Michael Tomasky reviews The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present
by Allan J. Lichtman
The review provides very thorough tour through Lichtman's book and the ongoing history of vote suppression in America for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. The book says that we are currently in the third wave of vote suppression that is the essence of the white supremacy movement that has haunted American history. The first wave started at the very beginning with the disenfranchisement of women and minorities. The second wave started after reconstruction with the Jim Crow era (lasted 100 years). The third wave commenced with the inauguration of the southern strategy that debuted in 1964 even before the passage of the voting rights act in 1965 and is reaching new levels of blatant discrimination by the day.
by Allan J. Lichtman
The review provides very thorough tour through Lichtman's book and the ongoing history of vote suppression in America for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. The book says that we are currently in the third wave of vote suppression that is the essence of the white supremacy movement that has haunted American history. The first wave started at the very beginning with the disenfranchisement of women and minorities. The second wave started after reconstruction with the Jim Crow era (lasted 100 years). The third wave commenced with the inauguration of the southern strategy that debuted in 1964 even before the passage of the voting rights act in 1965 and is reaching new levels of blatant discrimination by the day.
Nothing that Republicans are doing today is new. In the early days of the republic, Lichtman writes, members of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party raised regular allegations of voter fraud and sought to require men to bring to the polls proof of their property qualifications. As for “ballot security,” as the Republicans sometimes call their efforts, the GOP rolled out “Operation Eagle Eye” back in 1964, the first modern election in which the party sought to appeal to the racist vote. Eagle Eye targeted heavily Democratic, mostly minority precincts in thirty-six cities. It was based on a program that had already been tried in Arizona, which involved voter intimidation, the circulation of handbills warning that if you had outstanding parking tickets you couldn’t vote—the usual tricks. It didn’t work, but no one was ever known to have been caught and prosecuted or punished for it in any way. One of the participants in the Arizona program, William Rehnquist, was “punished” a quarter-century later by being confirmed as the sixteenth chief justice of the Supreme Court.
What at the time might have seemed like a marriage of convenience between business interests and the racist right is increasingly showing that the devil always wins such deals. The book provides one particularly compelling story of where things are:
Lichtman draws attention, as some journalists have, to the case of Rosanell Eaton, who grew up in North Carolina in the Jim Crow era and joined an NAACP lawsuit against VIVA as a plaintiff. In a book that is mostly a straightforward history-from-above narrative, Eaton’s story provides one of the more gripping passages:
In 1942, Eaton rode for two miles on a mule-drawn wagon to register to vote at the Franklin County courthouse. Three white male officials confronted her. They ordered her to stand up straight, keep her arms at her side, and recite from memory the preamble to the Constitution. She did so word for word and then passed a written literacy test, becoming one of the few African Americans of her era to vote in North Carolina.
Seven decades later, Lichtman writes, “Eaton had a much harder time qualifying to vote under North Carolina’s new law.” She had a driver’s license, but the names on her license and her voter-registration card did not match exactly. She made eleven trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles, two different Social Security offices, and three banks before everything was rectified. “I was hoping I would be dead before I’d have to see all this again,” she said.
In 1942, Eaton rode for two miles on a mule-drawn wagon to register to vote at the Franklin County courthouse. Three white male officials confronted her. They ordered her to stand up straight, keep her arms at her side, and recite from memory the preamble to the Constitution. She did so word for word and then passed a written literacy test, becoming one of the few African Americans of her era to vote in North Carolina.
Seven decades later, Lichtman writes, “Eaton had a much harder time qualifying to vote under North Carolina’s new law.” She had a driver’s license, but the names on her license and her voter-registration card did not match exactly. She made eleven trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles, two different Social Security offices, and three banks before everything was rectified. “I was hoping I would be dead before I’d have to see all this again,” she said.
