| Suffrage -- United States -- History. |
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Summary
Summary
The New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Impeachment shows that gerrymandering and voter suppression have a long history.
"Lichtman's important book...uses history to contextualize the fix we're in today. Each party gropes for advantage by fiddling with the franchise... Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change. With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame."-- New York Times Book Review
Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. Yet the world's oldest continuously operating democracy guarantees no one, not even its citizens, the right to elect its leaders.
For most of U.S. history, suffrage has been a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Economic qualifications were finally eliminated in the nineteenth century, but the ideal of a white man's republic persisted long after that. Today, voter identification laws, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of American citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box.
An award-winning historian who has testified in more than ninety voting rights cases, Allan Lichtman gives us the deep history behind today's headlines and shows that calls of voter fraud, political gerrymandering and outrageous attempts at voter suppression are nothing new. The players and the tactics have changed--we don't outright ban people from voting anymore--but the battle and the stakes remain just as high.
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
A noted authority on the history of American voting returns with a disturbing account of American political leaders who have, since the beginning of the republic, worked to limit the franchise.Lichtman (History/American Univ.; The Case for Impeachment, 2017, etc.), a winner of the National Jewish Book Award, does not conceal his political preferences throughout this sturdy account; it's abundantly clear that he is unhappy with both Donald Trump and the current GOP. Nonetheless, he marches us through the dark history of voter limitation, from the Founders to now, and the images he paints are not flattering. The Constitution itself is vague about voting rightsby design, since white male property owners had limited trust in others who did not meet their club requirementsand as Lichtman escorts us through the decades, we see an ugly pattern: people in power doing everything they can to remain soand limiting suffrage has always been a favorite tactic. The author examines a wide variety of discrimination: by race, gender, place of origin (immigrants, as he reminds us, have rarely been welcome here). He spends a lot of time exploring the denial and suppression of the African-American vote, and he notes how such efforts have succeeded and how they continue to dampen voter turnout. His text is rich, occasionally dense, with examples. Legal challenges and court decisions, statehouse maneuvers, legislative misbehaviorall combine to leave readers with a dim view of the history of voting rights in this country. The author also explores the issue of "voter fraud" that many (who wish to limit voting rights) have long raised. As Lichtman reveals, repeated studies have found virtually no evidence of it: a tiny fraction of a single percent. At the end he offers some suggestions for renewal, including easier voter registration, a holiday for national elections, and so on.An alarming, important, perhaps even essential book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
PROTESTERS MARCHED THROUGH Marion, Ala., on a winter night in 1965. Suddenly, the streetlights went dark and troopers charged into the crowd, beating them with clubs and blinding them with flashlights. Jimmie Lee Jackson fled with his mother and grandfather into Mack's Café, where the police chased after them, threw him against a cigarette machine and fatally shot him in the stomach - one more victim in the battle for the right to vote in America. Fast-forward 35 years to the Bush-Gore debacle of 2000. Republican election officials in Florida quietly dumped 180,000 ballots, casting aside one in 10 AfricanAmerican votes, often for minor irregularities. Republicans on the Supreme Court invoked two centuries of jurisprudence when they stopped a recount: "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the president of the United States." Allan J. Lichtman's important book emphasizes the founders' great blunder: They failed to enshrine a right to vote in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Instead, the Constitution handed control over elections to state and local governments. Local officials developed thousands of different electoral systems with no uniform standards or regulations and little oversight. Elections were organized and supervised by partisans brazenly angling for advantage. "The Embattled Vote in America" traces the consequences through American history. Reforms, when they came, often provoked a backlash. For example, in 1870 the 15th Amendment barred states from abridging the vote on account of race. A stronger version would have finally affirmed voting rights and prohibited restrictions like poll taxes or literacy tests. This version fell short in Congress because Northerners wanted to bar Irish voters and Westerners to ban Chinese-Americans. Even the weaker version of the amendment helped incite a reign of terror in the South and its loopholes eventually enabled the restoration of white supremacy. Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, uses history to contextualize the fix we're in today. Each party gropes for advantage by fiddling with the franchise. In blue states Democrats simplify voting; in red states Republicans suppress it with a long inventory of machinations: purge the rolls, convolute registration procedures, disenfranchise felons and cut back polling times and places. Small wonder turnout is so low. In 2014,140 million people did not vote (the elections had the lowest turnout since 1942); in 2016, just 25 percent of American adults voted Donald Trump into the Oval Office. What next? Lichtman ticks through the vital reforms. Abolish the Electoral College, automatically register voters, establish national election standards, draw less partisan voting districts, resist foreign interference and so on. Lichtman sounds dispirited about his own proposals. The odds on passing any are long - and growing longer as the Supreme Court heads rightward. In fact, real democracy would probably require even stronger medicine. Limit the court's power to unilaterally strike down laws (as Abraham Lincoln suggested in his first Inaugural Address); break the iron grip of the two parties by introducing proportional representation for congressional elections (any state could try). Just beyond the scope of Lichtman's book hovers the great question of our time. Why has partisan conflict grown so fierce? One answer lurks implicit in the history. The parties have never combined racial and nativist tensions the way they do today. White men crowd into the Republican Party, immigrants and African-Americans into the Democratic. Today's parties aggregate and amplify the old tribal antagonisms. Expect the declining white majority to do what endangered partisans have always done: block the ballot box. Lichtman ends with a little flicker of hope. Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change. With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame.
Choice Review
Lichtman's two careers--as scholarly historian and political activist--are on abundant display in this analysis of voting controversies in American history. The first 180 pages of the work contain a well-written, thoroughly documented history of battles over the franchise from America's founding through passage and implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By consigning important decisions over the franchise to the states, the Constitution produced a regime with "idiosyncratic decision-making" by state governments. This arrangement has never fully ensured a democratic equality for all citizens in elections. Lichtman (American Univ.) ably summarizes the history of racial and gender discrimination in voting. He explains the battle over the "prolix" 14th amendment, the irony of electorate-shrinking progressive reforms, and the battle over voting rights in the 1960s. In the book's final two chapters and conclusion, the partisan Lichtman is on full display, castigating Bush, Trump, and Republicans for a variety of exclusionary tactics. He concludes by advocating many reforms to expand voter registration, curtail gerrymandering, and boost turnout. The first section of the book will appeal to a broader audience than will the second. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Steven E M Schier, emeritus, Carleton College
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Introduction: Voters and Nonvoters | p. 1 |
| 1 The Founding Fathers' Mistake | p. 8 |
| 2 A White Man's Republic | p. 36 |
| 3 Constructing and Deconstructing the Vote | p. 70 |
| 4 Votes for Women | p. 99 |
| 5 The Absent Voter | p. 128 |
| 6 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 | p. 147 |
| 7 The New Wars over the Vote | p. 180 |
| 8 Reforming American Voting | p. 231 |
| Conclusion: The Embattled Vote | p. 252 |
| Notes | p. 259 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 303 |
| Index | p. 305 |