Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009)
The introduction of Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic notes that “The creation of a formal political system also clarified what stood outside it” (13). An essay by David Waldstreicher featured in that book collection discusses peoples’ “politicizing strategies” to make up for the limits of political systems. Our common reading for this week brought up points that gave me further insight into my individual reading, Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. This extensive history of voting in the United States from the Revolutionary Era to the present details the multitude of ways that the founders and their political descendants formed government structures that reinforced elite power and excluded those who “stood outside the political system,” in Waldstreicher’s words. The Right to Vote highlights these outsiders’ persistent efforts to gain access to suffrage and participate in a supposedly democratic state. Keyssar criticizes prior works that describe the history of suffrage as progressive and increasingly inclusive. Quite to the contrary, he shows that voting has always been a “contested” right in the United States – to begin with, suffrage was not always even viewed as a right.
Keyssar notes continuities and changes in suffrage for blacks, women, and those without property. He includes a lengthy appendix that describes state suffrage laws from 1775 to 1920. Simply flipping through these pages makes it clear that Keyssar has done his research and has written a compelling synthesis of a very contradictory group of legislation.
One of Keyssar’s most important contributions to the historiography of political involvement is that he refutes teleological accounts and describes the extensive “backsliding and sideslipping” that occurred as voting rights evolved. Reforms in the antebellum period, for example, were not typically intended to expand the nascent industrial working class’ access to suffrage but instead to grant artisans and the middle class more of a stake in the government.
Class is an integral part of Keyssar’s story, as he argues that class tensions served as the greatest obstacle to voting expansion until the 1960s. This argument may seem strange to many readers who rightly recognize the history of suffrage as a story deeply tied to racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant nativism. Keyssar does not discount the importance of race, gender and ethnicity in his book, instead noting that race and ethnicity are typically “determinants of class” (p. xxv). He argues that class structures the periodization of his account, and thus breaks his book into four periods:
1) The pre- and early industrial era from the Revolution to 1850 that witnessed the expansion of voting rights
2) The 1850s to World War I, during which suffrage narrowed. The expansion of voting for blacks during Reconstruction was merely a temporary step forward before more backsliding due to the upper and middle classes’ growing “antagonism to universal suffrage” (p.xxv)
3) The postwar era until the 1950s, when little changed formally in voting laws
4) The period beginning with the civil rights movement that saw the breakdown of voting barriers
In all of these periods, class is prominent because the “integration of the poor and working people into the polity” was always at stake (xxv). Changes in class occurred with each step in the fight for increased suffrage. Moreover, each of these periods must be understood in a context of war, when the (often poor) men who rallied for war efforts then prompted efforts to let those who would die for their country at least cast a vote in the ballot box.
Finally, this book suggests a fifth period in the present, “an era of contestation” where people have broad access to suffrage but still feel more work is to be done. The election of 2000, which coincided with the publication of Keyssar’s book, shows that a large part of the electorate is calling into question our modern voting laws and practices, as well as the Electoral College system. Interestingly enough, Keyssar also notes in his introduction that voting participation is at an all-time low despite unprecedented access to suffrage. The United States has recently waged a multi-front “War on Terror” and is still entangled in Afghanistan in its most lengthy war ever. Since the financial crash of 2008, class struggles are again increasingly visible in the United States too. This book allows us to rethink our prior views of suffrage and can provoke many debates on suffrage in the years to come.