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

2. "A Whole Fleet of Campaigns": The Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns in Overview

“A WHOLE FLEET OF CAMPAIGNS” The Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns in Overview “Register So You Can Vote November 8th.” In 1927, on Fountain Square in downtown Cincinnati, the local League of Women Voters erected an immense billboard to summon citizens to civic duty. “Civic thermometers” put the tally of registered voters in public view; each city ward’s “thermometer” would rise as the registration numbers climbed. Properly hatted, standing tall, these women hoped their work would propel registration “Over The Top” (see fig. 8). In the mid-1920s, concerned citizens such as these squarely confronted the problem of civic apathy . In 1923 and 1924, clubwomen and businessmen in every part of the country launched a series of nonpartisan drives to boost voter turnout. In the “Get-Out-the-Vote” or GOTV campaigns, these civic activists enlisted, as one participant put it, “every conceivable agency” to improve attendance at the polls: they advertised in magazines and newspapers and cultivated the support of publishers and editors ; they sponsored civics classes and taught citizens how to mark ballots; they helped rewrite laws governing registration and voting; they recruited allies from veterans groups, schools, churches, and synagogues. The GOTV campaigns, in Michael McGerr’s phrase, “caught on quickly.” By the summer of 1924, they had multiplied into “a whole fleet of campaigns,” a full-scale “patriotic crusade.”1 This crusade took place on a truly stunning scale. The total number of national organizations, state and local organizations, state and local chapters of 2 national organizations, and individuals involved is uncounted, and perhaps uncountable. A leading GOTV group put the number of participating organizations at more than three thousand. I have counted nearly a thousand, and certainly I have not found them all. The fullest list of participants in a single city is for St. Louis, where one organizer named eighty-nine participating groups while acknowledging the incompleteness of the list. What is certain is that in forty-seven of the forty-eight states, in the countryside and in urban centers and in towns of every size, the GOTV campaigns were vigorous, active, and visible.2 The large number of participants, however, does not mean that everyone participated. Patterns in the identity of the activists and in the timing and organization of the campaigns stand out clearly. Most GOTV activists were broadly middle class—the businessmen’s wives who met for club lunches, the shopkeepers who posted placards in store windows, the insurance salesmen who dropped off literature while collecting premiums . With a few notable exceptions, most vote activists were also white. Most groups put forward their biggest efforts in the presidential election of 1924, though many worked intensively in off-year congressional , state, or municipal elections in the mid-1920s and in the presidential election of 1928. At the national level, for the most part, GOTV groups cooperated in only the most limited ways, sending a representative to attend another group’s meeting, for example, or passing resolutions of support. At the local level, by contrast, organizations often cooperated closely, working together to plan and carry out the campaigns. Participating groups, too, spanned the ideological spectrum from the far right to the not-so-far left, from ultraconservatives in the National Security League to reforming women who also worked for issues such as disarmament and an end to child labor. Some GOTV activists were political independents; some, such as Alton B. Parker and Sarah Schuyler Butler, held positions of leadership in the Democratic and Republican organizations. Even deeply committed partisans, however, put party loyalties aside to express support for GOTV. As President Coolidge put it in a 1924 speech, “I am much less concerned for what party, what policies and what candidates you vote, than that you shall vote.” GOTV was a nonpartisan affair, and political parties played virtually no role in the campaigns.3 Participants varied, too, in their level of involvement in the campaigns and in the way in which they got involved in the first place. While local chapters often followed the lead of their national organizations, a few took up the GOTV mission quite on their own, winning the attention of “A WHOLE FLEET OF CAMPAIGNS” 47 those at the central offices and shaping the program of the national organizations from the bottom up. Some groups did no more than pass a resolution of support and then promptly file the resolution away. Some, however, devoted enormous resources...