The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States [Book Review]

Abstract

Alexander Keyssar's largely intellectual history of suffrage throughout the nation's history and Mark Lawrence Kornbluh's largely quantitative analysis of the transition from nearly universal male political participation in the late 1800s to the much less active polity of the twentieth century underscore a simple but of- ten neglected lesson: Because words and behavior are sometimes at variance, scholars should study both. The division of labor between these two books leads to contradictory conclusions. Despite mentions of low con- temporary voter turnout and unequal political power at the beginning and end of his book, Keyssar's is mainly a hopeful story of the sometimes reversed but eventually successful dismantling of class, race, and gender barriers to voting, in that unusual order of emphasis. Kornbluh's is explicitly a story of decline, from a late-nineteenth-century polity in which nearly every man, at least in the North, not only voted but argued, marched, and often organized for his party, to a deferential, interest group-and expert-dominated political system in the twentieth. In one, democracy flowers; in the other, it withers