Jon Grinspan

Really interesting book about how massive public participation in the post-Civil War era was linked with inequality, corruption, and other problems, and how political reformers chose reforms that both decreased corruption and suppressed participation among poor and nonwhite voters. I can’t do better than Grinspan’s introductory summary:
An incredible transformation of American politics took place around 1900, reconfiguring a public, partisan, passionate system into a more private, independent, restrained one. It took a terrible bargain. The well-to-do victors of the Gilded Age’s class wars chose to trade participation for civility. They restrained the old system, decreasing violence and partisanship, but diminishing public engagement along with it. Turnout crashed, falling by nearly one-third in the early twentieth century, especially among the working class, immigrants, young people, and African Americans.Grinspan doesn’t make causal claims about what might have been possible instead, but he does suggest that participation and violence might be linked in the American tradition, which is very worrisome for today. E.g., “[t]here was, by one account, gunfire at every Philadelphia election between 1870 and 1900.” Tattooed thugs showed up at the Pennsylvania statehouse, “arms menacingly folded across their chests, exposing their number 27 tattoos, standing as silent threats to any Pennsylvania Democrats who might vote wrong.”In response to the disruptions of the 19th century, he suggests, “[s]ome sought protection in political parties. Others looked for easy scapegoats, blaming corrupt politicians or Black Reconstruction. They created a cycle of rage, a self-perpetuating bad mood that simultaneously pushed citizens farther into partisanship while undermining their faith in democracy.” Parties offered the only apparent refuge from “an age of ruthless individualism”; with political parties the only source of a sense of community, Americans “abandoned the political fluidity that proponents of pure democracy had hoped the war might bring.”

The loss of Black political rights post-Reconstruction was part of a larger battle over democracy: whether participation was actually desirable. Class conflict made more wealthy and middle-class whites answer “no.” Reconstruction wasn’t destroyed by an elite bargain; it was “killed by political violence in the South and by the millions of White voters nationwide who gave up on it.” The larger context was one in which government seemed to stop working while also being the focus of attention.

Reformist politics tried to reduce the temperature of politics, but in exclusionary ways. For example, focusing politics on the written word instead of rallies “made politics less accessible to those who were illiterate, non-English speakers, or simply reluctant to study the issues closely,” and also shifted power to people who could deal with printers, more often professional politicians in big cities. Campaign materials shifted from torches, uniforms and hats—participatory tools that made the bodies of supporters themselves into the campaign—to signs and pins showing candidates’ faces, focusing attention on the executive instead of the people. “By beginning the switch from participatory objects to consumable trinkets, the 1896 election further increased campaigns’ reliance on money.” The increased costs of running a campaign reliant on literature decreased voluntary participation in rallies etc., which had previously been rewarded with patronage jobs. The secret ballot with candidate lists provided by the government, instead of preprinted ballots handed out by the parties for party-line votes, were also harder for illiterate and immigrant voters to use, by design.

Torn between the corruption of machine politicians and the condescension of reformers, millions of Americans chose corruption, then as now, “not because they were fools, but because they got something material or psychological from their participation.” This diagnosis by muckrackers made clear to reformers that it was the masses who needed to change, not just the politicians. Prohibition was part of it: closing saloons closed places where working-class men had organized politically and enjoyed the vibrant, violent process of politics. “Rather than a newly mobilized anti-alcohol vote, what was really happening was the suppression of the votes of saloon supporters.”

The collapse in participation from the resulting reforms was huge. In Mississippi, for example, the number of registered African American voters fell from 147,000 to 9,000 after a new state constitution. Presidential election turnout crashed from 79.3% of eligible voters in 1896 to 48.8% in 1924. Turnout “fell twice as much in states that introduced secret ballots which required voters to select individual candidates, rather than voting a straight party ticket.” Southern turnout dropped by half after 1900. “Just 17.5 percent of eligible South Carolinians voted in 1916. In the 1920 election, Jones County, Georgia, registered the lowest turnout in any U.S. county: 2.8 percent.” Nationwide, poor and immigrant voters disappeared, and “young first-time voters stopped turning out in high numbers to cast their ‘virgin votes.’” Indeed, even children of immigrants stopped voting: “in 1916, just one in five New Jerseyites with foreign-born parents voted.”

Instead of politics, many people turned to religious or other social organizations to find meaning and change. In these very same years, many major civic institutions were founded, including the Rotary Club (1905), the National Audubon Society (1905), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts (1910, 1912), Kiwanis Clubs (1915), the American Civil Liberties Union (1920), and the revived KKK (1915).

Even women’s suffrage was part of these reforms:
For decades women’s suffrage activists had to counter claims that women voting would ruin the hypermasculine culture of election day. But in a new political world where the well-to-do were looking for ways to extinguish that old political culture, “doubling the respectable vote” became one of its greatest selling points. The irony of women’s suffrage was that the movement finally won the right to vote at the precise moment in American history when voting was coming to matter less.
All of this seems pretty awful, but Grinspan takes pains to remind us of one thing: “Americans became less likely to hurt each other over electoral politics.” Can we get participation back without the associated violence? It’s hard to be optimistic.… (altro)