The Right To Vote: The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States [Hardcover]

Alexander Keyssar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 2000

Most Americans take for granted their right to vote, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But the history of suffrage in the U.S. is, in fact,the story of a struggle to achieve this right by our society's marginalized groups. In The Right to Vote, Duke historian Alexander Keyssar explores the evolution of suffrage over the course of the nation's history. Examining the many features of the history of the right to vote in the U.S.—class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and age—the book explores the conditions under which American democracy has expanded and contracted over the years.Keyssar presents convincing evidence that the history of the right to vote has not been one of a steady history of expansion and increasing inclusion, noting that voting rights contracted substantially in the U.S. between 1850 and 1920. Keyssar also presents a controversial thesis: that the primary factor promoting the expansion of the suffrage has been war and the primary factors promoting contraction or delaying expansion have been class tension and class conflict.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

HAmerica's self-image as the land of democracy flows from the belief that we've long enjoyed universal suffrageDor at least aspired to it. Duke historian Keyssar (Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts) convincingly shows that, though distinctive in some ways, the evolution of the franchise in America is similar to that in other countries: highly contested, with retreats as well as advances, containing within it the sharp reflections of larger struggles for power. America's basic claim to exceptionalismDearly white manhood suffrageDwas, according to Keyssar, part historical accident and part mistake, adopted before a European-style urban working class emerged. Keyssar identifies four periods: one of expansion from the Constitution's signing to around 1850; a period of contraction lasting until around WWI, in which the upper and middle classes demonstrated hostility to universal suffrage; a period of mixed, minor adjustments lasting till the 1960s, when the fourth period beganDthe civil rights movementDwhich inaugurated the removal of most of the remaining barriers. Various historical dynamics, such as economic development, immigration and class relations, underlie this periodization, expressed, Keyssar says, in shifting ideologies: voting as a right versus voting as a privilege or trust, while lack of financial independence was repeatedly used to justify excluding whole categories of voters. These large background shifts outline the tortured ebb and flow of suffrage: the post-Civil War enfranchisement of blacks and its rollback, the 70-year struggle for women's suffrage, the restoration of black voting rights in the 1960s. This is a masterful historical account of a complex, contradictory legacy.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

" . . .a useful corrective to somuch of the nonsense written about this important subject." -- Dallas Morning News [10/22/00]

". . . a masterful account of America's rocky progress toward realizing universal suffrage.. . . An enormously illuminating book!" -- Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, authors of Why Americans Still Don't Vote

". . . a wonderful new book . . ." -- -Richard Reeves, Tulsa World [11/23/00]

". . . easily the wisest and most comprehensive study of who was and is allowed to cast a ballot. . ." -- --Los Angeles Times Book Review [11/26/00]

"A superb retelling of the history of the right to vote. . .instructive to anyone concerned with the fate of democracy." -- Nancy F. Cott, Woodward Professor of History and American Studies at Yale

"In the wake of, arguably the most controversial election in American history, one may do well to pick up. . .[this] book. . ." -- New York Law Journal [12/22/00]

"Keyssar's bold and coercively argued revisionist history of the franchise will be of great value to students of democratization everywhere." -- James C. Scott, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University

"This is a masterful historical account of a complex, contradictory legacy." -- Publishers Weekly [Starred Review]

"This magisterial work is of great importance to anyone who wants to understand American politics." -- Benjamin I. Page, Professor

"Until now no one has ever studied, in all its detail, the full history of voting rights in the United States." -- American Prospect [1/5/01]

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First edition. edition (August 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 046502968X
• ISBN-13: 978-0465029686
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A useful study, October 18, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Right To Vote: The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States (Hardcover)

This is a book that will make you angry. If you are a conservative, this book should make you feel very guilty. It is important to begin with that this book is a detour from Keyssar's larger project, which was supposed to be a history of the American working class' electoral participation. After struggling with the work for several years he realized that he needed to publish a whole book explaining what the right to vote actually was in American history. The result is a history of the slow and uneven path to universal suffrage in American history. We learn about the existence of the vote before 1776, the improvement that occured with the revolution, and the larger improvement that occured with the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian period in which the large majority of white men were able to vote. At the same time we learn of efforts to counter the expanding suffrage, such as disfranchisement of free blacks all over the country before 1861, attacks on the voting rights of paupers, felons, migrants and aliens, as well as the disfranchisment in the early 1800s of the limited voting rights women had in the early 1800s. Keyssar then goes on to discuss the narrowing of the portals from the 1860s to the 1920s, periods ironically bounded by giving the vote to blacks in the 1870s and to women by the 1920s. But in between that period nearly all blacks and many whites were disenfranchised in the south, while literacy, residence, nationality and registration systems sought to limit the vote in the North (while "asiatics" were barred in the west). The book concludes with the successful passage of the Voting Rights Act and the twenty-sixth amendment, but also with low turnout, an extremely narrow political spectrum, and government structures which limit political participation and reinforce conservative values.

Much of this will not be new to historians, though never before has there been such detail and the twenty appendixes provided at the back will be invaluable for future reference. Sometimes Keyssar gives a qualititative estimate of how many Americans could vote (he suggests that perhaps 60% of white Americans could vote before 1776, a figure much lower than the 80-90% posited by more Panglossian historians). And there are many interesting details, such as the New York plan where registration was supposed to take place on Yom Kippur, conventiently leaving out many Jews. But otherwise the full results have been reserved for his upcoming work. This weakens his criticisms of American exceptionalism, since without a clear understanding of how much the vote declined in the North, we cannot see how fully the ponderous elitism of Parkman and Godkin were like the undemocratic aspects of German or Italian or even British liberalism. I am also do not agree with his description of slaves as a "peasantry." This implies that the majority of white farmers who were not slaveholders were a) not peasants and b) were otherwise indistinguishable on a class basis from the slaveholders. Recent southern agrarian history makes this assumption quite questionable. It is true that Americans were unenthusiatic as Europeans about the rise of the proletariat and rural subaltern classes, but it is insufficient to say that mass suffrage only occured because such classes were a small proportion of the population. They were also a small proportion of the population in France in 1848 and 1851 when universal male suffrage was declared, which did not prevent a greater degree of struggle over the question in that country. Enfranchising the majority of any population would raise serious issues of class domination and control regardless of the class structure. Nevertheless this is still a useful study, and reading the petty, racist, misogynist, self-serving and self-satisfied arguments against the suffrage will be a depressing experience. To think that such injustices could be continued for two centuries thanks to the endless cant of "state's rights" long after the republican content of that slogan had drained away will infuriate you.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It hasn't been done before, November 24, 2000

By 

Wendy Royalty (Silver Spring, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Right To Vote: The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States (Hardcover)

This book has helped me trendously with my masters thesis. It drew me in to American History like few books have. Keysaar does a brilliant job of helping us to imagine what it was to be alive during the infancy of our country. Perfect reading during the current "crisis" with the presidential election.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Important, Honest Look at Varieties of Democracy, July 17, 2002

By 

Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Paperback)

The Right to Vote (The Contested History of Democracy in the United States) by Alexander Keyssar is, first of all, marvelous for not being a triumphalist look at the march towards a perfect democracy. The book is, rather, a honest examination of the ups and downs in the struggle towards a concept of universal suffrage. The anti-democratic forces won many victories during the course of this history and continue to have an effect on today's political and judicial decisions. This book is a little daunting at first as it is quite thorough in its research and presentation (beginning with property qualifications in all of the first states) and is not about the fiery personalities involved in these two centuries of thrust and parry. The book grows more fascinating as the narrow focus (right to vote) spreads into its own mosiac representing all of America and its beliefs on a fundamental level. An important and readable study.