In the Rearview Mirror: The Counter-Revolution against “Mobocracy”

The past year has seen a tidal wave of laws to restrict the right to vote and reduce voter turnout. This systematic effort to diminish voting, though not unprecedented, is highly unusual. Overall, the history of the United States has been one of laws enacted to universalize suffrage and expand channels of democracy. True, in the decades following the Revolution the few women who had the franchise lost it and new obstacles made it more difficult, or impossible, for African-Americans to vote even in states without slavery. Immigrants, too, saw it become more difficult to vote as nativists pushed for restrictions on their political rights. Still, by the mid-1800s, an electorate initially limited largely to property-owning white men had grown as property requirements for voting were lowered or eliminated. After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment declared that “The right... to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The long struggle for female suffrage culminated in 1920 with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Until the current moment, there was only one era, from the 1870s to World War I, when changes in the law significantly reduced the size of the electorate. It coincided with major challenges to economic and racial domination. In reaction, elites defended their caste and class privileges in part by widespread efforts to restrict the suffrage.

The South served as the launching pad for the anti-democratic movement. During Reconstruction, former slaves, often in alliance with whites, were able to use the ballot box to elect black officials, repeal repressive legislation, and win public services (like schools), which they always had been denied. Government no longer acted as the arm of landowners and employers in extracting every possible ounce of wealth out of black labor. In return, whites ultimately resorted to terror, through the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations, to suppress the votes of African-Americans and their allies, recapturing control of Southern state governments. But until the end of the nineteenth century, Southern blacks retained at least some degree of political power through the ballot, with the last African-American congressman from the South, North Carolinian George Henry White, serving until 1901.

Even after Reconstruction governments were overthrown, planter and merchant elites faced new challenges from the biracial Populist movement and other voter insurgencies. To stop the threat, Southern Democrats redoubled their efforts to push blacks, and many poor whites, out of the electorate. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, Southern states adopted a variety of anti-democratic devices, including, as Alexander Keyssar enumerated in his book The Right To Vote, “poll taxes, cumulative poll taxes (demanding that past as well as current taxes be paid), literacy tests, secret ballot laws [which effectively required voters to be able to read in order to cast a ballot], lengthy residence requirements [at a time when the poor moved frequently], elaborate registration systems, confusing multiple voting-box arrangements, and eventually Democratic primaries restricted to white voters.” Criminal exclusion laws further reduced the electorate, in some states barring from voting even people convicted of minor crimes.

During this same period, a movement to restrict voting also took place in the North (although it is much less talked about in our history books). The last decades of the nineteenth century saw one wave after another of militant protest by workers and farmers, as national corporations and a plutocratic elite accumulated wealth and power. Mobilization took many forms, including the growth of unions, mass strikes, demonstrations, riots, the creation of cooperative enterprises, and electoral efforts by third parties like the Greenback Labor Party, Populists, and Socialists. Farmer- and labor-based parties never were able to mount much of a challenge in presidential elections, but they had considerable success on the local and state level, winning offices, passing laws that regulated railroads and other industries, and setting up publicly-owned utilities and transit systems. They demanded the direct election of senators (until 1913 and the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment senators...