general elections. In states where party competition existed, of course, restrictive primary election rules could damage a party’s chance to win general elections—which is why primaries did not become a means of restricting the franchise in the North. For an example of laws on primaries, see General Laws, and Joint Resolutions, Memorials and Private Acts, Passed at the Fourth Session of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Colorado (Denver, CO, 1865), 187-188; and Laws Passed at the Extraordinary Session of the Seventeenth General Assembly of the State of Colorado (Denver, CO, 1910), chap. 4, sec. 11, 24. For court cases on primary elections, see People v. Board of Election Commissioners of Chicago, 77 N.E. 321 (Ill. 1906); People ex rel. Phillips v. Strassheim, 88 N.E. 821 (Ill. 1909); Schostag v. Cator, 91 P. 502 (Cal. 1907). See also Chapter 7.

  76 Harris, Registration, 21, 106, 263-264, 302-303, 334-349; Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 47-48; Paul Kleppner, Who Voted: The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout, 1870-1980 (New York, 1982), 60-62; McDonald, Parameters, 120; Reynolds, Testing Democracy, 145-155. For decades, political scientists (including Walter Dean Burnham, Philip Converse, Steven Rosenstone, Raymond Wolfinger, Paul Kleppner, Richard Carlson, Frances Fox Piven, and Richard Cloward) have engaged in a productive scholarly debate regarding the importance of registration in reducing turnout, both historically and in recent years. One summary of this debate is presented in Frances F. Piven and Richard Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote (New York, 1988), 89-109. See also Chapter 9.

  77 Registration Commission of Pittsburgh, Minute Books, vol. 1, Report dated 28 February 1907, Archives of Industrial Society, University of Pittsburgh; Reynolds, Testing Democracy, 158.

  78 For an example of the traditional historical perspective, see Abrams, Conservatism, 53. For interpretations closer to those presented herein, see Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (October 1964): 157-169; and Reynolds, Testing Democracy, 122.

  79 An excellent examination of the literature on fraud is presented in Argersinger, “New Perspectives on Election Fraud,” 669-687; see also Paul Kleppner, Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893-1928 (New York, 1987), 168-171; Jaher, Urban Establishment, 504-505. For a colorful narrative, see Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote: A History of American Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition—1742-2004 (New York, 2005).

  80 Argersinger, “New Perspectives on Election Fraud,” 669-686; Genevieve B. Gist, “Progressive Reform in a Rural Community: The Adams County Vote-Fraud Case,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 ( June 1961): 60-78; “Bribery as a Local Custom,” Outlook 97 (14 January 1911): 42-44.

  81 Neelley v. Farr, 158 P. 458 (Colo. 1916).

  82 Kleppner, Continuity and Change, 169-170.

  83 “The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons: A Cruelly Excessive Punishment,” Southwestern University Law Review 7 (1975): 124-125; Andrew L. Shapiro, “Challenging Criminal Disenfranchisement Under the Voting Rights Act: A New Strategy,” Yale Law Journal 103 (October 1993): 537-542. See also Chapter 4 above.

  84 Discussions of the disfranchisement of those convicted of electoral fraud can be found in the constitutional conventions (cited earlier) in Maryland, 1867; New York, 1872 and 1894; Pennsylvania, 1872-1873; Texas, 1875; Delaware, 1896; Massachusetts, 1917; Illinois, 1920. Discussions of the disfranchisement (and pardoning) of felons can be found in Debates Maryland 1867, 230-231; Debates Pennsylvania 1872-73, vol. 1, 133; Debates Missouri 1875, vol. 4, 141-151; Debates Texas 1875, 259-262; Debates Ohio 1873, vol. 2, 1952-1957. See also “The Equal Protection Clause as a Limitation on the States’ Power to Disfranchise Those Convicted of a Crime,” Rutgers Law Review 21 (1967): 298-300; Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890); Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York, 2006), 28-29.

  85 “Equal Protection Clause,” 300-301, 310-313; Washington v. State, 75 Ala. 582, 51 Am. Rep. 479 (Ala. 1884); “The Need for Reform of Ex-Felon Disfranchisement Laws,” Yale Law Journal 83 (1974): 584-587; “Restoring the Ex-Offender’s Right to Vote: Background and Developments,” American Criminal Law Review 11 (1973): 721-731; “The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons: Citizenship, Criminality, and the Purity of the Ballot Box,” Harvard Law Review 102 (1989): 1302-1317; Shapiro, “Challenging Criminal Disenfranchisement,” 560-563.

  86 Manza and Uggen, Locked Out, 46-68; Angela Behrens, Christopher Uggen, and Jeff Manza, “Ballot Manipulation and the ‘Menace of Negro Domination’: Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850-2002,” American Journal of Sociology, 109 (November 2003): 559-605.

  87 “Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement Laws,” 581, 586-588; Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890); “Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons,” 1304-1315; Gavit, Americans by Choice, 401; New York Times, 2 April 1920.

  88 Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review 16 (1991): 167-175; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, 1997), 390-396; N. D. Houghton, “The Legal Status of Indian Suffrage in the United States,” California Law Review 19 (1931): 510-512.

  89 Wolfley, “Jim Crow,” 175-181; John H. Allen, “Denial of Voting Rights to Reservation Indians,” Utah Law Review 5 (Fall 1956): 251-252; Gary C. Stein, “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924,” New Mexico Historical Review 47 (July 1972): 257-270; Felix Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Charlottesville, VA, 1982), 639-652. The Dawes Act was invoked by a California court in 1917 to justify its refusal to abide by the Elk v. Wilkins decision. Anderson v. Mathews, 163 P. 902, 904 (Cal. 1917).

  90 Ann Marie Plane and Gregory Button, �
�The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act: Ethnic Contest in Historical Context, 1849-1869,” Ethnohistory 40 (Fall 1993): 587-618.

  91 Richard F. Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880-1980 (Madison, WI, 1984), 78, 83.

  92 Pope v. Williams, 193 U.S. 621, 632 (1904).

  93 Burr v. Voorhis, 128 N.E. 220 (N.Y. 1920); Sanner v. Patton, 40 N.E. 290 (Ill. 1895); McCafferty v. Guyer, 59 Penn. 109 (1868), cited in Brightly, Collection of Leading Cases, 44-50.

  94 Lamar v. Dillon, 14 So. 383, 387 (Fla. 1893). Regarding women, see Chapter 6.

  95 Howard L. McBain, The Law and the Practice of Municipal Home Rule (New York, 1916), 11-16, 101-106, 145, 182-186, 581-583; Gerald E. Frug, “The City as a Legal Concept,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 1062-1063, 1109-1117; Austin F. MacDonald, American City Government and Administration, 3d ed. (New York, 1941), 63-69, 76-87, 253; Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore, MD, 1984), 105-122. The supremacy of the state over municipalities was asserted forcefully in Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, 207 U.S. 161 (1907). In general, it was not considered permissible for legislatures to impose unilaterally distinctive suffrage qualifications on individual cities, although they could choose to impose procedural regulations on “classes” of cities, grouped by population. The Kansas City law—which amounted to a tax-induced requirement to vote—later was declared unconstitutional. One rationale for a distinctive municipal suffrage was that cities were corporate rather than political units; see Andrew White, “The Government of American Cities,” Forum 10 (December 1890): 357-372.

  96 Thomas M. Cooley, A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations which rest upon the legislative power of the states of the American union (Boston, 1883), 758, cited in State ex. rel. Lamar v. Dillon, 14 So. at 387; Bryce, American Commonwealth, vol. 2, 146. The notion that a new political “universe” appeared early in the twentieth century originated with Walter Dean Burnham, the foremost student of electoral turnout in the United States. See, among Burnham’s many works, “The Appearance and Disappearance of the American Voter,” in Richard Rose, ed., Electoral Participation: A Comparative Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA, 1980), 35-73; idem, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (March 1965): 7-28; idem, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970). Cf. Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 274-279. Cf. also Marie-France Toinet, “La participation politique des ouvriers amèricains à la fin du dix-neuvieme siècle,” in Marianne Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrant Workers and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880-1920 (Saint Denis, France, 1988).

  97 H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946), 194.

  98 J. B. McMaster, “Annexation and Universal Suffrage,” Forum 26 (December 1898): 393-402; C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, LA, 1959), 324-326.

  99 On the parallels between North and South, cf. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 45-46. 100. Evans, American Citizenship, 142-143; “The Crime Against the Suffrage in Washington,” Nation 25 (27 June 1878): 414-415.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 71-77.

  2 Ellen C. DuBois, “Beyond the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820-1876,” Journal of American History 74 (1987): 841; Mary Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, eds., Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper (Urbana, IL, 1978), 96; Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks,” Journal of Women’s History 3 (Spring 1991): 9-37; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 1-5, 29-32.

  3 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 177-193; Ellen C. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America (Ithaca, NY, 1978), 44-45; DuBois, “Beyond the Compact,” 839; Mildred Adams, The Right to Be People (Philadelphia, 1967), 5-7.

  4 Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 188-193; William Griffith, Eumenes (Trenton, NJ, 1799), 33-34; George Ticknor Curtis, Letters of Phocion (n.p., n.d., Daily Advertiser and Courier, Boston, 1853), 118-119. See Chapter 3.

  5 Marion T. Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1875,” Journal of Negro History 33 (April 1948): 172-175; Harold F. Gosnell, Democracy, the Threshold of Freedom (New York, 1948), 51; Arthur C. Cole, ed., The Constitutional Debates of 1847 (Springfield, IL, 1919), 546; Massachusetts Convention of Delegates, Journal of Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of Delegates (Boston, 1821), 250; Proceedings of the New Jersey State Constitutional Convention of 1844 (Trenton, NJ, 1942), 438; Milo M. Quaife, ed., The Convention of 1846, Publications of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Collections, vol. 27, Constitutional Series, vol. 2 (Madison, WI, 1919), 214-216, 271; Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Indiana, 1850 (Indianapolis, IN, 1850), 517-519; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Woman Suffrage in the United States, Bulletins for the Constitutional Convention, 1917-1918, vol. 2, no. 33 (Boston, 1919), 442.

  6 Richard J. Evans, The Feminists (London, 1977), 31, 45, 47-48, 56-57; DuBois, “Beyond the Compact,” 837-840; idem, Feminism and Suffrage, 22, 31-32, 39-40; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 64-65, 78; Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 16-17, 43; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington, IN, 1998), 14-17; Wellman, “Seneca Falls,” 9-32; David Morgan, Suffragists and Democrats: The Politics of Woman Suffrage in America (East Lansing, MI, 1972), 13-14; Aileen S. Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal: Writing in the History of American Feminism (Chicago, 1968), 14-15. For a compelling analysis of the diverse fronts on which this rethinking was taking place, see Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship.

  7 James Allen Smith, The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government (New York, 1930), 41-43; Wellman, “Seneca Falls,” 19-21; Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 15-17.

  8 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 1-6, 15-21, 32-36.

  9 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 41-46; idem, “Beyond the Compact,” 839, 841; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 82-83; Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 17-18, 37; Morgan, Suffragists and Democrats, 15; Carol C. Madsen, ed., Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896 (Logan, UT, 1997), 2-3; Israel Kugler, From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Women’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era (New York, 1987), 37; Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 14-17. In Kansas in 1859, for example, a constitutional convention agreed to hear a petition, signed by 252 residents, asking for equal suffrage for women, but it did not act on the petition. Kansas Constitutional Convention: A reprint of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention, July 1859 (Topeka, KS, 1920), 58-59, 72-76, 86-87, 99.

  10 Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 1984), 110; Dale Baum, “Woman Suffrage and the ‘Chinese Question’: The Limits of Radical Republicanism in Massachusetts, 1865-1876,” New England Quarterly 56 (March 1983): 65; Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Third Constitutional Convention of Ohio, 1873, vol. 2 (Cleveland, OH, 1874), 1802, 1978; Manfred Berg, “Soldiers and Citizens: War and Voting Rights in American History,” in David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen, eds. Reflections on American Exceptionalism (Staffordshire, UK, 1994), 197.

  11 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 59-61; Griffith, In Her Own Right, 123.

  12 Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association (New York, 1867), 7-8, 57.

  13 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 59
-65, 67, 70, 72, 75, 77-78, 79, 80, 87, 95-99, 105-108; Steven M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 1850-1920 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1986), 5-7; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 145-149; Ellen C. DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York, 1981), 88-92; Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal, 255; Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (1881; reprint, Salem, NH, 1985), 214, 307-308 (hereafter HWS); Griffith, In Her Own Right, 119, 123, 134; Baum, “Woman Suffrage,” 64; DuBois, “Beyond the Compact,” 845-846.

  14 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 112-160; Buhle and Buhle, Concise History of Woman Suffrage, 20-22; DuBois, Stanton, 99, 142-143; Buechler, Transformation, 40-41, 90.

  15 HWS, vol. 3, 275; ibid., vol. 2, 788. Dale Baum points out that some Massachusetts Republicans believed that they would benefit from women’s suffrage in the short run because a significant proportion of pro-Democratic immigrant women could not meet the literacy or citizenship requirements to vote; Baum, “Woman Suffrage,” 68-69. Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Illinois 1869, vol. 2 (Springfield, IL, 1870), 1289; for examples of the ideological debates of the period, see also ibid., 157, 451, 479, 736, 856, 1277, 1280, 1289, 1291, 1477, 1502.

  16 HWS, vol. 2, 641-642; Ohio Constitutional Convention 1873, vol. 2, 1872; The Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 3d sess., vol. 1 (29 January 1869), 710; Debates Illinois 1869, vol. 1, 212.