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The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, by Alexander Keyssar, Basic Books, 467 pp.; $30
The history of suffrage in the United States is a strange tale, in which two anomalies stand out. The first is that for much of its history the most democratic nation in the world, a nation whose charter document begins with the words, "We the people … ," gave the vote only to a small minority of its citizens. The vote was largely kept from women, immigrants, people who moved, people who did not own property, people who could not read and write, people who did not speak English, Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asians, poor people who required government aid, criminals, and young people.
These restrictions were not a fault in our democracy, according to most of its leaders, but a positive virtue. They considered voting a privilege, not a right, and thought it should be given only to those who were (by their lights) best qualified to adjudicate difficult decisions. Thus, for example, one reason only property holders could vote in most of Colonial America was that they were theoretically independent of influence. A factory worker or a tenant farmer might be controlled by someone else.
The second anomaly is that the right to vote, struggled over during the entire history of the United States, turns out to be less precious than one might suppose, once granted. Immigrants, poor people, non-English speakers, African Americans, Native Americans—the very groups once excluded—have the lowest voter turnout. Our time of universal suffrage shows the lowest level of voting participation in all American history. Hence a terribly undemocratic thought comes to mind: What was all the fuss about?
Alexander Keyssar has produced an admirably restrained, thorough, and thoughtful account of American suffrage. There are few surprises and no blinding revelations, but Keyssar writes well and shows an excellent grasp of a very wide subject range. It would be easier and probably more striking to write of any one of the groups whose struggle to win the vote he patiently chronicles, but Keyssar's wider view makes us think of more fundamental questions, such as What is America? and What is Democracy?
Keyssar points out that very often undemocratic forces worked to widen voting rights—most notably, war. Very rarely (if ever) did American voters decide that democratic principles would be best served by giving the vote to people on the other side of the tracks. Many voices urged them to think that way, but rarely was the majority convinced. Rather, some set of events brought voters to realize that the nation's welfare demanded that these "others" be included, for reasons that were not particularly democratic. War did this most obviously, because it required a maximum effort of the whole country. And how could you get Johnny to fight for a government that gave him no say?
The case of women is particularly instructive. Looking back, it seems in comprehensible that they could be denied the vote for the first 140 years of our history. Surely no one who read the novels of Jane Austen could believe that women lacked the sense to adjudicate complex claims. Nor did women suffer from the kind of ignorant prejudice extended to people of other races or languages. Every single voter claimed intimate contact with at least one woman, and most with several! And yet, though leaders as intelligent, forceful, and attractive as Elizabeth Cady Stanton were well known to the public for over 50 years, offering cogent arguments for woman suffrage, they made almost no progress. Groups as generally despised as African Americans were given the vote, but the proportion of the electorate favoring woman suffrage remained pathetic. Only a few states in the far, unpopulated West gave women the vote before the twentieth century. Surely this says loud and clear how little claim democratic principles had on the mind of American voters!
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