The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (review)

The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. By Alexander Keyssar. New York: Basic Books, 2000; pp. xxiv + 467. $30.00.

In the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 6, 2001, Congress certified the Electoral College vote, granting the presidency to George W. Bush, the first person to attain that office without winning the popular vote since Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Members of the congressional black caucus tried in vain to stop the counting of Florida's electoral votes, citing the disfranchisement of some African American voters in that state owing to irregularities in voter registration or to intimidation. Outside the Capitol, some protesters carried signs reading "Restore Democracy!" Readers of Alexander Keyssar's new book, the first scholarly study of U.S. voting rights since 1918, have cause to suggest that these signs might more accurately have read "Create Democracy!"

Arguing that U.S. democracy is better understood as an ongoing project than as a political condition, Keyssar, a professor of history and public policy at Duke University, surveys the formal restrictions on and expansions of the franchise from the colonial period to the late 1990s. Rather than offering the common triumphalist reading of U.S. suffrage--that is, the inexorable falling away of restrictions based on property ownership, race, sex, and age--The Right to Vote traces the zigs and zags of suffrage laws. Observing that the U.S. Constitution did not contain the phrase "right to vote" until 1868 and that it still does not affirm the right of suffrage in positive terms, Keyssar charts the fluctuations in the rights to the franchise that were made possible by the politically expedient decision of the Constitution's framers to separate national citizenship from voting rights.

Keyssar, whose last book examined the history of unemployment in Massachusetts, defines "class tensions and apprehensions" as "the single most important obstacle to universal suffrage in the United States" from its founding to the 1960s (xxi). The book is thus organized around touchstones of class, immigration, and economic history, including the Industrial Revolution, the influx of free immigrants from Europe and Asia, and the suppression of African American agricultural laborers in the South. Four temporal frames structure the narrative: from the signing of the Constitution to 1850, when voting rights generally expanded; from the 1850s to World War I, when rights narrowed (the one major aberration being the brief enfranchisement of African American men during Reconstruction); from World War I to the 1960s, a period of general stasis after the enfranchisement of women in 1920; and from the 1960s forward, when the civil rights movement ignited an era of expansion.

In each period, Keyssar finds that people who controlled access to the franchise acted in accordance with their own self-interests, sometimes, for example, expanding the franchise to noncitizens in order to encourage settlement, or contracting voting rights to prevent the political engagement of the urban industrial working class. The expansion of voting rights, Keyssar argues, has been most frequently associated with war: the Revolution heralded an expansion of voting rights for white men who did not own property; the Civil War, for African American men (briefly); World War I, for women; World War II, for Asian immigrants, for Native Americans, and for African Americans (again); and the Vietnam War, for eighteen-year-olds. In Keyssar's narrative, the most consistently persuasive rationale for expanding the franchise links voting with military service or wartime contributions. Voting thus has been construed as a right that one had to earn, through good behavior or action on behalf of the state.

Within the broad framework of the four periods, restrictions and expansions of the franchise are varied. In expanding suffrage to embrace white men who did not own property, for example, state governments during the late 18th and early 19th centuries denied suffrage to some...