Race and American Political Development by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics
ISBN: 9780415961530
Google: aJEnAQAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 4977620
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-01-15T13:07:45+00:00

Figure 7.1 Public support for poll tax reform

Source: “Gallup and Fortune Poll” (1941: 470); “The Quarter's Polls” (1948: 567); “The Quarter's Polls” (1949: 557); Ogden (1958: 252)

supporters of reform claimed, they were wrong in their understanding of how these millions of new voters would be incorporated into the political system. Most of the supporters (as well as the critics) of poll tax reform had worked from a New Dealish assumption that the South would experience a liberal democratic revival through inclusion of the white have-nots.

By framing poll tax reform as an issue of reconstitution or reinvigoration of white democracy, the extension of political and economic rights and benefits to blacks became even more problematic. How could white southern politicians promise newly incorporated white voters that the foundation of the new white democracy was safe in the face of rising African American political mobilization and increasing national attention to civil rights issues? By the early 1950s, before the Brown decision, on the heels of increasing white democratization came attempts to limit the spread of this democratization to blacks. Thus Alabama enacted its infamous (and later overturned) Boswell Amendment in 1946, which strengthened the discretionary and arbitrary powers of local voter registrars. Georgia, with the Talmadge forces back in charge, changed its voting laws in the late 1940s to allow the massive purging of newly registered African American voters (see Bernd and Holland 1959; Lawson 1976; Bernd 1982). Poll tax reform had allowed the South to begin to rejoin the United States. However, like their forebears of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many white southerners still defined democracy as a privilege restricted to and enjoyed only by whites.

The poll tax issue faded quickly. Although state-level poll tax reform had started off as a movement “with the endorsement of the best leadership and thought of the South” and as the “most forward political step there since the Civil War,” by the 1950s its time had come and gone (Brewer 1944: 299). In light of the deeper bitter struggle for civil rights that followed, the poll tax seemed to be a narrow technical issue like lynching that had been largely bypassed by history. Yet it left a significant impact on southern and national politics.

For the masses of southern whites, widespread democratization was a resounding success. A long-standing elite notion of a democracy restricted to the better class of whites was resoundingly and publicly discredited. As a result, millions of whites (re-) gained the franchise. Indeed this forgotten revolution created a new white electorate that responded to the broader pressures from below and above in ways not anticipated, or desired, by southern liberals. The democratization efforts of the Jim Crow reformers brought in millions of newly enfranchised white voters and opened up the political terrain in many states to new voices and new opportunities for political entrepreneurs. Higher levels of education and income coupled with greater urbanization, and new patterns of suburbanization meant that these new voters lay outside of the control of traditional white elites (see Thornton 2002).

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