16 Argersinger, Structure, 69-102, 172-190; David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, TX, 1987), 292; J. Allen Smith, The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government (New York, 1930), 61.
17 Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 226.
18 Sitkoff, New Deal, 26-27, 30-31, 92-95, 98-99, 102-109; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (New York, 1976), 57; Tindall, New South, 556-559; New York Times, 15 July 1929.
19 Lawson, Black Ballots, 55-70; Sitkoff, New Deal, 64, 125-137. For examples of and reasons for labor’s strenuous opposition to the poll tax, see American Federationist 45 ( January 1938): 61-63; American Federation of Labor, Fifty-ninth Annual Convention (1939), 456-458; The Shipyard Worker 5 (6 June 1941): 5; Machinists’ Monthly Journal (May 1940): 380-381; CIO News 4 (30 June 1941): 6; Textile Labor 1 (1 April 1940): 1; Enginemen’s Magazine 110 (June 1941): 363-364; UE News 2 (4 May 1940): 5; ibid., 2 (14 December 1940): 6; see also the papers of the ILGWU, Cornell University, box 26, folder 10. For an interesting examination of a local movement for poll tax reform, led by southern women and grounded, in part, on a gender-based opposition to the poll tax, see Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman, “The Second Battle for Woman Suffrage: Alabama White Women, the Poll Tax, and V.O. Key’s Master Narrative of Southern Politics,” Journal of Southern History LXVIII (May 2002): 333-374.
20 U.S. Senate, 77th Cong., 2d sess., Report 1662 (27 October 1942), 1-20.
21 Lawson, Black Ballots, 57-85; Sitkoff, New Deal, 131-137. Each time that the bill came forward, a dozen or more non-Southerners—both Democrats and Republicans—voted with southern senators to block cloture. A proposed state constitutional amendment to eliminate the poll tax in Arkansas was defeated by a margin of more than two to one in a popular election in 1938. McGovney, Suffrage Medley, 138; regarding the unusual history of Tennessee’s efforts at poll tax reform, see ibid., 135-136. The only state to abolish the poll tax in the 1940s was Georgia, which did so during the brief reign of a liberal governor in 1945.
22 New Republic (12 October 1932): 226; The Survey 68 (15 October 1932): 498-499; Literary Digest (17 September 1932): 6.
23 Literary Digest (17 September 1932): 6; Baltimore Sun, 13 and 14 September 1932; F. W. Grinnell, “The Need of Common Sense in Constitutional Interpretation: The Meaning of the Word ‘Pauper’ in the Third Amendment,” Massachusetts Law Quarterly 17 (August 1932); Massachusetts, Statutes (1932), chap. 206; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, General Laws, Tercentenary ed. (Boston, 1934), chap. 51, 67. The idea of disfranchising the poorest of the unemployed also was being considered by the Conservative government of England at almost the exact same time. The Garment Worker 32 (28 October 1932): 4.
24 New York Times, 3 February, 6 July, and 17 October 1932; 15 June 1933, 24 March, 6 August, 24 November, and 28 December 1934.
25 New York Times, 24 March, 6 August, 14 October, 17 October, 24 November, and 28 December 1934, 8 March 1935.
26 New York Times, 8 and 31 October 1934.
27 New York Times, 8 August, 10 August, 16 August, 18 October, 21 October, and 4 November 1934, 26 May 1935; American Federationist 41 (September 1934): 927-928; Michael B. Scheler, “The Unemployed—Pariahs or Freemen,” American Teacher 19 (May-June 1935): 17-19.
28 New York Times, 21 October 1934; Ernest J. Hopkins, “No Job, No Vote,” New Republic, 12 October 1932, 225-226.
29 New York Times, 13 September, 6 and 7 October 1934, 10 November, 12 November, 19 November, 23 December, 26 December, 29 December, and 31 December 1935, 1 May, 3 July and 8 July, 5 August, and 26 October 1938, 5 January and 12 January, and 6 July 1939, 18 February and 24 February, 22 April, and 6 October 1940.
30 New York Times, 6 September and 11 September 1938; Cal Lewis, “The Pauper Vote,” North American Review 246 (September 1938): 89.
31 New York Times, 6 September, 11 September, and 13 September 1938.
32 New York Times, 10 September 1938; Fortune, March 1939, 66, 132-133; Purcell, Crisis of Democratic Theory, 128-138. That the issue did not altogether die in 1938 is made clear in the New York Times, 12 September and 13 September 1939, in coverage of a pro-disfranchisement speech by Major General James G. Harbord.
33 New York Times, 3 November 1936.
34 Lewis, “The Pauper Vote,” 89.
35 Sitkoff, New Deal, 299-313; Ward E. Y. Elliott, The Rise of Guardian Democracy: The Supreme Court’s Rulings on Voting Rights Disputes, 1845-1969 (Cambridge, MA, 1974), 76-77.
36 Sitkoff, New Deal, 299-313; Purcell, Crisis of Democratic Theory, 128-138.
37 Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941 (Philadelphia, 1991), 1-20; Tindall, New South, 638-643, 712-713, 716; Sitkoff, New Deal, 307-325; Lawson, Black Ballots, 65-77.
38 Tindall, New South, 746; Lawson, Black Ballots, 66; W. Brooke Graves, American State Government, 4th ed. (Boston, 1953), 115; Robert F. Williams, The New Jersey State Constitution: A Reference Guide (New York, 1990), 52-53; Application of Seld, 51 N.Y.S. 2d 1, 2 (App. Div. 1944); Robbins v. Chamberlain, 75 N.E. 2d 617 (N.Y. 1947); Kashman v. Board of Elections of Onandaga County, 282 N.Y.S. 2d 394, 397 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1967); Nelson, Election Laws of the State of Missouri, 27. Texas eliminated its constitutional bar on soldiers and sailors voting in elections in 1954.
39 Lawson, Black Ballots, 65-80; idem, Running for Freedom, 17; Elliott, Guardian Democracy, 77-78; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), 218; Ogden, Poll Tax, 185-200. In Tennessee, legislation abolishing the poll tax was passed in 1943 but was struck down by the state’s courts, only to be revived in the early 1950s. According to Ogden, the poll tax efforts in Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina (where the tax was repealed in 1951) were all linked to partisan conflicts among whites—and inspired little opposition.
40 Grantham, Life and Death of the Solid South, 27-28; Stanley, Voter Mobilization, 88; Lawson, Running for Freedom, 14-15; Sitkoff, New Deal, 228-229; Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536 (1927); Nixon v. Condon, 186 U.S. 73 (1932); Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U.S. 45 (1935). The Texas Supreme Court had permitted primaries to be exclusive because they were “nongovernmental” elections and therefore not subject to federal and state constitutional provisions. Tindall, New South, 558.
41 United States v. Classic et al., 313 U.S. 299, 318-319 (1941); Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649, 664 (1944). For a full chronicle of the events leading up to the case (and its aftermath), see Darlene C. Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood, NY, 1979). For an interesting recent interpretation of the significance of the case, see Robert W. Mickey, “The Beginning of the End for Authoritarian Rule in America: Smith v. Allwright and the Abolition of the White Primary in the Deep South, 1944-1948,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (Fall 2008): 143-182.
42 New York Times, 4 April 1944; Sitkoff, New Deal, 229-237; Elliott, Guardian Democracy, 78-80.
43 Stanley, Voter Mobilization, 86-89; Tindall, New South, 746-748; Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, 380-382, 408-409, 488-489; Elliott, Guardian Democracy, 80-81.
44 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York, 1990), 362-378, 407, 413; Regan v. King, 49 F. Supp. 222, 223 (1949).
45 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 20-35; Numan V. Bartley, The New South 1845-1980 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1995), 76; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 260, 279; cf. 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), 208-211.
46 To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (Washington, DC, 1947), 6-8, 35-40, 139; Bartley, New South, 77.
47 To Secure These Rights, 151, 160-163.
48 Ibid., 99
, 139-148. McGovney’s Suffrage Medley is, in effect, a tract urging the nationalization of suffrage law.
49 To Secure These Rights, 100-101, 146-148. Regarding the links between the cold war and civil rights within the United States, see Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, 2001), esp. pp. 2-5, 45-84, 106-107, 125; and Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2000), pp. 6, 18-46, 79-114.
50 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 33-39.
51 Ibid., 39-50; Bartley, New South, 171-176. The red-baiting of civil rights initiatives also had occurred in Congress in the 1940s, when a poll tax repeal bill was introduced by left-leaning New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.
52 Daniel McCool, “Indian Voting,” in Vine Deloria, Jr., ed., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman, OK, 1985), 107-108; Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law with Reference Tables and an Index (Washington, DC, 1942), 158; To Secure These Rights, 161; Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review 16 (1991): 181-185.
53 Porter v. Hall, 271 P. 411, 412 (Ariz. 1928); Harrison v. Laveen, 196 P. 2d 456, 461 (Ariz. 1948); N. D. Houghton, “The Legal Status of Indian Suffrage in the United States,” California Law Review 19 ( July 1931): 507, 516-519; Wolfley, “Jim Crow,” 186-188; McCool, “Indian Voting,” 108-111; Henry Christman, “Southwestern Indians Win the Vote,” American Indian 4 (1948): 6-10; Cohen, Federal Indian Law, 158.
54 Wolfley, “Jim Crow,” 184-186; McCool, “Indian Voting,” 111-112; New York Times, 2 November 1952; Christman, “Southwestern Indians,” 6-10.
55 Vine Deloria, Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin, TX, 1983), 224-225; McCool, “Indian Voting,” 108; John H. Allen, “Denial of Voting Rights to Reservation Indians,” Utah Law Review 5 (Fall 1956): 247-256; Christman, “Southwestern Indians,” 10; Helen L. Peterson, “American Indian Political Participation,” Annals of the American Academy (May 1957): 116-126; Allen v. Merrell, 305 P. 2d 490 (Utah 1956); Murlene J. Worth, “Constitutional Law: Restriction of Indian Suffrage by Residence Qualification,” Oklahoma Law Review 11 (1958): 67-69; Wolfley, “Jim Crow,” 188-189.
56 McCool, “Indian Voting,” 113-130; Wolfley, “Jim Crow,” 186-195; Peterson, “American Indian Political Participation,” 121-126.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Note to the reader: All Web addresses for this chapter were checked as of December 2008.
1 Epigraph quotes from House Report 291, 85th Cong., 1st sess., 1 April 1957, 1969, 1977, 1987, 2004. Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (New York, 1976), 125-139, 176; idem, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941 (Philadelphia, 1991), 42-43, 47-50, 70.
2 Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1995), 160-222.
3 Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report 1 (Washington, DC, 1961), 31, 69; Lawson, Black Ballots , 88, 130-137, 162, 211, 227; idem, Running for Freedom, 48-49.
4 Lawson, Black Ballots, 139-202; idem, Running for Freedom, 56-58; Robert F. Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville, TN, 1984), 204-250.
5 Lawson, Black Ballots, 203-213, 222-249; idem, Running for Freedom, 63.
6 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1959 (Washington, DC, 1959), 19-145; Lawson, Black Ballots, 213-221.
7 Lawson, Black Ballots, 150-151, 156-158, 161-163, 165, 221-222; Lawson, Running for Freedom, 52-55, 78-79; Bartley, New South, 102-103, 232.
8 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 79-81, 86-99.
9 Commission on Civil Rights 1961, 5; Lawson, Black Ballots, 250, 278, 285-286.
10 Commission on Civil Rights 1961, 136, 139.
11 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 80-86, 94; idem, Black Ballots, 256-274, 283, 290, 294, 296-298.
12 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 103-117; Lawson, Black Ballots, 298-300, 306-312; David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven, CT, 1978), 106-107; Jack Valenti, “Looking Back,” Washington Post, 5 August 1990.
13 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 114-116; idem, Black Ballots, 295-296, 313-323.
14 Lawson, Black Ballots, 318-322, 329-339, 341; idem, Running for Freedom, 115-116; idem, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (New York, 1985), 15, 19-42; Garrow, Protest at Selma, 106-107; Dewey W. Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington, KY, 1988), 164-165.
15 Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 127-157, 191-253, 259, 282-303; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, State of Civil Rights 1957-1983: The Final Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC, 1983), 1-17; Steven F. Lawson, “Preserving the Second Reconstruction: Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1975,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 22 (Spring 1983): 55-75; idem, Running for Freedom, 185-188, 208-210; Abigail M. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 51-65; Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review 16 (1991): 190-200; for an impassioned chronicle of ongoing racial discrimination between 1965 and 1972, see Washington Research Project, The Shameful Blight: The Survival of Racial Discrimination in the South (Washington, DC, 1972). For a thorough examination of the Voting Rights Act and the Native-American community, see Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (New York, 2007).
16 Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 243, 253, 291-292; idem, Running for Freedom, 136-137.
17 Camille Cosby, “America Taught My Son’s Killer to Hate Blacks,” USA Today, 8 July 1998; “False Internet Rumor Keeps Surfacing to Dismay of Black Leaders,” Associated Press, 2 December 1998; James T. Tucker, “The Politics of Persuasion: Passage of the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization Act of 2006,” Journal of Legislation 33 (2007): 205-213; Jeffrey McMurray, “Georgia GOP Challenging Voting Rights Act Renewal, Likely in Vain,” Associated Press, 19 November 2005; Peter Hardin, “Renewal Set for Voting Rights Act,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 February 2004; Washington Post, 22 June 2006; J. Morgan Kousser, “The Strange, Ironic Career of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2007,” Texas Law Review 86 (March 2008): 752. The language assistance provisions had been renewed for ten years in 1982 and then for an additional fifteen years in 1992. See also the later section of this chapter entitled “Preclearance and the Totality of Circumstances.” Regarding the constitutional issues and the perceived need to revamp the VRA to take into account changed circumstances, see “Different Takes on Voting Rights Renewal,” Gannett News Service, 6 August 2005; Heather K. Gerken, “A Third Way: Section 5 and the Opt-In Approach,” in David L. Epstein, Richard H. Pildes, et al., eds., The Future of the Voting Rights Act (New York, 2006), 277-280, 297-298; Kousser, “Strange, Ironic Career,” 760. Some conservatives, among them Abigail Thernstrom, vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, also doubted the constitutionality of an extension and argued against renewal of the expiring provisions. See Tucker, “Politics of Persuasion,” p. 210; Abigail Thernstrom and Edward Blum, “Do the Right Thing,” Wall Street Journal, 15 July 2005; Abigail Thernstrom, “Divvying Up,” Wall Street Journal, 29 June 2006. There were several linked constitutional issues. One was whether legal measures regarded as temporary expansions of congressional authority in 1965 could reasonably be extended past 2007. A second was that important provisions applied to some parts of the country but not others, and the triggers for determining what jurisdictions were covered were based upon conditions in the 1960s. To some critics, this suggested that the legislation was no longer tailored to fit the circumstances of the twenty-first century. At the time of the 1982 renewal, moreover, Congress had acknowledged the Supreme Court’s concern that the preclearance requirement
not be made permanent. John Gibeaut, “New Fight for Voting Rights,” ABA Journal 92 ( January 2006): 46.
18 For a detailed narrative of the complex process leading to reauthorization, see Tucker, “Politics of Persuasion,” 205-267. See also Houston Chronicle, 21 July 2006; Washington Post, 22 June 2006; Johanna Neuman, “House GOP Delays Renewal of Voting Rights Act,” SFGate.com, 22 June 2006; Duke Falconer, “Who Really Stalled the Voting Rights Act Renewal,” www.epluribusmedia.org, 12 July 2006; Kousser, “Strange, Ironic Career,” 751-763; New York Times, 9 January 2009.
19 Carol M. Swain, “Race and Representation,” American Prospect 15 ( June 2004): A11-A13; Tucker, “Politics of Persuasion,” offers a detailed account of the (generally rather small) changes that were made to each section of the VRA in 2006. For a more critical account, see Kousser, “Strange, Ironic Career,” 743-763; see also Richard H. Pildes, “Political Avoidance, Constitutional Theory, and the VRA,” 117 Yale Law Journal Pocket Part 148 (2007).
20 Regarding the endgame dynamics, see Tucker, “Politics of Persuasion,” 208-209. Regarding the language provisions, see Michael Jones-Correa, “Language Provisions under the Voting Rights Act: How Effective Are They?” Social Science Quarterly 86 (September 2005): 549-564; and James T. Tucker, “Enfranchising Language Minority Citizens: The Bilingual Elections Provisions of the Voting Rights Act,” Legislation and Public Policy 10 (May 2007): 195-260. One other indicator of the growing importance of language minorities was the filing of lawsuits alleging Voting Rights Act violations in cities like Boston and Philadelphia. See Boston Globe, 4 August and 18 August 2005; ibid., 2 September and 27 September 2005; Philadelphia Daily News, 27 October 2006.
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