The right to vote is the fundamental test of any democracy. However, the machinery of politics through which the vote is organized and exercised can be just as important.
Our new year, 2020, will be an appropriate time to take stock of where we have been historically, and what still remains to be done in connecting voting and democracy. This year, folks celebrating the centennial of the U.S. 19th Amendment, cheer the right to vote for women in 1920.
Like past extensions of the suffrage, it was achieved after a long political and social battle. Another major voting struggle has, so far, received scant attention. We are also noting the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which in 1870 guaranteed the vote to people of color.
In his penetrating study, “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution” (2019) Eric Foner joins the great historian Kenneth Stampp in concluding that neither the 14th or 15th Amendment could have been adopted without the Radical Republican legislation after the Civil War.
Both scholars point out that these amendments were critical for “The Second Reconstruction” of the 1960s when civil rights advanced for people of color. Without leadership by radicals in Congress following the Civil War, the advances of the ’60s would not have had a legal foundation.
Foner writes that the Fifteenth Amendment “affirmed that only a few years after the death of slavery African-Americans were now equal members of the body politic.”
He cites President Grant’s proclamation hailing the amendment as “’a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government …. the most important development that has occurred since the nation came to life.’”
Historians have been slow in recognizing the support of U.S. Grant as president who acted on Lincoln’s goal of moving slaves to freedom and also to voting, using the national government to boost equality for people of color as citizens.
In striking contrast, Andrew Johnson, who preceded Grant (and deserves to be rated America’s worst president), contended: “This is a “white man’s country,” as he opposed both the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Sadly, he was in tune with his racist times when only five of the 22 victorious northern States were willing to grant Negroes the vote when the Civil War ended.
Foner and Stampp show that the fight to vote was led by radical white progressives, and boosted by the best-known man of color in the world, Frederick Douglass.
In his 1965 volume “The Era of Reconstruction” Stampp presented the central view of the fight to vote for “Negroes,” contending that “Radical idealism” was the key for achieving the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
He concludes: “The fact that these amendments could not have been adopted under any other circumstances, or at any other time, before or since, may suggest the crucial importance of the reconstruction era in American history. Indeed, without radical reconstruction, it would be impossible to this day for the federal government to protect Negroes from legal and political discrimination.”
Kenneth Stampp’s point cannot be overstated: he was writing in 1965 and he avers that only radical actions taken 100 years ago put the nation on the path to Lincoln’s celebrated “beacons” of democracy.
Most Americans never learned what another great historian, C. Vann Woodward emphasized in his chapter, “Capitulation to Racism,” about how reconstruction idealism was resisted in the South and abandoned by many Northern leaders. Woodward’s book, THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW, shows early implementation of the 15th Amendment eroded, producing legal segregation from the cradle to the grave.
Like, Stampp, Woodward celebrates the “Second Reconstruction” of the 1960s (based on the 14th and 15th Amendments), but he presents the admonitory view that although Jim Crow was legally dead with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, “his ghost continues to haunt the land.”
The curse of racism in American democracy is addressed by Jill Lepore in many of her writings, especially her recent book, THESE TRUTHS. It is perfectly understandable that advocates for political equality focused on the fight to vote for people of color.
Together with his Roslyn Heights lawyer and friend – Harry H. Wachtel, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. continuously lobbied President Lyndon Johnson to support a voting rights act. King saw voting as the key empowerment that could advance all civil rights and provide vital, continuing participation in the political process.
In recognition of Dr. King’s priority and his deep commitments, would it not be a good idea to move his holiday from a January Monday (not his actual birthday) so that the King celebration becomes our November Election Day?
