Joanne Freeman:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

Today, we want to talk about a topic that I suppose to say that it’s been in the news a lot lately is the most dramatic understatement I could make. In one way or another, what we want to talk about is voting and more specifically voting rights, because obviously if you think about it, the vote, who can vote and when and how they can vote is an enormous aspect of a functioning democracy in essence, it’s helping to determine who is a full-fledged citizen. And even more broadly than that, who counts as an American. We’re going to be looking at in a lot of ways at how the vote has changed throughout time and what that suggests about how a healthy democracy works.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And of course, we’re talking about it in part because on Tuesday, August 24th, the House passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021, which is an attempt to push back on the fact that between January 1st and July 14th of this year, at least 18 states enacted about 30 laws that actually restrict access to the vote. And one of the things that really jumps out about the house passage of the John Lewis Act is that the vote on whether or not to pass it was a strict party line vote in which the Republicans all voted no, and that’s a really specific and interesting moment right now.

Joanne Freeman:

And it really shows a theme, something that we’re going to be talking about a little bit on today’s episode, and that is the role and function of political parties in shifting around the ways in which voting does or doesn’t function.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So let’s start Joanne with the beginning of voting. So one of the things that was fun about talking about this is that I’m actually pretty good about the 19th century, but when you talk about the early voting all I know is that George Caleb Bingham painting where you’ve got men all standing around outside a polling place playing with dogs and drinking and talking about voting.

Joanne Freeman:

With stove pipe hats.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And one of the things you said and think about it, when the framers actually came up with this idea of voting, it’s not in the constitution how that’s going to happen. So when it comes time to voting, what did they do, pull straws?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, this is one of the fascinating and sometimes challenging things about studying early America is that in this early period, national things happening on a state level often vary enormously and voting is one of those things. There are different ways of voting in different states. There are different times, different dates when voting happens. There’s enormous variety in the early period. So in part, what they’re doing is continuing practices that they’ve had all along, which are being refined as the government, and I suppose you could say the function of democracy is evolving over time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So literally the federal elections take place in the states, which right off the bat says, we’ve got a problem in terms of making order out of any of this. But what does that look like?

Joanne Freeman:

There were a few different ways in which if you were in either Pennsylvania or New York or Georgia voting how that would look.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, first of all, for me, it wouldn’t look like anything in the early years, right? Because I’m a woman.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, that’s true. Neither you or I would have anything to say except in New Jersey, which I’ll come to momentarily. So yes, it would not look like anything to us. It would be pretty much from the outset white men of certain means, the vote was restricted to people who were worth a certain amount of money with part of the logic to that being that you should literally be invested in the community that you’re voting for. Another part of it being because people in power trusted other people of power and assumed that, of course, they would have the franchise. But throughout those states there were basically two different ways in which you voted. And as you’ll hear as I’m describing them, there are a lot of ways in which you can do some fishy things with votes, even in this very early period.

So you could use a poll book and some places used poll books, and that’s literally a book with the names of voters in one column and their votes in another column, and some of those books survive. In that case, what would happen would be you would come into a polling place and you would announce who you were voting for. And it would be written in the polling book. So obviously really public procedure. And there was a lot of in-person voting like that throughout the states at this time. And polled books were one primary form of evidence of that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

How’d you get your name in the book?

Joanne Freeman:

I think you would basically give your name and then some poll books show ineligible written after name. So there would have been checking, I think, after you gave your name to make sure that you were an eligible voter. The problem with that is among other things, spelling matters, a candidate’s name, the spelling of it matters, and you can throw out a vote of it’s misspelled. And that’s largely a problem of clerks, clerks who had their own politics. But for example, in 1807 in Ohio, there was a fellow whose last name was Meigs or Meigs, M-E-I-G-S, that was spelled 24 different ways in the ballot books from the time period. And there was a pronouncement that only three of them counted and an enormous segment of the voting public was just eliminated. So poll books were one way in which you voted.

The other was handwritten ballots. Here’s a way in which early party maneuvers took place. Basically in the late 1790s and then really in the fraught election of 1800, that was an election that was going to bring Thomas Jefferson to the presidency and outrage alarm, and basically freak out Federalists. In the election of 1800, Pennsylvania was an important state, I suppose you could say a swing state and they were desperate to get Jeffersonian Republicans elected. And that was a state where there were going to be handwritten ballots. So in that case, Republican politicos actually wrote out using family members and volunteers 30,000 handwritten ballots for a place where there were 24,240 eligible voters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So when you say they’re handwritten ballots, it’s not that the person voting writes the ballot it’s that the party goes ahead and writes the names of people down on a piece of paper.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And hands it to people. And then the people go into a polling place and drop it in a box.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because it’s not likely that all of them could read.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, or read or spell or anything. So how handy if the Jeffersonian Republicans come along and say, “Here are the people for whatever office that you really need to vote for.” And they drop the ballot in the box.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they go to the other guys and say, “Here’s a ballot for your guy.” And they’ve misspelled all the names?

Joanne Freeman:

Now, I’m sure that happened. I do not have evidence of all of the tricky maneuvers that happened in this time period. You can definitely hear all the space for that stuff to happen. To me, one of the remarkable things about this is that 30,000 handwritten ballots, I mean, that’s some serious effort to swing an election. And ballot boxes where the alternative to poll books, however, they were also trick ballot boxes with false bottoms. There all kinds of ways in which-

Heather Cox Richardson:

What does that mean to have a false bottom? That means that they stuff it first and then they just take the bottom out? Or is it the other way around that you put ballots in and they fall to the bottom and then you cover them up? I sound really quite like I’m trying to steal an election over here.

Joanne Freeman:

You totally do. And this is something I do not know how the false bottom worked. I know that it existed because in 1858, there was an alternative created to prevent all of that either falling to the bottom or stuffing it before from happening. So they created glass valid boxes so that you could see everything that was happening inside. But clearly part of what I’m saying here is a long history of people manipulating votes in one way or another to have a leg up, and even from the beginning, dirty tricks that they assumed were fine as long as no one caught them. Now, as I started out by saying, the vote is restricted to white men of certain means, except for a time in New Jersey. Everything’s legal in New Jersey comes from Hamilton musical.

Clip from Hamilton (archival):

Did your friends attempt to negotiate a peace? / He refused to apologize / we had to let the peace talks cease / Where is this happening? / Across the river, in Jersey / Everything is legal in New Jersey!

Joanne Freeman:

In 1789, this as an example, only 6% of Americans were eligible to vote in the 1789 presidential election. But in New Jersey, 6%, 6%. I’m going to pause there for a moment because that’s a number.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. And of course that’s very restricted to a certain group of people except in New Jersey.

Joanne Freeman:

Except in New Jersey where beginning during the revolutionary era, white women of certain means could vote. So basically wealthy women could vote except not wealthy married women because their property automatically was given to their husbands. So basically what [crosstalk].

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they are not wealthy anymore.

Joanne Freeman:

No. They’re just like us, would vanish.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So widows or something.

Joanne Freeman:

Widows. Precisely wealthy widows. So wealthy widows have the vote. And it’s tempting to say like, “Oops.” Or to use what you’d like to say Heather, “Popsie, poopsie.” That we forgot we let this slip. But as a matter of fact, when there’s a revision made to voting, I guess in 1790, they include a phrase that says, “No person shall be entitled to vote in any other township or precinct than that in which he or she actually reside at the time of the election.” So they’re deliberately allowing this to happen.

Now, of course, part of the reason is it benefited someone, wealthy widows leaned Federalist. So having women vote potentially could swing elections and they voted in reasonable numbers. And just recently in 2018, the Museum of the American Revolution discovered actually polling books, what I mentioned before, documenting women voters in New Jersey, and they uncovered between 1800 and 1807, 163 women voters, which is not a vast number, but considering that they’re generally not voting at all, pretty good. However, over time, it did not necessarily serve the Federalist as well. Elections became tighter.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You’re trying so hard not to say this. You’re trying so hard not to say who takes the vote away from women in New Jersey.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, I thought about you and I was looking at this and here’s the thing Heather, you can’t entirely blame it on Jeffersonian Republicans. And I know you want to, and I could see … You’re even laughing. I can see the look on your face.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It wasn’t me. I did say it. I wasn’t me.

Joanne Freeman:

You didn’t say it. Harrumph. That’s my first harrumph of the episode. Basically in 1807, there was a decision that it could be stripped away, and this is significant given where we are today, in part because there was an election in 1807, where there was a lot of actual fraud, some of it from men dressing like women so that they could vote twice. So of course the fraud was blamed on women and free-black voters. There were also some free-black voters in Pennsylvania. So people said, “Ooh, there’s fraud. Women and free-black men should no longer be allowed to vote.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So the white men dress up as women and the women AMD the free-black people get accused of fraud.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. Just clarifying that.

Joanne Freeman:

No, that’s a good clarification. And that’s precisely the case and it gets stripped away, but it’s a bargain. So here’s where I’m giving a slight, I don’t know, I’m countering a little bit you’re Jeffersonian Republican hatred. In essence, there’s a kind of bargain made in the New Jersey legislature between Federalists and Republicans. Federalists basically say, “Yeah, the women basically benefit us. So women no longer can vote fine.” And Republicans say, “well free-black voters, they sort of have been here voting and they don’t need to vote either.” So as much as you want to blame this on Jeffersonian Republicans, actually, it’s all of these people who just decide, “Okay, that’s it, we’re done, interesting thing for a few years, kind of an experiment, it’s taken away.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So just to be clear, it’s not Jeffersonian Republicans I dislike, it’s Thomas Jefferson.

Joanne Freeman:

I know. I know, but you can’t resist an opportunity to point in that general direction.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But that’s really interesting because both the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans come together to say, “Yeah, we can all get along so long as we cut out the women and the black people from voting.”

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But now I want to get into the next part of these early years, so you can go ahead and you can mess around with the actual system of voting. And then the other thing that takes place is essentially on the street or in the fields or in front of the saloon or the many places that they’re voting, because of course we don’t at that point have explicit government sanctioned places in which to vote. People are voting in saloons, they’re voting wherever men gather, women being excluded. But in those places, or even before a vote, there’s a way to keep voters from the polls.

Joanne Freeman:

There sure is. And this is largely through intimidation and violence. Now I’ll start out by saying, boy was the United States violent in this time period. I mean, although some of what I’m going to be saying here will sound and is remarkable, it’s important to put it in that context because there were incredible numbers of riots and man-to-man violence. So keep that context there. However, it was, I want to say almost common place for there to be intimidation, shoulder hitting as it might’ve been called at the time, people standing outside polling places or just in the streets trying to intimidate people to either not vote or vote a certain way. Now this happened in a general way, over time, I’ve even found in my research in Colonial Virginia, the brother of a candidate standing next to the door of a polling place with a gun, he didn’t do anything but it was a really clear message.

But it became targeted over time in some cases. And the greatest example of this or certainly the most striking example of this is The Know Nothing party, which is a nativist party that is active mostly in the 1840s and 1850s. The Know Nothing party basically was anti-immigrant nativist parties. And they really made an extreme, organized effort to attack or intimidate immigrant voters at polling places. And there would actually be riots at some of the polling places. And as you’ll hear in a moment, people killed. So for example in 1857, there was a massive, I guess, you’d have to call it a riot, the Baltimore Know Nothing party brought in three gangs, and I have the names, you will not forget the names once I give them to you. They brought in three games with great 19th century gang names, the Plug Uglies, the Rip Raps and the Chunkers. You got to love it. They got them to come to Washington and to attack Catholic immigrant voters.

They were responding in part to the fact that there was an anti-Know Nothing party mayor. So they were trying to reassert their power. But these gang members began attacking people at a particular polling place. Newspapers at the time describe it, but they go a little overboard, newspapers in this period exaggerate. So I’m going to read you what one says, and then we can knock it down by 40%, “One man was armed with a large blacksmith sledge, another with a horse pistol of large dimensions. A third carried a miscellaneous assortment of revolvers, bowie knives, billy clubs, an iron bar.”

 

I don’t know how that got carried all of that stuff, but the newspaper says he did. “While a fourth carried besides a side-pocket filled with convenience stones, brick bats and etc., a large billet of Oakwood of sufficient weight to fill an ox.” Now, newspapers really exaggerate in this time period. However, the fact of the matter is these were armed in one way or another. And ultimately, people end up getting killed.

The mayor calls in Marines to quell the violence. When the Marines get there, they find that some of the gang members have dragged a cannon to the polling place and are prepared to use it. In the end, eight men, mostly innocent bystanders were killed during this riot. And I discovered this riot because I was reading the diary of someone. And when he’s talking about this election, he says, “Oh, only eight men killed this year, that’s pretty good.” Which tells you something about elections, but that’s very targeted nativist violence against immigrants, and particularly against Catholic immigrants.

Not the first time it happened, there was a similar thing that happened in 1856, but it sends you a pretty clear message about what’s going on. And the thing about that kind of intimidation is you don’t need to carry it out everywhere for it to have an impact. If in one place you show extreme violence and a willingness to go to the level of killing people, that message is going to carry. So that if you are an immigrant voter or a Catholic immigrant voter, you’re going to know that there’s a threat if you vote. So intimidation strategically carried out. It can send a really sweeping message that can affect whether people are willing to vote or not.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So essentially when we talk about voting from the very beginning, we’re talking about the direction of the country, who gets to have a say in the country. And from the very beginning, we have the use of different techniques to go ahead and manipulate the vote, who gets to go there, who gets to be there, the women, the free African-Americans, men of property.

Joanne Freeman:

Whose voice is heard. Whose voice is heard.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Whose voices get heard. So you can go ahead and you can limit it artificially by making state laws about who gets to vote. Then there’s also this really important piece of violence and intimidation, and both of those things I think we established from the very beginning, and then we really see how they develop and how they affect what the nation is going to become after the Civil War. Because during the Civil War, of course, the Republican party which is in charge of the country during those years goes ahead and argues that the country needs to have a different set of voices than it did before the war. They’re trying to get away from that idea of the property white men running everything, because of course the property white men were the same ones who decided to destroy the country.

So they have to rethink what it means to be a voter and what it means to have a say in American society. And beginning in 1867 with the military Reconstruction Act, the Republicans say, “Hey, black men need to vote in the South. We need to outweigh the votes of those white conformer Confederates and go ahead and give African-Americans the say in society.” And almost immediately you get the violence that you talked about in the earlier period to go ahead and keep African-American voters from the polls. And also, by the way, white Republican voters in the South because poor whites in the south are willing, in fact, to vote Republican in those early years, in the late 1860s.

Joanne Freeman:

Is all of the intimidation violence, or are there other ways in which intimidation [crosstalk].

Heather Cox Richardson:

Violence is really big in beginning in 1860, but ‘68 because as the Southern Republicans essentially begin to write new Southern State Constitutions, the Ku Klux Klan becomes really a political body and they go ahead and they kill a lot of people before the 1868 election. And they are attacking people because of the vote. I mean, there’s certainly the obvious racial component of that, but they’re trying to keep people away from the polls in 1868. And like you say, intimidation, a little intimidation goes a long way. And of course they’re not just doing little intimidation, they literally kill a black legislator a little bit later on a train platform. He’s actually a state legislator and they kill him on a train platform.

So they’re doing overt things, but there’s also just that idea, if you’re walking past a guy who knows who you are and he’s standing there with his gun and he gives you that look, you got to weigh, “Is it worth my life?” And you gotta go home, and in this case talk to your wife, and she says, “No, because you do this, we’re going to starve to death because we won’t have your labor to go ahead and support the family.” And that intimidation, that KKK intimidation is really so effective that of course by 1870, we get the establishment of the department of justice to go in and to enforce the laws that say that African-Americans actually have voting rights.

Joanne Freeman:

Are those laws enforced?

Heather Cox Richardson:

They are immediately after 1870, but what happens is that we get, of course, the military Reconstruction Act and then the Southern State Laws that go ahead and establish black voting in the South. And in the election of 1868, African-Americans do vote. They are what manages to swing the Southern states behind Ulysses S. Grant. And after that happens in Georgia, Georgia goes ahead and throws out all the African-Americans who’ve been elected to the legislature because they say, “Hey, according to state law, you’re not allowed to serve.” And at that point, this is one of my favorite historical tidbits, Georgia gets remanded to military rule. That’s what all the textbooks say. And I still remember, one day I was in the library and I’m like, “What the heck does that mean? The troops march in because it sure sounds like troops march in and I don’t see any records of troops marching in.” All that means is that Georgia did not get to have senators and representatives after that.

Joanne Freeman:

And I have to point out here the historian instinct that you just revealed there because it is true, so many times if you don’t pause and think about a word that seems weird, you actually miss the what of a moment. So remanded sounds like it’s obvious, but you asked the historian question.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I was also bored.

Joanne Freeman:

I don’t care why you asked this random question.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But so that’s why we get the 15th Amendment. The idea that the right to vote shall not be abridged according to race. And that 15th Amendment is going to be really powerful because when the 15th Amendment is ratified, first passed through Congress and then ratified by the states, American women who had been so instrumental in keeping the Union together during the Civil War go ahead and say, “Hey, wait a minute here. Why aren’t we included in that?” And they go ahead in 1872 and they say, “Okay, you didn’t include us in the 15th Amendment, but under the 14th Amendment, people born in America or naturalized with the exception of some indigenous Americans, are citizens. And therefore as citizens, we have the right to vote.” And in 1872, they go ahead and they hold a vote-in in which they go ahead and they registered a vote, or they try to register to vote and they actually cast ballots in the 1872 election. That’s how Susan B. Anthony gets in trouble for the crime of voting. But what comes out of that is the challenge to what it means to vote, who has a right to vote in America?

So in 1872 in Missouri, a woman named Virginia Minor goes ahead and she does in fact try to register to vote. And the registrar in Missouri, a man named Reese Happersett says, “I’m not going to let you go ahead and vote.” So she sues him and that’s going to go up through the courts, up to the Supreme Court. And when it gets to the Supreme Court, it gets to the Supreme Court in 1874 and they’re going to hand down their decision in 1875. And the question is, “Are women citizens? Because if women are citizens, they should be able to vote. And if women are going to be able to vote, that’s going to change the whole way the structure of the American government works and the voices that are included.” Because one of the really important things here is if you simply say, “The only voices we’re going to include are white people of property, white men of property.” You’re going to get a really different country than if you’re going to include the voices of black people and soon brown people and women and indigenous Americans.

Joanne Freeman:

And I want to point out here, I want to point out what you just said or highlight a link that is worth repeating. What you just said is when you’re talking about voting, you’re talking about citizenship. You’re talking about who is given the rights of a citizen. So you’re talking about this larger question about what the nation looks like, whose voice counts in that nation? You’re making major structural and even broader sort of cultural and social decisions about what a nation is. But it’s important to note that citizenship and fundamental rights of citizenship are bound up in this.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And just to jump back to the earlier period a little, this is one of the things that just makes my head explode about voting before the Civil War, when white men especially in the South, say, “Slavery is just fine because we voted for it.” And to me, I’m like, “I don’t see how you can talk about local voting and local democracy without including all those voices.” Because if you included African-Americans and indigenous Americans and women in that vote, they would not be voting for slavery.

Joanne Freeman:

That would not be the logic they would use, but you’re right. You’re right, but it would be far from their mind I guess.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But that is Literally the logic that Stephen Douglas uses when he talks about why slavery is just ducky. But what happens then in 1874 is really interesting because it goes before the Supreme Court, this question of Minor v. Happersett, are women citizens? And therefore, should they have the right to vote as they tried to have an 1872? And the Supreme Court in 1875, a really important year hands down a court decision, the Minor v. Happersett decision in which it’s very long and detailed. And they go, “Yes, of course women are citizens.” And they list I think every possible instance they can find of women doing citizen like things. And then it goes on and on and on, and then at the very end of it, they say, “Yes of course women are citizens, but citizenship does not necessarily convey the right to vote.”

Now, all of a sudden the 15th Amendment to the constitution says, “You can’t discriminate based on race.” But now in 1875, the Supreme Court has said, “Yeah, but you can discriminate in any other way you might like.” And that of course is going to be absolutely huge because 1876, the next year, you’re going to have Southern states, the Democrats in Southern states going ahead and cementing their control over those states and beginning to exclude people from the vote based on things that are not race but that map onto race extraordinarily closely.

Joanne Freeman:

And I think it’s important to note, again, by map onto race in one way or another, poor and marginalized people are always under attack, and race is a component within that. So you can restrict or attack voting without being as blatantly racist as your efforts are, because if you’re not explicitly saying black people can’t vote, you’re setting it up so that in a broader way, poorer people or certain kind of people or people who live in a certain place can’t vote. And while it’s obvious what that means, it’s not set outright. And sometimes that difference matters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, that’s precisely what happened in the 1870s and in the 1880s, because while white Democrats in the South were worried about African-American voters voting Republican, white northerners were concerned about immigrant voting. So they are both looking at the rise of organized labor of African-American workers of a marginalized underclass, if you will, gaining a political voice. And that’s exactly the grounds on which they begin to cut back on voting. First, like you say, through violence, intimidation with the KKK for example, but also with violence and intimidation in the North against immigrants. But increasingly, they come up with ways to go ahead and make sure that that marginalized underclass can’t vote. So really dramatically in 1890, we get, first of all, the Mississippi Constitution. And the Mississippi Constitution goes ahead and it says, “We got no problem with black people voting, but however,” there’s always that “however”, because of the 15th Amendment, “However, we’re going to go ahead and limit voting based, for example, on whether or not you can read, or whether or not you’re literate.”

So what the Mississippi Constitution does is it establishes a whole number of new ways to go ahead and discriminate against who get to vote.

Joanne Freeman:

Hurdles. Voting hurdles.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Voting hurdles. So for example, the Southern states are going to go ahead after the Mississippi Constitution and institute grandfather clauses, that says, for example, “So long as your grandfather voted, you can too.” Well, again, looks on the surface, it’s not about race, except of course, enslaved people’s grandfathers were not voting. So right there, white people can vote and black people can’t. Then they have, as I say, these literacy tests, and if a white guy gets to determine whether or not an African-American can read, I mean, there are questions like our friend Carol Anderson talks about the “jelly bean test”, how many jelly beans are in that jar? It’s a lose-lose, right? Or tests that simply say, no matter how good you are at reading a passage or deciphering the state constitution, another test, the white guy would say, “You almost got it, but better luck next year.”

And then of course their poll taxes, the idea that you can’t come to the polls unless you have paid your taxes that year, and also that you have kept the receipt that you paid your taxes that year. Now real quick, do you know where your tax receipts are? This is the 21st century, I’m not living in a place where there … I was going to say I’m not living in a place where there’re mice, but that’s a lie. But if you’re living in the country and you’re trying to keep your belongings together and you’ve got animals in your house, as everybody in the country does, you’re not going to keep your hands on your poll tax receipt. And that’s in the first constitution, the Mississippi Constitution’s 1890. And The New York Times looks at that and they say, “Well, that’s not a bad idea. We’d love to keep illiterate, poor people away from the vote.”

And after 1890, the states across the Union, North and South are going to go ahead and rewrite their state constitution to go ahead and limit the vote of people who are poor, people of color in the South primarily, but also immigrants in the North. And the number of people voting gets dramatically smaller after 1890. And then there’s also something else that is really interesting that happens in 1890. 1890 is a year that America adopts the Australian ballot. And this is something that’s seen as a reform, as something that’s really good because it’s going to take the suffrage away from people who can’t read because the Australian ballot goes ahead and it tries to take politics out of the vote by going ahead and establishing ballots printed by the government that have both party’s candidates on them.

So no longer a ballot’s going to be color coded and you vote for the Democrats with one color AMD the Republicans with another, so that individuals didn’t have to read. They could simply take the ticket from their side, and that’s actually why I asked about whether or not people were cheating in the early years by putting the wrong names when they wrote things down, because that does happen in the 19th century where people say, “Here’s your Republican ballot.” And it’s actually a democratic ballot, but people can’t read, so they don’t know the difference. With this new ballot with both the names on it, voters are going to have to be able to read in order to go ahead and mark the ballots in the right places. And the Republican party comes out and they say, “We got to do this. This is going to be great.” Because especially in New York City, where they want to go ahead and control the vote because they need the electoral votes of New York. They go, “This is going to be really important. This is going to be great.” And they back the Australian ballot, but privately they’re writing to each other going, “Crap, do you think we can teach our voters to read fast enough to go ahead and do this?” Because they really are trying to keep the Democrats from voting and not the Republicans from voting. But the Australian ballot, which is again, an attempt to clean up that.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s what I was going to say is that the argument that people make when they want to justify it is it’s purifying elections, right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s a good thing.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a good thing. And actually some people say, “It will even make the voting of a straight-ticket, one party, less likely because all of the candidates will be listed and you can vote for any of them.” So there are all kinds of ways in which it’s justified as something that will purify and strengthen elections. And as everything else which we’ve been discussing here, underlying that are ways to keep out voices.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what happens after 1890 is in the South, we get a one-party system. And in the North, we also have limited the vote to a body of people who look not unlike that original set of voters. And what’s interesting about this middle period here is that the rules and the violence in the early years were designed really to keep propertied white men in power. And after 1860, there is this initial attempt to open up the vote first to black men and then to women. And once again, the system through Minor v. Happersett and then through state laws, and violence goes ahead and creates that same limitation again, because although I really emphasized Minor v. Happersett because I think it’s such an important law. Of course, the KKK and after 1889, when there’s a real attempt to protect Black voting again, the rise and really just devastation of lynching across the South to keep black men, primarily, at least this is the argument for it, from corrupting the body politic first, and then from corrupting society in general, really takes off. And again, talk about intimidation. How many of your neighbors do you have to lose to a white mob before you say, “Nah, I guess I don’t think I need to have my voice heard here.”

Joanne Freeman:

And you would assume, as so many of us do, that one voice doesn’t make a difference.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right.

Joanne Freeman:

And you don’t necessarily, for very logical reasons, step back and think about all the one voices that that adds up to.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, that’s what the real power like you say of terrorism, is that it doesn’t take all that much pressure for someone to make that calculation and say, “Well, the system’s stacked against me, and if I show up, I could lose my life.”

Joanne Freeman:

That’s the importance of that word, right? I mean, terrorism is about terror. There might be violence involved, but what it’s about is keeping people afraid to the point that they won’t do what you don’t want them to do. And that has a real power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that changes dramatically in America in the 1960s. Coming out of World War II and the idea in America that theoretically, it’s only theoretical at that point of course, that everybody should have an equal say in society. And that coinciding with the anti-colonial movements, especially on the continent of Africa, there is an increasing movement among brown Americans and Black Americans to say, “Wait a minute, this is our country too. We need to have a voice in this country as well.” And once again, they’re going to face both state and federal systems that keep them from voting, but also extraordinary intimidation. So of course, what happens is after World War II, there’s pressure from both the black and the brown community to be able to vote, to have a say in society. And after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, and the massive resistance on the part of, especially, of white southerners to go ahead and stop the desegregation of schools, African-Americans begin to stand up for their rights.

And in 1957, and then again in 1960, under pressure both from the African-Americans who are demanding rights, but also pressure from Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts that are designed to empower the federal government to go ahead and protect black voting as they had been empowered to do in the 1860s and 1870s. And in 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Council of Federated Organizations begin intensive efforts to go ahead and enforce those laws, to register African-American voters in the South. And they focus on Mississippi because in Mississippi, there were only 6.7% of eligible black Mississippians registered to vote.

So Mississippi becomes a focal point of going ahead and determining what America’s going to look like, is in fact America going to include the voices that it claims should be included in our democracy or not? So in 1964, we get the Freedom Summer, that’s what the Freedom Summer is, the idea of registering African-Americans to vote. And one of the key organizers of that is Bob Moses, who passed just a few weeks ago, who organizes volunteers coming from the North to go ahead and work with local organizers on the ground in Mississippi to go ahead and register voters. And just as they are trying to do that, just as they’re starting in the summer of 1964, on June 21st, the KKK of whom some of the people in this mob are actually law enforcement officers, go ahead and they murder three of the organizers that came down to Freedom Summer. That’s James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. And they murder them near Philadelphia Mississippi, and the guys disappear.

So this happens on June 21st. So you’re down there in Mississippi thinking about registering to vote, and these three guys disappear. And you know nothing good has happened to them, but you don’t know what has happened. And when that happens, actually, Bob Moses calls his people together and he says, “Listen, you’re taking your lives in your hands. Nobody is going to blame you if you turn around and you go home.” And the power of that speech has been credited with convincing most people to stay. So over the course of the summer, with those men not found, the volunteers in the Freedom Summer go ahead, and in fact, they do register people to vote. And then in August of that year, they find those bodies. They find them in an earthing dam, which was under construction when they were murdered and they get buried inside the dam. And pretty clearly and quickly Americans can see exactly what it looks like to suppress votes, because first of all, these young men have been murdered. But second of all, the people who did it, the KKK members, including this guy who’s a law enforcement officer laugh at their arraignment. They’re laughing because they know they’re never going to get called out for what they have done. They’re never going to get punished for what they’ve done because their political opponents aren’t allowed to vote, and they never have.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, they haven’t gotten punished yet. I mean, that’s the flip side of terrorism and intimidation. It persists because the people carrying it out aren’t held accountable, aren’t punished. And if that’s the case, why not keep going?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which is precisely why we need the competition, we need to have voters from all parties to go ahead and keep the system honest. So these guys start laughing about what had happened and almost immediately on the heels of that, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to go ahead and strengthen voting rights. One of the things that that does is it strengthens voting rights. But when in March of 1965 in Selma Alabama, marchers begin to march in favor of black rights, and these are going to be marchers led by John Lewis, who again, passed last year after spending 17 terms in Congress after that, they decide to march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate their desire to vote. And law enforcement officers stopped them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and beat them brutally, which is something we still commemorate on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But those are the very famous pictures you see of John Lewis with the blood running down his face.

Joanne Freeman:

And Lewis has very explicitly used that image in discussing why the vote is valuable, right? He’s basically said, I don’t have the precise quote here that, “I shed blood on that bridge to defend the right to vote. That’s not something I’m going to stop fighting for now.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And on heals of that on March 15th, President Johnson calls for Congress explicitly to defend American’s right to vote, and it did. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, and on August 6th of 1965, Johnson signs it into law. So then, everything’s absolutely hunky-dory, we never have to worry again. In 1975, Congress expands that rule to go ahead and provide multilingual ballots so that all voices can have a say and the episode is done. Right? We’re good.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I want talk about that for a moment though, because first of all, we started out by talking about ballots, and now due to the fact that in that year, actually in 1972, only 44% of Spanish surname citizens were registered compared with 68% of blacks and 73% of wights. There was a clear difference in voting. So in 1975, Democratic Texas representative Barbara Jordan, Democratic New York representative Herman Badillo and Democratic California representative Ed Roybal proposed a bill requiring bilingual election materials. And they suggest that they will be printed in areas where more than 5% of the voting age citizens are of a single language minority, they use census records.

And the reason why I bring this up at length is just because I want the chance to quote Barbara Jordan in explaining why this has particular importance. She says on February 19th 1975, “Nearly all the forms of discriminatory voting practices suffered by blacks in the South are being suffered by Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. When Mexican Americans tried to register in one town, they were told to register and ran out of printed forms. Polling places had been located in places where only whites normally congregate. There have been instances where Mexican-American ballots have been consistently challenged causing voters to appear in court and attempt to recognize their ballot among many thousands cast.” That’s a remarkable summary of all of the things that we’ve just been talking about as happening against other poor and marginalized people throughout this entire period.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So once again, we have the intimidation and the messing around with the ballots, the way we’ve had all along. And the attempt by 1975 to go ahead and combat that, to give everybody a say in American society. Now what’s interesting about that and why I was being flippant about, “ow we’re done, the episode is over we can quit” is because that’s 1975, our lifetimes, even one could go so far into say virtually our adult lifetimes. That’s maybe a bit of a stretch. And here we are again, because in 2013, the John Roberts court began the process of gutting the Voting Rights Act. So the Voting Rights Act when it was set up was originally designed to expire after a certain period of time. And Congress has re-upped it, renewed it repeatedly most recently in 2006. And in 2006, that was still a bipartisan re-upping of the Voting Rights Act.

Joanne Freeman:

Bipartisan support of the fundamental core of democracy, voting rights.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Then 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder, a decision from the Supreme Court, it gutted the Voting Rights Act by taking away a key provision of it. And that provision was that the Department of Justice had to sign off on new laws, new state laws that limited the vote. And then this year on July 1st with Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court went a step further in which it said that some of those laws, laws that were passed by Arizona before, by the way, the 2016 election were not unconstitutional, even though they went ahead and affected racial and ethnic groups differently. Justice as Samuel Alito wrote, “The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote.” That’s this year, 2021.

Joanne Freeman:

And I want to offer numbers here. I want to inject a few numbers mentioned briefly at the beginning, just as a reminder of where that leaves us. So between January 1st and July 14th of this year, at least 18 states have enacted 30 laws that restrict access to the vote. These laws make male voting and early voting more difficult. They impose harsher voter ID requirements and they make faulty voter purges much more likely among a variety of other things. More than 400 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states just in the 2021 legislative sessions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And just throw in here while we’re at it the idea of intimidation, we’re talking about how states can fiddle with their rules in such a way that it prevents people from voting. But we’ve also seen the rise again of intimidation, the attempt to drive the Biden-Harris bus off the road in Texas.

Joanne Freeman:

Election officials. Election officials being afraid for their lives and resigning. As a historian who focuses on political violence and intimidation in the 19th century, that was ringing all kinds of alarm bells for me when they began to say this, “We’ve been threatened and I’m not going to stay as an election official anymore.” The roots of that are very long, but that’s remarkably straightforward intimidation and we’re watching the impact.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The question of voting has always been about who owns the country, who gets to have a say in the country and what is that country going to look like? And from the very beginning, there has been a move to limit the vote and to limit it to people of means, to people who are white and usually to people who are male. And to do that, first of all, by messing around with who gets to vote by things like saying, “Oh no, we’re out of ballots.”

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Or nowadays, putting fewer voting machines into minority districts. Or by a voter ID that says that you can use your hunting and fishing license as a way to identify yourself, but not a student license for example.

Joanne Freeman:

And here’s the thing about that, which hearkens, again, back to what we’ve already talked about. All of these things can be defended as purifying the process, keeping people who are not eligible to vote out. We’ve seen that before, but the fact of the matter is that’s not the impact that they’re having. And the impact is the reason for the acts, the claim that they’re purifying the process is a way to explain them away.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So here we are, again, trying to decide what the country should look like and who gets to have a say in it. And one of my favorite lines ever was one that former president Barack Obama used when he spoke at the funeral for representative John Lewis, in which he said, “We simply must go ahead and protect the vote. We must protect it by supporting the idea behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act.” Former president Obama said, “You want to honor John, let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”