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A useful study
Format: Hardcover
This is a book that will make you angry. If you are a conservative, this book should make you feel very guilty. It is important to begin with that this book is a detour from Keyssar's larger project, which was supposed to be a history of the American working class' electoral participation. After struggling with the work for several years he realized that he needed to publish a whole book explaining what the right to vote actually was in American history. The result is a history of the slow and uneven path to universal suffrage in American history. We learn about the existence of the vote before 1776, the improvement that occured with the revolution, and the larger improvement that occured with the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian period in which the large majority of white men were able to vote. At the same time we learn of efforts to counter the expanding suffrage, such as disfranchisement of free blacks all over the country before 1861, attacks on the voting rights of paupers, felons, migrants and aliens, as well as the disfranchisment in the early 1800s of the limited voting rights women had in the early 1800s. Keyssar then goes on to discuss the narrowing of the portals from the 1860s to the 1920s, periods ironically bounded by giving the vote to blacks in the 1870s and to women by the 1920s. But in between that period nearly all blacks and many whites were disenfranchised in the south, while literacy, residence, nationality and registration systems sought to limit the vote in the North (while "asiatics" were barred in the west). The book concludes with the successful passage of the Voting Rights Act and the twenty-sixth amendment, but also with low turnout, an extremely narrow political spectrum, and government structures which limit political participation and reinforce conservative values.
Much of this will not be new to historians, though never before has there been such detail and the twenty appendixes provided at the back will be invaluable for future reference. Sometimes Keyssar gives a qualititative estimate of how many Americans could vote (he suggests that perhaps 60% of white Americans could vote before 1776, a figure much lower than the 80-90% posited by more Panglossian historians). And there are many interesting details, such as the New York plan where registration was supposed to take place on Yom Kippur, conventiently leaving out many Jews. But otherwise the full results have been reserved for his upcoming work. This weakens his criticisms of American exceptionalism, since without a clear understanding of how much the vote declined in the North, we cannot see how fully the ponderous elitism of Parkman and Godkin were like the undemocratic aspects of German or Italian or even British liberalism. I am also do not agree with his description of slaves as a "peasantry." This implies that the majority of white farmers who were not slaveholders were a) not peasants and b) were otherwise indistinguishable on a class basis from the slaveholders. Recent southern agrarian history makes this assumption quite questionable. It is true that Americans were unenthusiatic as Europeans about the rise of the proletariat and rural subaltern classes, but it is insufficient to say that mass suffrage only occured because such classes were a small proportion of the population. They were also a small proportion of the population in France in 1848 and 1851 when universal male suffrage was declared, which did not prevent a greater degree of struggle over the question in that country. Enfranchising the majority of any population would raise serious issues of class domination and control regardless of the class structure. Nevertheless this is still a useful study, and reading the petty, racist, misogynist, self-serving and self-satisfied arguments against the suffrage will be a depressing experience. To think that such injustices could be continued for two centuries thanks to the endless cant of "state's rights" long after the republican content of that slogan had drained away will infuriate you.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2000
