The right to vote : the contested history of democracy in the United States / Alexander Keyssar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keyssar, Alexander.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Suffrage--United States--History.

Suffrage.

Voting--United States--History.

Voting.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 467 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Basic Books, [2000]

Summary:

The Right to Vote is the first comprehensive history of suffrage in the United States to be published in more than eighty years. This path-breaking volume chronicles the surprisingly complex and slow evolution of the right to vote from the American Revolution to the present.

Alexander Keyssar's account highlights the gap between the hallowed image of the United States as the democratic nation and the reality that it took nearly two centuries for universal suffrage to be achieved. The story that he presents is one of both progress toward democratization and of fierce resistance to any expansion of the franchise. It includes lively accounts of those who "won" the right to vote, including women, African Americans, immigrants and industrial workers, while also describing recurrent -- and sometimes successful -- efforts to bar millions of individuals from the polls.

Keyssar analyzes this story in the context of broad currents in American economic, social and political history. In so doing, he explains the ways in which diverse forces -- including war, class tension, socioeconomic changes, racial and ethnic hostilities, ideological shifts and the dynamics of party competition -- shaped the expansion and contraction of voting rights over the last two hundred years. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of major chapters of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.

Contents:

Part I The Road to Partial Democracy 1

1 In the Beginning 3

The Received Legacy 5

The Revolution and the Vote 8

The States and the Nation 21

2 Democracy Ascendant 26

The Course of Things 27

Sources of Expansion 33

Ideas and Arguments 42

3 Backsliding and Sideslipping 53

Women, African Americans, and Native Americans 54

Paupers, Felons, and Migrants 61

Registration and Immigration 65

Democracy, the Working Class, and American Exceptionalism 67

A Case in Point: The War in Rhode Island 71

Part II Narrowing the Portals 77

4 Know-Nothings, Radicals, and Redeemers 81

Immigrants and Know-Nothings 82

Race, War, and Reconstruction 87

The Strange Odyssey of the Fifteenth Amendment 93

The Lesser Effects of War 104

The South Redeemed 105

5 The Redemption of the North 117

Losing Faith 119

Purifying the Electorate 127

Two Special Cases 162

Sovereignty and Self-Rule 166

The New Electoral Universe 168

6 Women's Suffrage 172

From Seneca Falls to the Fifteenth Amendment 173

Citizenship and Texes 180

Regrouping 183

Doldrums and Democracy 196

A Mass Movement 202

The Nineteenth Amendment 211

Aftermath 218

Part III Toward Universal Suffrage

and Beyond 223

7 The Quiet Years 225

Stasis and Its Sources 226

Franklin Roosevelt and the Death of Blackstone 237

War and Race 244

"Our Oldest National Minority," 253

8 Breaking Barriers 256

Race and the Second Reconstruction 257

Universal Suffrage 268

The Value of the Vote 284

Two Uneasy Pieces 302

Getting the Electorate to the Polls 311

Conclusion: The Project of Democracy 316

Appendix State Suffrage Laws 325.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [403]-452) and index.

ISBN:

046502968X

OCLC:

44045685