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

4. "Good for at Least 100 Votes": The Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns at the Local Level

“GOOD FOR AT LEAST 100 VOTES” The Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns at the Local Level On the day before the September primary, the Grand Rapids, Michigan, League of Women Voters sponsored a parade to drum up enthusiasm at the polls. “With the Firemen’s band at its head,” a procession of twenty-five cars “decorated in patriotic colors and bearing pennants with slogans admonishing all voters to use their voting privilege” made its way through the city’s business districts (see fig. 11). Despite the pouring rain, “factories and shops” and schools “furnished spectators and applause” along the length of the two-hour route.1 The GOTV campaigns were not just a top-down affair. Local campaigns such as the one in Grand Rapids were numerous, vigorous, and often departed from the dictates of national organizations. Local GOTV leaders always had considerable autonomy to conduct the campaigns as they saw fit, and local efforts varied widely in their methods, participation, and reach. Some towns put up only small efforts, while others mobilized massive resources . In many areas clubwomen were the driving force behind efforts to organize, while in others businessmen assumed the leadership roles. Some campaigns took place in relatively homogenous communities; others were organized in cities with great ethnic, class, and racial diversity. Some campaigns took place in towns where political parties were relatively weak, while others were situated in cities with powerful party machines. The three case studies that follow investigate how the GOTV campaigns played out in the context of 4 local political institutions, cultures, and practices. New York City, Birmingham , Alabama, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, were all home to large and well-developed GOTV campaigns, and together the three illustrate an assortment of organizational and cultural settings in which the campaigns took place. In New York, GOTV activists faced an enormous and diverse population including many thousands of immigrants and a powerful Democratic political machine. In Birmingham, where political participation was the almost exclusive preserve of whites, the campaigns raised tantalizing questions about exactly whose votes organizers hoped to “get out.” In Grand Rapids, a manufacturing center and Michigan’s second largest city, GOTV groups operated within the context of ethnic, racial, and economic diversity and of a Republican-dominated two-party system. In each case study, a variety of sources held the key to understanding the local campaigns: organization records and publications, political party records and publications, large-circulation daily newspapers, and newspapers that served distinct communities in the city. Who did the work of GOTV in each locale, and what form did it take? To what extent did the national campaigns penetrate each city and the diverse communities there? What sort of reception did local GOTV activists receive? Though the national campaigns failed to boost turnout, did intense, local campaigns work? These case studies offer the opportunity to examine the reach and the limits of the GOTV campaigns, and to see how they were shaped by local political leaders, institutions, and practices. “Improve the Electorate by Education”: The GOTV Campaigns in New York City The Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns in New York City were born out of frustration with machine politics. In the 1920s Tammany Hall reigned supreme. Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans by two to one, and the machine succeeded in electing every mayor between 1917, when Tammany reclaimed victory over the Fusion movement backed by John Purroy Mitchell, and 1933, when Republican and City Fusion candidate Fiorello LaGuardia won by running on a platform of reform. Especially after the death in 1924 of boss Charles Francis Murphy, extortion , contract-rigging, protection rackets, and office-selling reached heights that were indecent even by Tammany’s relaxed standards, so much so that scandal would eventually drive Mayor Jimmy Walker, first elected in 1925, from office. Tired of being outvoted by the coalitions of “GOOD FOR AT LEAST 100 VOTES” 111 Irish, Italians, Jews, and workers whose party loyalties kept Tammany in power, the native-born elite whites who dominated the city’s civic and business communities saw GOTV as a way to challenge the machine. Recalling one of the city’s many graft cases, John Hays Hammond of the National Civic Federation in 1926 blamed the sorry state of city politics on the indifference of New York’s “decent” citizens. The frequent scandals , the New York Times reported, “represent the apathy toward law and decency of the majority of American citizens...