The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century by Jon Grinspan (review)

In this energetic account of the rise and fall of youthful political engagement in the nineteenth century, Jon Grinspan embraces the narrative zeal of his subjects with his own fast-paced and exuberant writing style. The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century is a coming-of-age story of young voters and a young, uncertain American democracy. It is a lively and important account of bumptious boys and curious girls who discovered their adulthood in democratic politics. While the author acknowledges that current scholarship has focused on the exclusive nature of nineteenth-century democracy—on those who were left out—he argues that by examining youth political culture we might better see how many people engaged in "'democracy out of doors'" and made the years between 1840 and 1900 the "age of popular politics" (pp. 3, 7).

Grinspan tells his story through the eyes of several individuals, including Oscar Lawrence Jackson, the boy orator who gave his first speech for Abraham Lincoln surrounded by jaunty Wide Awakes in 1860; the young Susan Bradford, whose curiosity was piqued as she overheard conversations about abolitionists, whom she described as "monstrous 'devils,'" on Florida's Pine Hill plantation; Ned Cobb, who watched his emancipated father in Reconstruction Alabama proudly cast his ballot and later lose this privilege; and John J. McCarthy, the Irish cowboy with the "County Cork accent" who braved the icy waters of the North Platte River to get his first ballot to Ogallala, Nebraska, in time (pp. 16, 82). Grinspan uses private papers, Federal Writers' Project interviews, and autobiographies to give form to youth political engagement. William Dean Howells, Samuel J. Tilden, and George Washington Plunkitt appear as boys herein. Grinspan argues that children, motivated primarily by self-interest, observed adult conversations, political rallies, and election-day activities and embraced and energized the country's young democracy because they found a chance in its cultural manifestations to socialize. Democracy offered American children a lively path to adulthood.

While Grinspan carefully includes the voices of a few white girls and African American boys, The Virgin Vote is a compelling story about precocious white American boys living in a fast-changing United States and finding their way to manhood through ritual political participation. The reader can feel the frustration and anticipation as these youngsters played with manhood by growing paltry mustaches, running errands for party bosses, and giving their first political speeches. In Grinspan's hands, a young man's first vote at age twenty-one was a "'virgin vote,'" akin to a first drink or first kiss, which ushered him into the world of American manhood (p. 8).

Grinspan draws on the emasculating uses of phrases like "virgin vote," "'parasol-holders,'" and "'old ladies'" to create a world where young boys became men through the political process, but he remains uncritical of how this youth culture readied American boys for their own patriarchal authority (p. 11). Grinspan, referring to participatory democracy, calls his work "a story about a culture reproducing itself over time," but this particular iteration of democracy also reproduced a culture of white male superiority as exuberant boys became politically privileged American men (p. 13). In the end, the author argues that the desire to tame and rationalize the political process in the early twentieth century took the fun out of political participation and thus ushered in a steep decline in participatory democracy. A closer examination of gender, however, might complicate this assertion. What role did the woman suffrage movement or the Nineteenth Amendment play in bringing an end to the exclusive, rowdy, masculine political culture of the nineteenth century? The Virgin Vote is a well-written study of youthful political engagement and its demise between...