The issue did not die; instead it was resuscitated by the New Deal’s unprecedented efforts to provide federal aid to the unemployed. In 1934, the banner of disfranchisement was carried by the New York State Economic Council (NYSEC), an association of anti-New Deal businessmen headed by prominent Republicans, including former United States Attorney General (and former chair of President Hoover’s law enforcement commission) George W. Wickersham. Claiming to have 50,000 members, the NYSEC was an influential voice urging lower taxes and reduced government expenditures to promote business recovery; it also opposed “compulsory” unemployment insurance, denounced the American Federation of Labor as “un-American,” and recommended the passage of laws outlawing general and sympathetic strikes.24
Among the council’s most celebrated proposals was “the withholding from all persons receiving public unemployment relief the right of suffrage during the period in which such relief is being received.” Put forward in the summer of 1934, just as the country was moving politically leftward, this proposition immediately drew national attention—both because millions of jobless workers were receiving relief and because the rationale for the proposal was politically inflammatory. Unlike the registration board of Lewiston, the council claimed that disfranchisement was warranted not because there were laws on the books but because the growth of New Deal programs had created a huge and potentially dangerous bloc of voters. Relief recipients, it was argued, were indebted to those who had created the relief programs and would vote to perpetuate and enlarge those programs. “If the millions now receiving relief should organize . . . and wield the power of organized voters,” insisted Merwin K. Hart, the president of the council and a vigorous opponent of unemployment insurance, “they could hamstring any effort to bring about economic recovery.” Implicit in the NYSEC’s argument was the conviction that the great mass of relief recipients, beholden to the New Deal, would vote for the Democrats in order to keep relief funds and tax dollars flowing in their direction.25
Although Wickersham and his colleagues never mentioned William Blackstone or Chancellor Kent, their argument for disfranchisement had deep historical roots. In the millions of citizens on the payroll of the Civil Works Administration (CWA) or receiving relief through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the NYSEC saw the nightmare that Blackstone had characterized and Kent had predicted: an army of “dependents” marching to the polls; a mass of propertyless men ready to seize the property of others (through taxes); men “with no will of their own” who easily could be manipulated by a clever politician or demagogue, such as Franklin Roosevelt or even Huey Long. That New Deal administrators announced $135 million in relief appropriations shortly before the 1934 elections only added fuel to the flames; so too did widespread (if unsubstantiated) reports that aid was being given only to those who promised to vote Democratic. In the harsh, disordered, and to some, frightening social order of the mid-1930s, where the poor were numerous and supported by the state, the dangers of a broad suffrage once again loomed large.26
According to a survey conducted by the NYSEC, 35 percent of all candidates for the legislature and Congress in New York supported disfranchisement. National support was sufficiently widespread that a countermovement was launched to promote a Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution to guarantee the citizenship rights of the unemployed. The economic council had overplayed its hand, however—or played it at the wrong historical moment. In the dire conditions of the depression, it was clear to almost all Americans—as had not been clear even a decade earlier—that the unemployed were victims of a crisis in capitalism, that they were jobless “through no fault of their own,” and that they sought relief not because they were slothful but because jobs did not exist. For businessmen (whom many blamed for the depression in the first place) to try to deprive unfortunate working people of their political rights seemed unfair, even grotesque. Democratic politicians, labor spokesmen, and letter writers to newspapers heaped scorn on the idea; more than one asked if the NYSEC also planned to disfranchise businessmen and farmers who received any form of government aid. In October 1934, President Roosevelt himself addressed the issue. Asked for his response to a report that officials in twelve states were taking action to deny the franchise to persons on relief, the president declared that no man who was “out of work and willing to work” possibly could be regarded as a pauper, according to any “honest” conception of the law. Disfranchising the jobless, he insisted, would be “a thoroughly un-American procedure.”27
In the end, the number of relief recipients actually disfranchised in 1934 was small. In some locales, pauper laws were invoked; in others, such as West Virginia, they were explicitly and publicly ignored; a compromise in Maine led to the laws being applied only to those receiving municipal rather than federal relief. In Kansas, transients (largely agricultural workers) who voted were warned that they would be taken off the “transient relief ” rolls. But no new voting restrictions were enacted, and it is likely that far more of the unemployed were disfranchised because of poll taxes and residency requirements than regulations expressly excluding paupers and relief recipients. Turnout, moreover, was unusually high in the 1934 elections, and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party gained unprecedented strength. The heirs of Chancellor Kent were on the run.28
Yet wariness of relief recipients persisted. Throughout the New Deal, Republicans attacked the administration for the partisan use of public funds in the distribution of relief and jobs. Roosevelt was accused of being a masterful and manipulative politician using federal tax dollars to build a national political machine; the large relief programs were decried as sources of corruption fostering a permanent, government-supported army of indigents. In fact there was some basis for Republican concern: not only were relief funds sometimes distributed to gain partisan advantage, but by 1938 an organization of 400,000 Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers and other relief recipients pledged that it would organize politically to elect congressmen who supported higher relief wages. The policy conflict that flowed from such charges, however, did not focus on disfranchisement: it centered instead on the size of the relief budget and on efforts to insulate the administration of relief from politics. The most significant law to emerge from this controversy was the Hatch Act, which prevented federal employees from participating in political campaigns.29
Nonetheless, the idea of disfranchising the unemployed had one more moment in the sun. In September 1938, a small group of conservative, anti-New Deal women, calling itself the Women’s Rebellion, revived the demand that relief recipients be deprived of their voting rights. The group was led by Mrs. Sarah O. Hulswit of Suffern, New York, who was identified in the press as the wife of the manager of the Rockland Gas Company. Mrs. Hulswit explained that she and her colleagues feared that if millions of relief recipients continued to vote, they would perpetuate themselves “and there would never be an end of the depression.” She also attacked the New Deal’s “buying and coercion of votes,” declaring that “millions are no longer free to vote as they wish,” and warning that the “WPA and relief vote is building up a situation similar to that existing in Germany and Russia.” Mrs. Hulswit and her fellow members of the Women’s Rebellion were not alone in raising the issue. In an article in the North American Review, Cal Lewis declared that “the pauper vote should be an important public question” since “such a large part of the voters in many states are not self-supporting.” Lewis claimed that in many states, “the pauper vote may hold the balance of political power.”30
The strategy of the Women’s Rebellion was to approach the attorneys general in states with pauper exclusion laws and demand that the laws be enforced. New Jersey and Rhode Island were targeted first. In New Jersey, the case for disfranchising recipients of federal aid was logically compelling: WPA jobs went only to those who had been on relief for two months, relief recipients had to take a pauper’s oath, and the state constitution expressly banned paupers from voting. The leg
al logic notwithstanding, the “rebellious women” achieved little. New Jersey’s attorney general stated that only a formal investigative procedure could determine whether or not a person was a pauper; “in my judgment,” the attorney general continued, “it is inconceivable” that the category of pauper would apply to “those who, because of the unusual economic conditions, are receiving assistance through the agencies of the federal government.” It was notable that the attorney general, like most opponents of franchise restriction, argued not that paupers should be enfranchised, but rather that relief recipients were not paupers. Even more telling, Warren Barbour, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from New Jersey, announced that the proposed restriction was “unthinkable” and that he personally would “engage eminent counsel to oppose in the courts any attempt at preventing WPA employees or relief clients from voting in the coming election.”31
The Women’s Rebellion fared poorly in other states as well, although New Hampshire placed before its voters a circuitous constitutional amendment to permit the state legislature to define pauper. Despite the cries of political corruption and the fears of some conservatives, the idea of disfranchising relief recipients ran counter to the prevailing tides. A survey conducted by Fortune in 1939 revealed that only 18 percent of Americans favored such action—a figure high enough to suggest that nineteenth-century fears of the poor were still alive and well, yet low enough to explain why the notion was embraced primarily by men and women who were not running for office. In the eyes of most citizens, the dependent poor were victims; the New Deal remained popular; and the growth of fascism in Europe was strengthening American identification with democracy. Once again President Roosevelt gave voice to the popular mood. When asked his views of the crusade of the Women’s Rebellion, Roosevelt breezily responded that the logical outcome of such a crusade would be to limit the franchise to men of “academic distinction.” He then recalled that a group of Harvard students had once agitated to restrict suffrage to men with bachelor’s degrees, provoking Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot, to comment that with such a restriction the United States would “remain a republic for just about three years.”32
The significance of Roosevelt’s comments resided as much in their cavalier tone as in their content. The president could be flippant about the issue precisely because he knew that his was the majority view: in the wake of the stock market crash and the collapse of the pro-business ideology of the 1920s, Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate himself, could safely ridicule the notion of government by an educated elite. In addition, Roosevelt was expressing a confidence, characteristic of the New Deal, that a democratic polity could be managed successfully, that government could juggle the competing claims of diverse social and economic interests, and that it could smooth the inherent tensions between industrial capitalism and popular government. While the New York State Economic Council and the Women’s Rebellion echoed longstanding conservative apprehensions—perpetuating a line of thought that had run from Blackstone and Kent to Parkman and Munro—Roosevelt was the embodiment of a more optimistic faith.
In early November 1936, on the eve of the presidential elections, Roosevelt, at home in Hyde Park, New York, gave an extemporaneous speech to his fellow residents of Dutchess County. Announcing that he wanted to tell them “a few things” that were “in my heart at the end of this campaign,” he reflected on American constitutional history and on the history of the county. “At the time of the first election, after the Constitution was ratified,” he observed, “In the early days of the nation,” the president then noted, “the results of an election could not be called the rule of the majority,” but things had changed, and “today you have a different situation and by midnight tomorrow night . . . whatever the result is, it will be definitely, clearly, and conclusively the will of the majority.”33
very few men—of course there were no women voting in those days—comparatively few men voted. The reason for that was that in the early days of the United States the franchise was limited to property holders. Most of this Dutchess County of ours in the early days of the republic was inhabited by tenant farmers. A tenant farmer could not vote because he was not a freeholder and only freeholders could vote in this and the other counties of the State of New York. . . . Today we have a very different proposition. . . . You do not have to be the owner of real estate in order to vote.
Roosevelt was not the first president to celebrate the virtues of democracy or to applaud the end of property requirements for voting. But his self-conscious excursion into history, in the midst of a profound economic crisis that had brought class issues to the forefront of national politics, had an unmistakable symbolic resonance. The president’s embrace of a broad suffrage, unbounded by economic qualifications, underscored one of the central messages and thrusts of the New Deal: industrial capitalism and political democracy could coexist. Just as he rebuffed socialist critics who believed that capitalism had failed, he dismissed conservatives who were clamoring for the resurrection of electoral bans on the dependent poor or the “economic unfit.” That this resurrection did not occur, that Mrs. Wellman, the NYSEC, and the Women’s Rebellion made so little progress—despite the threatening presence of millions of dependent “paupers”—was a measure of the New Deal’s success and a sign that the ghosts of Blackstone and Kent finally had been put to rest.34
War and Race
The equilibrium in voting laws was decisively disrupted by World War II. Fighting a long and difficult war on both the Atlantic and Pacific fronts compelled the United States to mobilize almost all men of military age, including many who were not enfranchised: roughly one million African Americans as well as thousands of Native Americans and men of Asian descent. Drafting these men into military service inescapably raised the troubling issue of fairness that had surfaced as early as the American Revolution: Could men be obliged to risk their lives to protect a society and government that did not give them a voice in its politics? This question shot to the surface of political life during the war and was kept there, in the war’s aftermath, by veterans—cadres of young Americans who, by dint of their military service, felt entitled to the full rights of citizenship and were unabashed about demanding those rights.
The impact of World War II also was shaped by the particular goals of the war and the nature of America’s adversaries. The Atlantic Charter was precise in declaring that the war’s objectives included the restoration of democracy to all European nations, as well as an end to racial and ethnic discrimination. In the popular mind and in wartime propaganda, the ideology of racial superiority espoused by the Nazis loomed as an evil that had to be vanquished. Yet, as the Nazis and the Japanese frequently pointed out, the presence of systematic discrimination in the United States undercut America’s posture as the standard bearer of democracy. World War II was an ideological as well as a military war, and its ideological dimension exposed the undemocratic features of American political life. In doing so, the war recast democratization as a matter of compelling national interest and therefore as an appropriate, indeed imperative, concern of the national government.35
Alongside such strategic considerations was a broader shift in beliefs and temperament: World War II spawned a popular embrace of democracy more vigorous than any that had occurred since the most optimistic moments of Reconstruction. In sharp contrast to the 1930s, when many intellectuals and opinion leaders thought that capitalist democracy was on its last legs, the war against Germany and Japan (and then the cold war) led many Americans to renew their identification with democratic values. That identification, coupled with the repugnance of Nazi ideology, significantly strengthened the movement to end racial discrimination at home. Sensitive to this shift in values and to the growing electoral strength of northern blacks, both political parties, and particularly the Republicans, vigorously supported black rights in their national electoral campaigns.36
The tensions between the democratic goals of the war and the limits of democracy at hom
e offered black leaders an opportunity that they seized to good effect. In contrast to their stance during World War I (which was to defer racial issues while uniting behind the war effort), African-American political figures invoked the anti-Nazi and antiracialist ideology of the war to press for an end to discrimination at home. “Prove to us,” declared one activist, “that you are not hypocrites when you say this is a war for freedom.” The well-known March on Washington Movement focused attention on discriminatory practices in the armed services and among defense contractors; the campaign to abolish the poll tax gathered steam, as noted earlier; and the NAACP, whose membership rose from 50,000 to more than 400,000, announced that the war for freedom would be fought on “two fronts,” abroad and at home. Declaring that “we shall not abate one iota our struggle for full citizenship rights in the United States,” the NAACP renewed its legal assault on lynching, social segregation, and disfranchisement. In making such pronouncements, activists had the support of an increasingly assertive African-American community, particularly among the millions who either joined the army or took advantage of the booming wartime economy to migrate to northern and southern cities to take jobs in industry. “If I’ve got to die for democracy,” observed one black soldier, “I might as well die for some of it right here and now.”37
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