The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920s

Conclusion: The New Regime

Conclusion THE NEW REGIME Middle-class and elite whites in the early twentieth century succeeded spectacularly in their efforts to contain the radical potential of universal suffrage. By the 1920s, immigrants, ethnic Americans, and workers had practically disappeared as respectable participants from discussions of civic issues in the large-circulation daily newspapers that comprised in this period a crucial part of “the public sphere” of discourse and debate. A drumbeat of unfavorable depictions of women citizens counterbalanced their familiar portrayal as civic “angels” and undermined their new equality as voting citizens by criticizing their competence to make decisions which men would have to abide. Middlebrow magazines routinely characterized the interests of native-born, middle-class whites as the public good and the interests of immigrants, workers, African Americans, and sometimes women as narrow and particular. Civic education classes described good citizenship in terms that defined “expertise” as whiteness and middle-class or elite status, while advertisements that portrayed businessmen and stylish homemakers as model citizens propagated the idea that people who were elite or middle class ought to be regarded as both the civic ideal and the civic norm. This was a remarkable achievement, for as recently as a generation earlier the vigorous participation of workers, immigrants, and ethnic Americans in civic life had been a democratic necessity. Workers , ethnic Americans, and noncitizen immigrants had participated, fully and fully legitimately, in the electorate of the party period. Their participation was once a defining feature of the political system; by the turn of the century it had become contested ground. The strong system of multiethnic, multiclass political parties that for most of the nineteenth century had welcomed and indeed insisted upon their participation deteriorated rapidly after the realignment of the 1890s, making it possible for the class stratification that in the mid–nineteenth century had come to characterize so many aspects of American life—the workplace, the arts, the layout of urban space— finally to take hold in politics as well. By the end of the 1920s, a new system of civic hierarchies had displaced much of the old. In the old regime, enfranchisement corresponded neatly to the racial and gender hierarchies that conferred privilege upon white men of every class and ethnic background. African Americans were for the most part excluded from significant roles in civic life, and women occupied subordinate roles as abstractions perched upon parade floats or as critics of, say, temperance policy, but not as people who were empowered to make public decisions for others. In most places, voters needed simply to be male, white, and twenty-one years of age; those qualities alone made them legitimate decision makers for the rest of society. As more people gained the right to vote, powerful groups worked to change the meaning of enfranchisement. When enfranchisement no longer neatly corresponded to civic privilege, middle-class and elite whites began to mark civic status in new ways. In the new regime, frequently under the banner of “expertise,” noncitizen immigrants were banned from the electorate; African Americans in the South remained for the most part disenfranchised; workers and ethnics were pushed to the margins of civic life; and women occupied a range of positions that reflected their unsettled civic status, from working-class and ethnic women who had few resources for exerting civic power in official ways to elite white women who used the power conferred by their class and race to carve out a place for themselves in the most privileged ranks. In the new regime, the pinnacle of civic privilege was reserved for elite and middleclass whites alone. This political culture of exclusion was achieved in many ways. Courts during the Red Scare, for example, defined the views of left-leaning immigrants as a breach of the boundaries of good citizenship, while “Judge Lynch” continued to enforce segregation, disenfranchisement, and deference . The “American Plan” campaigns by business groups to replace closed shops with open shops curtailed the influence of workers on the CONCLUSION: THE NEW REGIME 195 job. The continuing use of injunctions to prevent picketing and strikes branded labor activism as a criminal act. The restrictions on immigration passed in 1921 and 1924 dramatically cut the number of new arrivals , while Americanization campaigns by schools, churches, and businesses pressured foreign-born residents to shed ethnic markers and conform to narrow definitions of “Americanness.” In the 1920s, these actions and others added up to a multifrontal assault on...