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

A Note on Method and Sources

A NOTE ON METHOD AND SOURCES This bibliographic essay highlights the primary and secondary sources upon which I relied most heavily. It is intended to complement the endnotes , which are largely limited to primary sources. Calculating Turnout All turnout figures are for presidential elections. Turnout for other offices or for off-year elections was usually lower. Voter turnout is the ratio between the number of ballots cast (numerator ) and the number of eligible voters (denominator). Though the definition is straightforward, calculating voter turnout with precision is difficult, above all because it is difficult to ascertain accurately the number of eligible voters. Most elections do not coincide with federal census years, making population figures imprecise. Eligibility requirements varied from state to state, within states, and changed over time. Especially between 1840 and 1910, many states allowed immigrants to vote if they had begun the process of naturalization by taking out first papers. Women were enfranchised incrementally and acquired presidential suffrage in a number of states before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified . Many states imposed different residency requirements on voters in urban and rural areas or exempted rural residents altogether. Literacy tests, applied at a registrar’s discretion, disenfranchised by race and class as much as by the ability to read and write, rendering ineligible people who were constitutionally enfranchised. These complexities and others are amply documented in the appendix to Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 325–401. Despite the difficulties, very careful estimates exist for the years through 1968 in the work of Walter Dean Burnham. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 1067–68, 1071–72, the figures for which were prepared by Burnham. The best available figures for the period after 1968 were calculated on a different basis. For the years 1972 through 1992, I have used the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract Online, table 458, which can be accessed at http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html. For the 1996 and 2000 elections, I have used figures prepared by Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate published in the Washington Post, 9 November 2000, A35. These sources define the number of eligible voters as the voting-age population and apparently do not take into account factors such as the millions of noncitizen immigrants living within U.S. borders, or policies of criminal disenfranchisement , which today render ineligible about fourteen percent of the nation’s African American men and nearly a third of African American men in Florida and Alabama. See Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 308. The turnout calculations for the case study cities reflect the availability of published census and election data. In each case, I used the 1920 population figures for the 1920 and 1924 calculations and the 1930 figures for the 1928 calculation. Since the population of all three case study areas grew between 1920 and 1930, this practice overestimates turnout in 1924 and underestimates it in 1928. For New York City, the base figures were drawn from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 691; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 290; James Malcolm, ed., The New York Red Book (Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1921), 530; the 1925 edition, 510; the 1929 edition, 365. The numerator is the presidential vote in 1920, 1924, and 1928 for the five counties that comprise New York City. According to Keyssar, The Right to Vote, Table A12, the state of New York required voters to have been citizens for at least ninety days. To approximate that number , the denominator is the population of native-born whites, naturalized foreign-born whites, and “Negroes” in New York City 21 years of age and over for 1920 and 1930. Using these figures, turnout in New A NOTE ON METHOD AND SOURCES 234 York City was 52.5 percent in 1920, 57.6 percent in 1924, and 55.8 percent in 1928. These data have certain biases. The use of 1930 population figures for the 1928 calculation helps to explain the absence...