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

Rating:
Summary: Informative look at American Democracy
Review: One of the things that Americans take great pride in is the democratic nature of their country. Keyssar shows that this democratic nature took a long time to develop and that the concept of "universal" suffrage is really very recent.

Supported by a lot of information (the supplementary materials make up around 25% of the book), Keyssar shows that American history is made up of lots of incidents of people trying to gain voting rights, including women, various ethnic groups, men without property and eighteen year olds. The progression to universal suffrage was neither smooth nor always forward: there were numerous cases when voting rights were taken away from a group.

Although this book is very informative and filled with important material, the subject of voting rights is not always very exciting. Keyssar does a good job overall - and keeps reasonably objective in the process - but there are times when this can be a slow read. Nonetheless, for those interested in distinguishing between the myths and truths of American history, this is a worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent accounting of a neglected history
Review: The previous reviewers make the major arguments in favor of buying, reading and digesting this book. It is well-written, thoroughly researched and very well thought out. I want only to add a few specific points that might further perk your interest.
Keyssar is able to present succinct summations of complex historical and legal issues. For example, one of the themes of the final historical chapter is to outline how the Warren Court developed the standard of "one man, one vote". In a few brilliant pages (pp. 298-302 of the paperback edition), Keyssar gives a synopsis of just how complicated and convoluted even this standard can be. Keyssar points out that this standard works only where there are no structural biases to the way that the individual votes are aggregated. A simple example: in my home city of Portland, OR, we elect our city councilors at-large. For a majority white city, this has the consequence of making it more difficult to elect minority councilors. Keyssar lays out the complexities of the debates on the resulting issues from this line of thought with clarity and fairness.
For me, another of the pleasures of the book was learning about some lesser known moments in our national history, e.g., the Dorr War in Rhode Island in 1841-1842. This is part of one of the overall themes of the book, which is the class bias that has always been (and still is) part of our politics. Keyssar is very good at explicating how both parties have played that game.
One final point that Keyssar makes and which is worth reminding ourselves of in light of the last election. There is no constitutional right to vote for the President for any of us. To quote: "... the Founding Fathers, in writing the Constitution, declined to institute any national suffrage standard at all: for pragmatic political reasons of their own, they left to the states the power to determine the contours of the franchise"(P. 329). There have been subsequent Amendments and Voting Acts all phrased negatively to limit the state's ability to disfranchise certain voters or from using certain techniques to disfranchise but nothing that positively asserts the individual's right to vote.
Keyssar in his afterword written post-Election 2000, points out that the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed that fact in it's majority opinion in Bush v. Gore.
Keyssar quotes that opinion, "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College...[and] the State...after granting the franchise in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors." To our current crop of Supreme Court judges, that means, as Keyssar points out, that the presidential electors (and thus the President) "need not be chosen by popular vote at all." Now that is States Rights for you with a vengeance. If there is an afterlife, John C. Calhoun loves Justice Scalia.
Whether or not you agree with Keyssar's point of view (which he states very clearly), you cannot help but learn from this book. He presents an enormous amount to think about in a lucid and interesting fashion. I definitely agree with all of the reviewers below- this is one of those books that everyone should read. Not all will agree with it's conclusions but it would start and improve many an excellent debate and might inspire some action.

Rating:
Summary: Important, Honest Look at Varieties of Democracy
Review: The Right to Vote (The Contested History of Democracy in the United States) by Alexander Keyssar is, first of all, marvelous for not being a triumphalist look at the march towards a perfect democracy. The book is, rather, a honest examination of the ups and downs in the struggle towards a concept of universal suffrage. The anti-democratic forces won many victories during the course of this history and continue to have an effect on today's political and judicial decisions. This book is a little daunting at first as it is quite thorough in its research and presentation (beginning with property qualifications in all of the first states) and is not about the fiery personalities involved in these two centuries of thrust and parry. The book grows more fascinating as the narrow focus (right to vote) spreads into its own mosiac representing all of America and its beliefs on a fundamental level. An important and readable study.

Rating:
Summary: Don't take it for granted
Review: The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States should be on your required reading list if you are interested in the history of the democratic experiment in the United States. Alexander Keyssar has produced that most unusual book-both enjoyable and profoundly informative.
Keyssar traces the always contentious right of Americans to participate in democracy. I, like most others, take for granted that voting is part of our system. We are wrong. As this book shows, the right to vote has been-and continues to be-more an issue of which group has the reigns of power than a fundamental right enjoying consensus support.
While The Right to Vote fully covers the struggles of women and African Americans to obtain and keep their voting rights, it also tells the history of voting requirements tied to property ownership, immigration status, and the still-debated criminal status. While focusing on suffrage, Professor Keyssar creates a cohesive political history of the United States.
The Right to Vote is one of those important history books that should be read and then often used as a source of reference for all those concerned about our political system.

Rating:
Summary: Superbly Crafted
Review: There's a trick to writing a good history book. The trick is to not get bogged down in so much picayune detail that the book becomes a bore, while including enough detail to help the reader gain clear, authoritatively-based insight into exactly what happened and how. Fortunately, Keyssar understands this nuance. As a result, this book is engaging like few American histories I've read. At the same time, there is sufficient well-researched and well-documented detail to place this among the best of scholarly works.

Apart from the deftness of Keyssar's writing, the subject matter - how voting rights have evolved in America - is one that has received paltry little attention. That is, until now. Thankfully, this book reveals voting rights history in a way that makes the reader feel like he or she is finally getting the history lesson he or she never got in high school - but should have.

Of course it has become a cliche to say that "This is a book every American should read." But I would be remiss if I failed to say that the book genuinely made me feel that way. More than that, this is an important book for anyone in the global community that wants to use the American experience to gain deeper insights into the evolution of democracy. In that sense, The Right to Vote is not just "The Contested History of Democracy in the United States," as the subtitle states, it is ultimately the universal story about how human yearning so typically collides with (and challenges) the operatives of the greater political machine. In short, everyone in every nation that cares about the future of democracy should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: It hasn't been done before
Review: This book has helped me trendously with my masters thesis. It drew me in to American History like few books have. Keysaar does a brilliant job of helping us to imagine what it was to be alive during the infancy of our country. Perfect reading during the current "crisis" with the presidential election.

Rating:
Summary: THE book to read!
Review: This book is, undoubtedly, THE best book to read insofar as the history of voting in America. Keyssar writes a fabulous book - meticulously detailing critical historical information - in a manner that is readable and enjoyable. The author does a marvelous job in citing his sources.

For all individuals interested in the history of the backbone to American democracy - the right to vote - this is a book that must be read!

Rating:
Summary: THE book to read!
Review: This book is, undoubtedly, THE best book to read insofar as the history of voting in America. Keyssar writes a fabulous book - meticulously detailing critical historical information - in a manner that is readable and enjoyable. The author does a marvelous job in citing his sources.

For all individuals interested in the history of the backbone to American democracy - the right to vote - this is a book that must be read!

Rating:
Summary: A useful study
Review: This is a book that will make you angry. If you are a conservative, this book should make you feel very guilty. It is important to begin with that this book is a detour from Keyssar's larger project, which was supposed to be a history of the American working class' electoral participation. After struggling with the work for several years he realized that he needed to publish a whole book explaining what the right to vote actually was in American history. The result is a history of the slow and uneven path to universal suffrage in American history. We learn about the existence of the vote before 1776, the improvement that occured with the revolution, and the larger improvement that occured with the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian period in which the large majority of white men were able to vote. At the same time we learn of efforts to counter the expanding suffrage, such as disfranchisement of free blacks all over the country before 1861, attacks on the voting rights of paupers, felons, migrants and aliens, as well as the disfranchisment in the early 1800s of the limited voting rights women had in the early 1800s. Keyssar then goes on to discuss the narrowing of the portals from the 1860s to the 1920s, periods ironically bounded by giving the vote to blacks in the 1870s and to women by the 1920s. But in between that period nearly all blacks and many whites were disenfranchised in the south, while literacy, residence, nationality and registration systems sought to limit the vote in the North (while "asiatics" were barred in the west). The book concludes with the successful passage of the Voting Rights Act and the twenty-sixth amendment, but also with low turnout, an extremely narrow political spectrum, and government structures which limit political participation and reinforce conservative values.

Much of this will not be new to historians, though never before has there been such detail and the twenty appendixes provided at the back will be invaluable for future reference. Sometimes Keyssar gives a qualititative estimate of how many Americans could vote (he suggests that perhaps 60% of white Americans could vote before 1776, a figure much lower than the 80-90% posited by more Panglossian historians). And there are many interesting details, such as the New York plan where registration was supposed to take place on Yom Kippur, conventiently leaving out many Jews. But otherwise the full results have been reserved for his upcoming work. This weakens his criticisms of American exceptionalism, since without a clear understanding of how much the vote declined in the North, we cannot see how fully the ponderous elitism of Parkman and Godkin were like the undemocratic aspects of German or Italian or even British liberalism. I am also do not agree with his description of slaves as a "peasantry." This implies that the majority of white farmers who were not slaveholders were a) not peasants and b) were otherwise indistinguishable on a class basis from the slaveholders. Recent southern agrarian history makes this assumption quite questionable. It is true that Americans were unenthusiatic as Europeans about the rise of the proletariat and rural subaltern classes, but it is insufficient to say that mass suffrage only occured because such classes were a small proportion of the population. They were also a small proportion of the population in France in 1848 and 1851 when universal male suffrage was declared, which did not prevent a greater degree of struggle over the question in that country. Enfranchising the majority of any population would raise serious issues of class domination and control regardless of the class structure. Nevertheless this is still a useful study, and reading the petty, racist, misogynist, self-serving and self-satisfied arguments against the suffrage will be a depressing experience. To think that such injustices could be continued for two centuries thanks to the endless cant of "state's rights" long after the republican content of that slogan had drained away will infuriate you.

Rating:
Summary: The Coming of Democracy?
Review: This is a very good history of the right to vote over the course of American history, with some surprises that shouldn't be for those left teary-eyed by the Fourth of July speeches concerning such matters. Democracy has evolved since the beginning of the American experiment, and we should hope that it will continue to do so, to earn its title. Created as a republic in the old-fashioned sense,with conditions of property for eligibility, the slow progression toward 'democracy' begins in the generations after the American Revolution, proceeding briskly yet with severe delimitations, the Civil, Reconstruction, the Second Reconstruction, and the woman's suffrage movement being important by-stations. This account does the job very well of refloatating the shadowy history, ending with a plaintive inspection of the steady retreat of voters from the voting booths. This book could be a useful introduction to the just published book, The Vanishing Voter, and is also, quite apart from its significance for the study of American history, a good companion to the study of the post-Civil War Reconstruction, where the general trend toward democratization actually reversed itself.