Scorecard

One of the few salutary consequences of the incredible 2000 election may be a revival of serious political history. Spurred by the tension and drama of the grand national standoff, millions of Americans have learned something about the Electoral College, presidents named Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison and the arcana of recounts and ballot design. More important, they have found themselves debating how democratic our Constitution really is if it allows a candidate who loses the popular vote to win the White House. Suddenly, the way we choose our leaders seems almost as significant, even as exciting, as their personalities and sex lives.

Perhaps this rare fascination with the guts of the voting process will boost interest in Alexander Keyssar’s scholarly masterpiece. “The Right to Vote” is easily the wisest and most comprehensive study of who was and is allowed to cast a ballot that has ever been written, and it is the first survey of its vast subject to be published since 1918.

Keyssar, who teaches history at Duke University, doesn’t flinch from laying out the complexities of what must, by its nature, be a narrative of laws as much as political conflict. A historical appendix of suffrage statutes trails on for some 76 pages. But the professor is no pedant. With quiet precision, Keyssar takes on the myth that universal suffrage has always been the American way and utterly destroys that belief.

Well into the 20th century, many states denied the vote to women, African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans. What is more, during the long ordeal of industrialization, legislators who feared an unruly, uneducated proletariat enacted scores of state and local laws that barred from the polls “paupers,” illiterates, short-term residents, parolees, newly naturalized citizens, anarchists and anyone without real property. Not until the 1960s did most of these exclusions get wiped off the books; only the ban on erstwhile felons survives in many places, a vestige of the traditional belief that, as Keyssar phrases it, “a voter ought to be a moral person.”

The sheer number and ingenious variety of these class-based restrictions would have surprised Alexis de Tocqueville, the celebrated observer of America’s democratic mores. Indeed, when the Frenchman visited the United States in the 1830s, most male citizens (a category that excluded slaves and most other nonwhites) could vote regardless of the size of their income or holdings. Nowhere in Europe was the franchise so broad and widely exercised--and so unmindful of economic hierarchy.

Michael Kazin is coauthor (with Maurice Isserman) of “America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s” and teaches history at Georgetown University.

That began to change in the late 19th century. The rise of a factory system and the onrush of working-class immigrants made the United States the economic marvel of the world. But the political muscle of foreign-born laborers alarmed elite guardians of the old social order. E.L. Godkin, editor of The Nation, grumbled about the “large body of ignorant voters” who were allegedly corrupting city government; the esteemed historian Francis Parkman cringed that universal manhood suffrage “gives power to the communistic attack on property.” A frontal assault on the suffrage of white men was politically impossible. But pro-business and rural legislators did concoct indirect methods for whittling way the rights of what one lawmaker sneeringly called “the vomit of the saloons.” The courts, then bastions of conservatism, upheld most of the restrictions.

In extremis, a bit of force was also useful. Keyssar retells grisly tales of white vigilantes, with or without burning crosses, who terrorized blacks for demanding a say in how the South was governed. He also unearths stories that put flesh on all the Populist rhetoric about “big money” strangling politics. During a bitter Colorado coal strike in 1914, local Republicans redrew the precinct lines in Huerfano County to ensure that key districts would be situated on employer-owned land. Company police then stepped in with shotguns and billy clubs to stop union members from either registering or voting.

The unassailable conclusion of Keyssar’s careful scholarship is that through most of our history, the right to vote was not the birthright of a majority of Americans. Only when massive social movements dovetailed with changes in the national mood did the lovely myth inch closer to reality. The most far-reaching of those changes, according to Keyssar, resulted from war. Time and again, excluded groups had to spill their blood or cheer the sacrifices of others in order to gain entry into the charmed circle of democracy.

The Civil War offers the most dramatic example. If 180,000 African Americans had not volunteered to fight in the Union Army, it is unlikely that Northern whites would have acquiesced to black male suffrage. “When the fight is over,” predicted Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, “the hand that drops the musket cannot be denied the ballot.” Even then, ratification of the 15th Amendment was a close, hard-fought battle, achieved only because the Republican Party controlled most state legislatures. Of course, the victory proved short-lived in much of the South once the Democrats stormed back into power there.

The two world wars proved indispensable to a more secure expansion of voting rights. After Congress declared war on Imperial Germany in 1917, most women suffragists shelved their traditional pacifism and pitched in to sell bonds, knit sweaters for soldiers and teach Americanization classes to immigrants. At about the same time, an uncompromising group of feminists chained themselves to the gates of the White House, demanding that President Woodrow Wilson support their cause. The two-pronged strategy--of selfless patriotism and militant protest--sent suffragists over the top.

For their part, black Americans used World War II to gain the advantage in their battle to regain the vote in the states of the Old Confederacy. After tens of thousands of African Americans had fought (in segregated units) to vanquish an avowedly racist enemy, the days of Jim Crow back home were numbered. Then the mighty moral challenge of the postwar freedom movement spurred Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. What Keyssar calls “the nationalization of suffrage” finally triumphed, but only after two world wars and a lengthy cold war had illuminated the hypocrisy of a great democracy that prevented millions of its own citizens from casting a vote.

For most of his book, Keyssar avoids addressing questions that go beyond the matter of access to the ballot box. Only in a brief conclusion does he depart from his tangled, fascinating narrative to address why, in our time, roughly half of eligible Americans seldom, if ever, find themselves inside a polling station. He places most of the blame on campaign finance and the legal barriers placed before embryonic third parties. “The current state of American politics,” Keyssar intones, “makes clear that universal suffrage is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a fully democratic political order.”

This indictment echoes those hurled by other left-wing writers and activists who imagine that non-voters compose a rich seam of “progressive” sympathies just waiting for the right candidates to mine and mobilize. But the judgment is probably mistaken. For all his formidable research, Keyssar neglects studies of nonvoters done by Ruy Teixeira and other liberal scholars. These disclose that habitual abstainers lack any consistent ideology; most would side with the winner, if they bothered to make a choice. Nor can one assume that a stalwart champion of the poor and exploited would convince millions of hard-pressed but nonvoting Americans to flock to the polls. If that were true, Jesse Jackson would have been the Democratic nominee for president in 1988. And Ralph Nader might have made the 2000 race a serious three-way contest instead of becoming the grinch who may have elected George W.

Ironically, one key to the electoral malaise that has afflicted so many Americans may lie in the very absence of the conflicts that once punctuated the history of suffrage. When snobbish nativists like E.L. Godkin and tough-talking racists like George Wallace tried to limit the right to vote, struggling for and exercising that right was infused with moral urgency. But since the 1960s, Americans have come to take the franchise for granted, considering “politics” damaged goods many would rather not consume. Predictably, voter participation has plummeted. One can only hope that this fall’s agonizing election, when ordinary people in Florida and elsewhere argued over the intent and significance of every vote cast, will remind us of the fragility of popular rule.