Battling Over the Boundaries of the American Electorate

Alexander Keyssar.The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000. xxiv + 467 pp. Figures, appendix, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

In its conception and methods, The Right to Voteis an old-fashioned book. Like many studies dating to the early and mid-twentieth century, it examines a single major issue in American history--conflicts over and changes in legal qualifications for the suffrage--from the Revolutionary era to the present. Drawing primarily on elite sources like laws, state constitutions, court decisions, and the speeches and writings of political leaders and opinion-makers, Keyssar narrates and explains how and why the boundaries of the electorate changed over the last two centuries.

Keyssar's book is hardly dated, however. Earlier efforts to tell a comprehensive history of voting rights were written in the half century between 1919 and 1969. In reviving this topic, Keyssar brings to it the sensibilities of a contemporary historian: an appreciation of the impact of movements of the disfranchised, an eye for contingency and irony, a healthy skepticism concerning the exceptional character of American development. Where many earlier studies told Whiggish stories of uninterrupted progress, Keyssar (reviving the approach of historians writing in the 1890s and 1910s) depicts democratization as the result of fierce and recurrent conflict, in which the opponents of democracy often overpowered its advocates and rights were sometimes taken away.

Keyssar sees a common cluster of forces contributing to the periodic expansion of the suffrage over the last two hundred years. Movements among militiamen, white propertyless urban men, women, African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians were critical to democratization. When they succeeded, Keyssar argues, these movements were aided by a number of factors. Urbanization and the expansion of urban employment allowed large numbers of the disfranchised (white, propertyless, urban men in the early nineteenth century; wage-earning and middle-class women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; African Americans from World War I on) to achieve new levels of economic and civic independence, providing them with the social space to create their own political movements and convincing many of their fellow citizens of their fitness for the vote. In addition, partisan competition often drove democratization, as the party most likely to benefit from a particular group's votes strove to enfranchise their supporters while the opposing party fought to perpetuate the group's exclusion. Once it seemed likely that a given group would get the vote, however, the erstwhile opponents of democratization rushed to support its enfranchisement for fear of earning the enmity of the new voters. Ideological change was critical as well, as the "spread of democratic values" in the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries emboldened the advocates and chastened the opponents of an expanded electorate.

The real midwife of democracy, however, was war. Military mobilization contributed greatly to industrialization and urbanization, thus contributing to many disfranchised groups' civic and economic independence. Wars called forth sacrifices in the name of democracy, cementing popular commitment to democratic values and creating new ideological openings for those wishing to expand the electorate. Most importantly, military conflict elicited sacrifices from the disfranchised, which both emboldened them to claim the rights of citizenship and strengthened their claims to the suffrage in the eyes of their fellow citizens. Keyssar points out that all the major expansions of the electorate--the enfranchisement of propertyless white males, African Americans (twice), white women, American Indians, and eighteen- to twenty-year-olds-took place during or in the wake of wars, either "hot" or "cold."

Keyssar makes clear that every movement for expansion of the suffrage had its opponents and skillfully sketches out their arguments against a broader electorate. The explanations he offers for their opposition include those emphasized by other historians: the interest of elites (and, one might add, of humbler white men) in the subordination of African Americans, immigrants, American Indians...