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Alexander Keyssar is a professor of history and public policy at Duke University. He has written widely about American history and contemporary affairs for numerous popular and academic publications. He is the author of Out of Work:The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), which won three scholarly prizes and was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.His most recent book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2000) has received much attention and is reviewed by Tim Stafford in the current issue of Books & Culture. In October, Books & Culture editor John Wilson and Eastern Nazarene College historian Donald Yerxa attended a lecture at Boston University hosted by the New England chapter of The Historical Society during which Professor Keyssar presented his thesis on the contested history of American democracy. Yerxa reached Keyssar at his Duke University office and conducted the following telephone interview for B&C on Monday afternoon, November 13th.

Before we get to matters related to election 2000, I'd like to have you speak to the argument of your recent book, The Right to Vote. First, what is the standard narrative of the history of suffrage in America?

It is a narrative of steady and irresistible expansion of the franchise. It is a story of continuous progress. At the nation's founding, the franchise was sharply restricted, but thereafter one group of citizens after another acquired the right to vote. First property requirements were eliminated; then tax-paying requirements; then African-Americans were enfranchised; then women were enfranchised; then African-Americans again; and finally 18-year-olds.

How do you challenge that narrative in your book?

I challenge it in two ways, in some sense micro and macro. There were numerous instances in American history of specific rollbacks of the franchise, of specific groups who were enfranchised losing the right to vote. One somewhat anomalous but very interesting case was that of women in New Jersey, who had the right to vote until 1807, and then they lost it. Many Africans in Northern states in the first half of the nineteenth century were enfranchised and then lost the right to vote. In macro terms, I argue that the entire period from the 1850s to World War I or shortly thereafter was a period in which the dominant trend was toward contraction of the suffrage rather than expansion.

You stress two factors that shaped the trajectory of suffrage in America: war and class tension. Could you explain that a bit?

What I discovered was that war seems to be the primary factor that contributes to the expansion of suffrage. That is not to say that there are no other factors; it is multi-causal. But every major expansion of the right to vote in American history occurred during or just after a war. Leaders and elites usually like to have armies drawn from the lower orders, and it was difficult to recruit an army that was disfranchised.

There were also powerful rhetorical claims after a war or at the tail end of a war on the part of people who had performed service that they thought had earned them the right to vote. We see this with men who were unpropertied during the Revolution and the War of 1812. It affected the enfranchisement of blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. The dynamic of war in its own particular way affected the timing of the enfranchisement of women just after World War I.

And we see it also in World War II and the Cold War, but there were some different dynamics there, with the Cold War in particular. The Cold War played a role in black enfranchisement in the South. And were it not for the Vietnam War, as I say in the book, the voting age might still be twenty-one.

On the other side, among the many factors that have led to periodic contractions of suffrage or the retarding of progress, it appears to me that class tension is the primary one. The distinction between men who owned property and those who did not was critical at the outset. And I think that a reluctance on the part of the upper and upper middle classes to enfranchise an industrial working class or a quasi-peasantry was central to the dynamics of the history of suffrage.

Is that functionally the same case now? We have virtual universal suffrage, but we don't have full participation in the democratic process.

There is a remarkable and I think non-coincidental link here, in that we not only do not have full participation, but participation is class-skewed. Turnout for elections correlates very closely with income and education. The first data that I have seen from this past election suggest that this pattern continues, and I think that is not a coincidence.

To what extent does your analysis of the right to vote in America support or call into question the notion of American exceptionalism?

It calls it into question in very serious ways. One of the key ingredients in notions of American exceptionalism is the claim that the American working class—unlike the working class anywhere else or everywhere else—was enfranchised early and more or less without a struggle. I argue in The Right to Vote that simply as a fact American exceptionalism isn't true. The particular dynamics of U.S. history are such that the property requirements for suffrage were dropped before industrialization had proceeded very far and before there was much of a working class. And then in the aftermath of industrialization what happened was a movement to roll back the suffrage.

If we look at the history in that light, what that then reveals is that many of the same dynamics and conflicts over suffrage that were visible in Europe were also visible in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They didn't take exactly the same political form, but the same dynamics were present. In the United States as in Europe, there were persistent political fights over the breadth of the franchise.

Is it a mistake to equate universal suffrage with democracy?

Universal suffrage is a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy. Certainly, one cannot speak of a meaningful democracy without universal suffrage. But universal suffrage cannot make a democracy on its own. There was universal suffrage of a sort in the former Soviet Union, and we would not describe that as a democracy.

You indicate in your conclusion that while the right to vote is now nearly universal, the United States is far from being a vibrant democracy. What are the obstacles that stand in the way of a vibrant American democracy?

Increasingly visible in this past election is the immense power of people and organizations that can write large checks. I think that the power of money is a counterweight to the political power of universal suffrage, and that has become particularly clear in the context of a set of political institutions and electoral rules that make it extremely hard for dissident candidates and diverse parties to get on the ballot. What we have really is a fairly narrow political culture supported by large amounts of money and political institutions that try to keep things as narrow as possible.

In your opinion, was the project of democracy well served in last week's election?

I want to say that we don't know yet. Certainly up through 10 o'clock last Tuesday night, I would say the project of democracy was not particularly well served, because I think what we had was a somewhat deadening election with major issues unaddressed and with an overemphasis on what I call "focus group politics" (candidates trying to identify likely voters and trying to find some formulation that would speak to the needs of those likely voters while ignoring everybody else). There was very little besides Nader's campaign that attempted to galvanize people or even engage them.

The strange aftermath of the election—I'm not sure we can talk about the election as being in the past tense yet—over the last week may have some interesting consequences. Many people have spoken of the potential of the close election to lead to increasing turnout, and that could serve the project of democracy. But I also think that what is happening is focusing attention on a lot of the more peculiar wrinkles and limitations in our political procedures. The upshot of all the litigation and everything else that is going on could turn out to be increased cynicism, but it could perhaps spur various kinds of reform movements to change a number of these procedures in a way that, I think, would serve the project of democracy.

Gore campaign manager William Daley used the phrase "democracy fulfilled" in one of his post-election press conferences. What would "democracy fulfilled" look like for you?

"Democracy fulfilled" for me would include such things as very large voter turnout, an animated electorate, debates over lots of different issues, and many different voices joining in the debate. Linking this question to your last question, I have had one concern this past week as we have seen how the electoral procedures have somewhat broken down. What would have happened if we'd had an 80 percent turnout? We'd all still be in line, and probably the machines would have broken in half the country!

One of the ways that dissident voices get a hearing is with the proliferation of political parties. Are you at all optimistic that Nader's efforts will lead to a growth of third parties?

That may be one way in which the project of democracy was ill-served in this election. I supported Nader's efforts to open things up and to add a new voice. It was a positive development, but the particular way in which this election has turned out may really set back the cause of third parties in some significant way—at least third parties as a national phenomenon. Certainly, the line that will be used much more powerfully in future elections is that "you will throw the election to the other guy." That is going to be harder for third parties to overcome, and I don't know whether they will be able to, at least not in the short run of the next ten years or so.

Practically speaking, then, is the effort to achieve a vibrant democracy in terms of opening up the process essentially a function of reforming the existing two major parties?

I don't know. I am not sure how that is going to play out. There is still the much publicized example of Jesse Ventura. He had something very powerful to say—less about his positions than about procedures. He was at 8 percent in the polls before they let him into the debates, and same-day registration permitted a lot of Minnesota voters to go to the polls at the last minute. So there might still be something coming from third parties. I don't know. Whether or not there will be much happening with third parties will depend upon what the outcome is in this election.

Your thoughts on campaign financing?

There just has to be campaign finance reform. In many ways the general election this year appeared to a lot of people as an opportunity to participate in a ratification of candidates that were already pre-selected by the fund-raising contest. That was certainly what the primaries looked like in many respects. Governor Bush, who three years ago nobody was talking about as a presidential candidate, really came forward by having raised an enormous amount of money before a single vote was cast. I think that what is going on with campaign finance is really deforming elections and should be changed. I am not altogether optimistic that it will be.

There has been much discussion about the use and misuse of polling data, particularly exit polls. What are your thoughts on this?

I have two thoughts about which I have not seen much in the press. First is the notable fact that the polls were largely wrong in terms of gauging "the outcome." I didn't see a poll in the last few weeks of the election which saw Gore ahead in the popular vote. So there is clearly something wrong there.

Second, while many people have discussed the whole matter of the news media, in the interest of profits, publishing data that might influence the election, the polling issue that concerns me most, as I've already suggested, is the notion of focus-group politics. The practice of politics in the United States has become the practice of candidates and parties using sophisticated poll techniques to focus on likely voters and to find out who and what they want to hear. This has now pulled into a very pernicious circle, because the pollsters are identifying who the likely voters are.

It is very interesting; those identifications are made largely based on socio-economic characteristics and whether people voted in the previous election. If you are identified as an unlikely voter, your concerns are pretty much ignored when these consulting firms go back to the parties and candidates about what they should say. The result is that the candidates address only likely voters; they are not addressing the concerns of people who are considered unlikely voters. Thus those people remain "unlikely" or perhaps become even "more unlikely." So we are in a cycle where the practice of politics is predicated on the non-participation of certain large groups of people. And it helps to ensure that they remain outside of politics.

Stanford University Pulitzer Prize-winning political historian Jack Rakove has written a piece in which he states that "if we were starting over with the Constitution, the Electoral College is the first thing we would scrap, even without the evidence of this year's election to help us." Do you agree?

Yes, absolutely!

So it is essentially an anti-democratic institution?

It is an anti-democratic anachronism that has virtually no justification in the modern world.

In Massachusetts, a ballot question passed to prohibit persons who are incarcerated in a correctional facility due to a felony conviction from voting in certain state elections. That obviously provides further ammunition for your overall thesis. Do you agree with the will of the people so expressed?

This is a question that really does interest me. I expected that the proposal to disfranchise incarcerated felons in Massachusetts would pass. I think this was very unfortunate. In a certain way, it was a politically unsatisfying piece of evidence supporting my argument that the vote is often rolled back. It does happen.

The rationale for disfranchising felons is so flawed and so thin. In the nineteenth century, these laws were passed first as part of the criminal codes. They were seen as a kind of punishment. By the late nineteenth century, it was clear to many people that it made no sense as punishment. It didn't fulfill any of the normal objectives of punishment. It wasn't a form of retribution; it didn't deter crimes. People do not say: "I'm not going to hold up a gas station because I'm not going to be able to vote." It didn't rehabilitate anyone. The argument then shifted to a bizarre notion that it was necessary to protect the "purity of the ballot box." This was based on the rather dubious assumption that somehow people who had committed other crimes might be more likely to commit electoral fraud.

By the 1960s and early 1970s, most courts and many people involved in this had begun to think that the whole thing was groundless. In fact, a number of states were in the process of getting rid of such provisions, and perhaps many more would have had it not been for a U. S. Supreme Court decision in the early 1970s that overturned a California Supreme Court decision to get rid of California's law disfranchising convicted felons. And the grounds on which these laws were upheld were that the Constitution expressly permitted felon disfranchisement in a clause of the 14th Amendment which tacitly allowed states to disfranchise people "convicted of rebellion and other crimes."

This was passed in 1868 right after the Civil War, and most people, including myself, think that this was aimed at Confederate rebels. It was not aimed at somebody who stole a car. But based on that phrasing, the Supreme Court in an opinion written by Justice Rehnquist upheld these laws. So I think the rationale is terribly flimsy.

Right now it is producing a remarkable racial skew. Particularly in those states where the disfranchisement is permanent, it is affecting a large number of people. The latest figure I saw was that 4.5 million people had been disfranchised because of this.

You conclude the book with a reflection on democracy as a project rather than as a condition or fixed set of rules and institutions. In the light of election 2000, what is the future of the project of American democracy?

I think many people understand that there is a lot of work that has to be done to transform laws and change things to make this a more vibrant democracy. We can't be passive about this. There is very significant popular support out there for reforms that will open things up and encourage a richer and more diverse political dialogue. And I think that a lot of us are going to have to work on that. It's notable that my book was used as a backdrop to former Secretary of State James Baker's interview last weekend on Meet the Press, with the title _The Right to Vote_ showing very clearly. I am happy to get the publicity for the book, but it will be very unfortunate if the dominant impression of the people as a result of this post-election procedure is a rousing invocation of "the right to vote," which—because it isn't tied to genuine reform—is disingenuous and aimed largely for partisan gain.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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