The current assault on voting is a backlash, in part, to the greater access that marked the 2020 presidential election. More mail-in and greater early voting helped push turnout to modern highs. In the same way, the turn against universal manhood suffrage came after its expansion in the wake of the Civil War.
A growing number of voters were foreign-born, the result of mass immigration and the rapid growth of an immigrant working class in the industrial centers of the North. Between 1865 and World War I, wrote the historian Alexander Keyssar in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, nearly 25 million immigrants journeyed to the United States, accounting for a large proportion of the nations World War I population of roughly 100 million.
A vast majority arrived without property or the means to acquire it. Some were the Irish and Germans of previous waves of immigration, but many more were Eastern and Southern Europeans, with alien languages, exotic customs and unfamiliar faiths.
By 1910, noted Keyssar, most urban residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the nations huge working class was predominantly foreign-born, native-born of foreign parents or Black.
To Americans of older stock, this was a disaster in waiting. And it fueled among them a backlash to the democratic expansion that followed the Civil War.
A New England village of the olden time that is to say, of some 40 years ago would have been safely and well governed by the votes of every man in it, Francis Parkman, a prominent historian and a member in good standing of the Boston elite, wrote in an 1878 essay called The Failure of Universal Suffrage.
Parkman went on:
but, now that the village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder, to whom the public good is nothing and their own most trivial interests everything, who love the country for what they can get out of it and whose ears are open to the promptings of every rascally agitator, the case is completely changed, and universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing.
In The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, the historian J. Morgan Kousser took note of William L. Scruggs, a turn-of-the-century scholar and diplomat who gave a similarly colorful assessment of universal suffrage in an 1884 article, Restriction of the Suffrage:
The idea of unqualified or tramp suffrage, like communism, with which it is closely allied, seems to be of modern origin; and, like that and kindred isms, it usually finds advocates and apologists in the ranks of the discontented, improvident, ignorant, vicious, depraved and dangerous classes of society. It is not indigenous to the soil of the United States. It originated in the slums of European cities, and, like the viper in the fable, has been nurtured into formidable activity in this country by misdirected kindness.
Beyond their presumed immorality and vice, the problem with new immigrant voters, from the perspective of these elites, was that they undermined so-called good government. There is not the slightest doubt in my own mind that our prodigality with the suffrage has been the chief source of the corruption of our elections, wrote the Progressive-era political scientist John W. Burgess in an 1895 article titled The Ideal of the American Commonwealth.
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