The Right to Vote : The Contested History of Democracy in the United States

Keyssar's largely intellectual history of suffrage throughout the nation's history and 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 often 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 contemporary 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. Limitations on their research strategies call some conclusions of both books into question. Thus, Keyssar's deliberate inattention to voting behavior undermines his four-period chronology. No doubt his first period, from the 1780s to 1850, saw loosened legal restrictions on the suffrage. But since most colonial historians estimate that 60-80% of adult white males could vote, how much did the suffrage actually broaden during the first generations of the republic? In