In contrast to the debates of the 1830s and 1840s, advocates of a broad suffrage were back on the defensive: the terms of public discussion were being set by men who believed that universal suffrage had failed, that it was neither viable nor desirable in the socially heterogeneous, industrial world of the late nineteenth century. As scores of contemporary commentators noticed, the tides of political thought had shifted again, and that shift endured well into the twentieth century. In 1918, two Yale historians concluded a two-volume comparative history of voting with the comment that “if the state gives the vote to the ignorant, they will fall into anarchy to-day and into despotism to-morrow.” A decade later, William B. Munro, professor of history and political science at Harvard, declared that “eliminating the least intelligent stratum” of the electorate was essential to the nation’s well-being.13
Despite their shared diagnosis, the intellectuals and reformers who were losing faith in universal suffrage were not of one mind about the prescription. Some, such as Godkin, believed that nothing could be done to shrink the electorate. “Probably no system of government was ever so easy to attack and ridicule,” he wrote in 1894, “but no government has ever come upon the world from which there seemed so little prospect of escape. It has, in spite of its imperfections and oddities, something of the majesty of doom.” Beneath Godkin’s sonorous rhetoric was a shrewd perception of political realities: introducing new barriers to suffrage was far more difficult than simply retaining those already in place. Men who possessed the franchise, and their representatives, could combat—and politically punish—those who sought to disfranchise them. Consequently, Godkin regarded it as “a mere waste of time to declaim against” universal suffrage: the challenge to “educated men” was to develop ways of having good government despite universal suffrage.14
Proposals for achieving such a goal began to find their way onto the public agenda in the 1870s and remained there for decades. Among them were less frequent elections, at-large rather than district voting, increased public accountability for office holders, and state control over key arenas of municipal administration. Another proposal that garnered considerable attention was to remove public offices from the electoral sphere and make them appointive. As the Atlantic Monthly observed in 1879, “the right of voting cannot be taken away, but the subjects of voting can be much reduced.” It was “absurd” to involve the electorate in “the selection of judges and sheriffs, and district attorneys, of state treasurers and attorney-generals, of school commissioners and civil engineers.” Democracy in effect could be salvaged by circumscribing its domain.15
Other critics were more optimistic about the possibilities of changing the size and shape of the electorate. Some advocated reinstituting property and tax qualifications or imposing literacy tests on prospective voters. More subtle approaches also were proposed, including longer residence periods, stricter naturalization laws, waiting periods before new citizens could vote, complex ballot laws, and elaborate systems of voter registration. Wherever such ideas originated, their endorsement by well-known liberal spokesmen helped to speed their circulation through the political cultures of the North and West, where they quickly acquired a life and importance that reached far beyond the world of northeastern intellectuals.16
Purifying the Electorate
The laws governing elections in most states were revised often between the Civil War and World War I. Many states, new and old, held constitutional conventions that defined or redefined the shape of the electorate as well as the outlines of the electoral process. State legislatures drew up increasingly detailed statutes that spelled out electoral procedures of all types, including the timing of elections, the location of polling places, the hours that polls would be open, the configuration of ballots, and the counting of votes. As had been true before the Civil War, many of these laws were straightforwardly administrative, creating needed electoral machinery and translating broad constitutional precepts into concrete, enforceable rules.17
Other laws were more controversial, inspired by partisan interests, enacted to influence the outcome of elections. Prominent among them were laws that affected the weight, or value, of votes cast. The apportionment of state legislative as well as congressional seats was a key issue, generating recurrent conflicts, particularly between urban and rural areas. Linked to apportionment was the location of district boundaries in states and within cities: gerrymandering was a routine form of political combat, practiced by both major parties against one another and against any upstart political organizations. Similarly, technical rules governing the presence of parties and candidates on the ballot also were subjects of contention—since they could encourage, or discourage, third parties and fusion slates. Minute legal details could and did shape the choices offered to voters and the weight of individual votes.18
Nonetheless, the most critical laws remained those that determined the size and contours of the electorate. These were of two types. First and most important were those that set out the fundamental qualifications that a man (or woman) had to meet in order to become an eligible voter. The second, of increasing significance, established the procedures that a potential voter had to follow in order to participate in elections. Both types remained under state control, since the Constitution and federal courts continued to say little about suffrage, except with regard to race. In every state, changes in both substantive and procedural laws were proposed and debated, often giving rise to reforms and commonly generating political and ideological conflict.
The legal changes considered by constitutional conventions and legislatures cut in both directions. Some were aimed at enlarging the franchise—either substantively (e.g., by eliminating tax requirements) or procedurally (e.g., by keeping the polls open longer hours, to make it easier for working people to vote). In the early twentieth century, several states, alarmed at the decline of turnout in the middle and upper classes, even considered making voting compulsory—thereby making exercise of the franchise an obligation as well as a right.
More typical of the era, however, were efforts to tighten voting requirements. Justified as measures to eliminate corruption or produce a more competent electorate, such efforts included the introduction of literacy tests, lengthening residency periods, abolishing provisions that permitted noncitizen aliens to vote, restricting municipal elections to property owners or taxpayers, and the creation of complex, cumbersome registration procedures. Stripping voters of the franchise was a politically delicate operation that generally had to be performed obliquely and without arousing the ire of large and concentrated groups of voters.19
The political dynamics of reform defy easy characterization: any full understanding would require dozens of in-depth studies of individual states and cities. Still, certain overarching patterns are visible. Efforts to restrict the franchise commonly emanated from the middle and upper classes, from business and rural interests, as well as professionals; resistance to these efforts, as well as sentiment in favor of looser voting requirements, tended to be concentrated in the urban working class. Republicans were far more likely than Democrats, or third-party advocates, to favor restrictive reforms. Partisan competition played a larger role, and ideology a smaller one, than had been true during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Issues of military recruitment and mobilization were not much of a factor until World War I.20
Yet there were exceptions to nearly all of these trends. The partisan lineup was not consistent, either geographically or over time; the middle and upper classes were never homogeneous in their views or interests; segments of an ethnically divided and fluid working class periodically championed the cause of restriction; and political machines, long regarded as powerful engines of electoral expansion, sometimes judged that it was in their interest to freeze the size of the electorate. The politics of suffrage were shaped by vectors of class, ethnicity, and party, but these vectors were never identical nor even consistently parallel to one another. The battle lines were bent further by th
e omnipresent shadow of demands for the enfranchisement of women and by the indirection of proposals that would only partially disfranchise (or enfranchise) members of particular groups. This was more guerilla than trench warfare.
Money and the VoteIf the law of Massachusetts had been purposely framed with the object of keeping workingmen away from the polls it could hardly have accomplished that object more effectually than it does. It probably was drawn up with just that sinister purpose in view. In order to register it is necessary for the workingman to lose a day or at least half a day in presenting himself personally to substantiate his right to vote—no small sacrifice in the case of the hardly driven and badly paid workers in the cotton mills and other poorly remunerated industries. Then, again, the payment of the poll tax of $2 is a prerequisite to voting . . .
The registration and poll-tax law of Massachusetts is essentially unjust and un-American. It virtually debases the right of suffrage to a part of the tax collecting machinery, and instead of making it really, as it is in theory, the birthright of every American citizen[,] renders it a privilege to be secured by a money-payment.
—Journal of United Labor (KNIGHTS OF LABOR), 1889
Contrary to received wisdom, economic requirements for voting were not a dead issue after 1850. In addition to being resurrected in the South, such requirements persisted in some northern states and were revived or debated anew in others. (See Tables A.10 and A.11.) Although difficult to justify because they violated popular ideological norms, economic qualifications continued to offer opponents of universal suffrage a direct and potentially efficient means of winnowing out undesirable voters.
The unpopularity of economic qualifications was manifested in three states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Delaware), which abolished longstanding property or tax requirements at the end of the nineteenth century. In Massachusetts, the abolition was accomplished by the Democrats, with substantial labor and Irish Catholic support. For decades, the tax requirement had served as an obstacle to poor people’s voting and as a drain on the treasuries of both political parties, who often paid the taxes of their constituents. By the late 1880s, the Democratic Party—with more working-class supporters and thus greater financial exposure—reportedly was spending $50,000 at each election to pay the poll taxes of its supporters. Taking advantage of a brief moment of statewide electoral strength, the Democrats pushed through a constitutional amendment repealing the tax requirement in 1891. While campaigning for repeal in the face of vociferous conservative opposition, Governor William Russell claimed that the “tax deprives a man of his vote because of his poverty only” and warned that continued deprivation would only prompt the poor to adopt violent means of seeking change. According to Boston’s mayor, the abolition of the poll tax led to an immediate 21 percent increase in the number of persons on the city’s voting lists.21
In adjacent Rhode Island, the Democratic Party also led a campaign against economic qualifications but with less satisfactory results. (Rhode Island was the last state to require property ownership to vote.) Passed in the 1840s, its electoral laws permitted foreign-born citizens to vote in state elections only if they owned real property; the laws further barred all those without property from voting in city elections in Providence. Combined with an apportionment system heavily biased in favor of rural voters, these laws—which disfranchised roughly one fifth of the state’s males and nearly 80 percent of potential municipal voters in Providence—very effectively kept a Republican elite in power.
By the 1880s, however, the Republicans were faltering, in part because of the growing electoral strength of the native-born children of Irish immigrants and because of corruption so flagrant that it repelled some of their traditional constituents. Supported by a coalition of middle-class reformers, advocates of women’s suffrage, and labor, the Democrats successfully pressured Republicans into holding a referendum on the franchise in 1888. The electorate then approved the Bourn amendment, which eliminated the statewide property qualification for immigrants. The victory, however, was incomplete: the Bourn amendment extended the property requirement for municipal elections to all cities as well as to town meetings dealing with financial matters. At the same time, it imposed an annual registration requirement on propertyless voters. Consequently, suffrage reform remained an issue in Rhode Island well into the twentieth century, with the Democrats annually introducing legislation to repeal the municipal property requirements. These efforts bore fruit only in 1928, when men and women who did not own property finally were permitted to vote in city elections.22
In Pennsylvania, attempts to repeal a taxpaying requirement were even less successful. The issue came to the fore at the constitutional convention of 1872-1873: the convention’s committee on suffrage recommended that the tax qualification be dropped, a recommendation supported by Democrats and reform Republicans, including the committee’s chair, H. Nelson McAllister. McAllister, presenting the committee report, argued that “the right of suffrage” was perhaps not an “absolute personal right” but was a “natural social right,” belonging “to a man because he is a man,” not “because he is a taxpayer.” McAllister found repugnant the prospect “of excluding from the right of suffrage any man on the face of the earth because he is poor.” Yet McAllister and his allies ran up against the powerful Republican political machine that ruled the state for decades and was well known for paying the taxes of its supporters. William Darlington, a machine Republican, objected strenuously to this “fundamental change” in the state’s laws, a change that would allow “those to vote . . . who have no manner of stake in the government.” His colleague, Charles Bowman, declared that he would “never vote” for a proposition “by which vagabonds and stragglers shall have a right to step up to the election polls and cast a vote which will count just as much as the man whose property is taxed thousands of dollars.” Thanks more to their political muscle than the power of their arguments, the defenders of a taxpaying requirement carried the day, and the qualification was carried over into the new constitution. Fifteen years later, opponents sponsored a constitutional amendment to repeal the requirement, but the electorate, mobilized by the still-powerful machine (now headed by Matthew Quay, who played a key role in defeating the Lodge Force Bill), overwhelmingly rejected the amendment. Until the 1930s, the only success achieved by reformers was the passage in 1897 of a weakly enforced law that required citizens to pay their taxes themselves.23
Meanwhile, a handful of states that did not have property or taxpaying requirements considered imposing them, causing disputes in constitutional conventions in Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, and Texas. (The last occurred in 1875, long before the great sweep of southern disfranchisement.) In the 1870s, the electorate of Maine narrowly rejected the adoption of the state’s first taxpaying requirement, and the California Constitutional Convention of 1878-1879, which expressly banned property requirements, declined to inscribe in its constitution a similar ban on poll tax restrictions.24
In many locales, there were serious debates regarding the implementation of more politically palatable economic qualifications: selective ones that would apply in some elections but not others. The most celebrated contest occurred in New York in the late 1870s, when a commission appointed by the Democratic governor, Samuel Tilden, recommended the creation of a board of finance to control taxation and expenditures in each of the state’s cities. In the largest cities, this board was to be elected by men who owned and had paid two years of taxes on property valued at $500 or more; potential voters also could become eligible by establishing that they had paid an annual rent for two years of at least $250. In lesser cities, the same principles would apply, but the valuations were lower. Aimed at New York City’s Democratic machine and at working-class voters throughout the state, this proposal was endorsed by the business community, the state’s social and financial elite, prominent politicians, major newspapers and magazines, and leading liberal reformers such as Godkin. Characterized by supporters as a means of low
ering taxes and making clear to voters “that municipal affairs are business affairs, to be managed on business principles,” the measure would have deprived a sizable majority of the state’s urban population from participating in decisions affecting municipal taxes or expenditures. The Republicans introduced the measure to the legislature as a constitutional amendment, where it was approved in 1877. New York, however, required that proposed amendments be passed by two successive legislatures before being submitted to a popular vote, and the following year—unhappily for advocates of municipal property requirements—Democrats gained a legislative majority and blocked passage of the amendment.25
Although defeated in New York, selective or municipal economic qualifications were imposed in cities and towns scattered throughout the country. The legislature in Maryland had the authority to impose taxpaying requirements in all municipal elections, and it did so for numerous towns and cities, including Annapolis. Municipal tax qualifications also appeared in Kentucky, Vermont, Texas, and eventually some communities in New York, as well as Rhode Island. Michigan in 1908 decided that only owners of taxable property could vote on any referendum question “which involves the direct expenditure of public money or the issue of bonds.” Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah passed similar legislation, and New York in 1910 restricted school board voting to either the parents of school-age children or property owners in the school district. Kansas, early in the twentieth century, adopted a technique that would be emulated for decades: it created new governmental entities—drainage boards, in this case—that possessed highly specific yet crucial powers, and for which only taxpayers could vote. (For a listing of various tax and property qualifications, see Tables A.10 and A.11.)26
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