On March 30, the Republican id burst forth when President Trump said that the latest congressional stimulus bill “had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Two days later, the Republican House speaker in Georgia, David Ralston, admitted that an expansion of absentee voting would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
And on April 6, the U.S. Supreme Court refused, in a 5-to-4 ruling, to allow additional days for absentee voting in the Wisconsin primary. For years, Wisconsin Republicans have demonstrated that they will do anything to gerrymander and restrict access to voting to stay in power, including now asking citizens to risk their health to vote. Someone should ask Mr. Ralston and the conservative legislators and judges in Wisconsin what they are conserving.
Petitions are now flying around the internet, calling for mail-in voting as has long been practiced in Oregon and other states. Democrats are using Mr. Trump’s stumble into truth-telling as a fund-raiser. Republicans are trying to avoid the subject entirely or repeating worn-out claims of voter “fraud.”
This eruption has immediate consequences: Americans are about to see how fragile our right to vote really is. Among our many fears is the widespread concern over whether we will have an open and legitimate general election in November. If we are still stuck at home, will we be able to vote? Or will we have to risk our lives by venturing to our local school gym?
With customary ignorance, Mr. Trump has also stumbled unknowingly into history, our long tale of trickery, laws, Orwellian propaganda and violence as ways of keeping the mass of voters from casting ballots. Since the beginning of our Republic, and especially since Emancipation and the stirrings of black suffrage established in the 14th and 15th Amendments, restricting the franchise has been a frighteningly effective tool of conservatism and entrenched interests.
America has a long history of attempts to restrict the right to vote to people with property, with sufficient formal education and, too often, those privileged by gender or race. Political minorities — today’s Republican Party, antebellum slaveholders, Gilded Age oligarchs or rural states empowered disproportionately by the Electoral College — have always feared and suppressed the expansion of both the right and the access to the right to vote. There is no Republican majority in America, except on Election Days.
Mr. Trump’s rhetorical stumble into truth joins a litany of similar expressions in American history. The creation of black male suffrage was the most contested of all the problems of the early new state governments formed during Reconstruction. Most white Southerners were hellbent on trying to restore white supremacy, especially in voting. Appointed by President Andrew Johnson as South Carolina’s governor in 1865, Benjamin F. Perry believed that black suffrage would give political power over to “ignorant, stupid, demi-savage paupers.” In North Carolina, the politician William A. Graham believed enfranchising blacks would “roll back the tide of civilization two centuries at least.”
In Southern history, when the law wasn’t on the side of voter suppression, intimidation, fraud and murderous violence served as ready alternatives. As the historian Carol Anderson writes in her brilliant book “One Person, No Vote,” the techniques of voter suppression in the 19th century were conducted with “warped brilliance” and were “simultaneously mundane and pernicious,” whether by requiring voters to interpret bizarrely complex written passages to prove literacy, in fail-safe grandfather clauses or through allegedly race-neutral poll taxes. Today’s vote suppressors are no less pernicious, sporting earnest outrage at the fraud they cannot find.
As many Americans broadly came to embrace the defeat of Reconstruction in the South, viewing it as a futile, even unnatural, racial experiment, historians at the turn of the 20th century declared black suffrage the great demon of a “tragic era.” Writing in 1901 in The Atlantic, the historian William A. Dunning, whose work helped define a generation’s interpretation of the post-Civil War era, wrote of “The Undoing of Reconstruction.”
In Dunning’s polite brand of white supremacy, black voting during Reconstruction — which for a while brought political revolution and hundreds of black elected officials to the South — was a curse and a historical blunder. The “political equality of the negroes,” he maintained, went too far and necessitated a counterrevolution to roll it back.
Dunning never used our modern term, suppression. He called it “pressure applied by all these various methods” to reduce the black vote. Indeed, the “undoing” of Reconstruction could be measured, as Dunning celebrated, in the large reductions of black voter turnout in Southern states. Votes were not suppressed; they simply “disappeared,” he said, like bad weather.
In the 1884 presidential election compared with that of 1876, the black vote declined from 182,000 to 91,000 in South Carolina, 164,000 to 120,000 in Mississippi and 160,000 to 108,000 in Louisiana. As the Jim Crow system descended on Southern life, black voters became increasingly “extinct,” Dunning wrote. Dr. Anderson documents this “voter mortality rate” by the early 20th century: Between 1896 and 1904, registered black voters in Louisiana plummeted from 130,000 to 1,342, and in Alabama from 180,000 to 3,000. Today’s Republicans can only dream of such numbers, but they need only fractions of those counts to succeed. Their trickery matches their challenge. We should not mince words: Voter mortality is their goal.
Fueling Dunning’s confidence about Jim Crow’s control over voting was the coup and bloody massacre committed by white Democrats in Wilmington, N.C., in the election of 1898. The largest city in the state, Wilmington had forged a black majority and a successful black economic and political leadership. White Democrats found black rule and economic success unbearable. In a vicious white-supremacist campaign led by a Confederate veteran and congressman, Alfred Waddell, whites used lies, intimidation, cartoon journalism and racial terrorism to take back control first of the city and then of the entire state. Organized mobs, energized by grievance and racial hatred, violently overthrew the election.
In rousing speeches, Waddell made their “duty” clear to the mobs of Wilmington. “This city, county and state shall be rid of Negro domination, once and forever,” he shouted at an election-eve rally. “Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find a Negro voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!” The mob roared and raised their rifles in the air. On and after Election Day, 15 to 20 people were murdered in the immediate uprising, while hundreds of black women and children fled into nearby swamps. About 1,400 fled the city during the next 30 days.
Generations later, the right to vote never seemed so important and newly triumphant as on the day President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in the early spring, and the heroic march that it inspired; a brave and persistent civil rights movement; liberal Democrats joined by a key cadre of moderate Northern Republicans in Congress; and a converted, dedicated former segregationist in Johnson, who embraced his most important historic moment — all of this made the act possible. But it became law against the same resistance and rhetoric left over from the past.
W.B. Hicks, the leader of the white-supremacist Liberty Lobby, told Congress: “If the president’s law is passed, the South will disappear from the civilized world just as surely and certainly as Haiti did in 1804.” Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina trotted out numerous notorious segregationists to testify before his Senate Judiciary Committee. Leander Perez, the Democratic leader of a Louisiana parish, invoked the Dunning school vision of Reconstruction. The bill “was worse than the Thaddeus Stevens legislation during Reconstruction,” he said. “It is inconceivable that Americans would do that to Americans.” The new power of the Voting Rights Act empowered the Justice Department to scrutinize any changes to voting laws and practices (so-called preclearance) in seven states and other regions of the country with especially notorious records of denying the franchise.
As Ari Berman shows in his excellent book on the modern history of voter suppression, “Give Us the Ballot,” the Voting Rights Act has enjoyed many bipartisan renewals since the 1960s. Even the George W. Bush administration, in 2006, after long trying with its Justice Department to engineer new ways to restrict voting in the guise of protecting the “integrity” of the ballot and firing U.S. attorneys who would not pursue voter “fraud” cases that did not exist, buckled under huge public pressure and supported the renewal of the act.
But since Shelby v. Holder in 2013, in which the Supreme Court struck down the crucial preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, and even before that in other court challenges, a new era of Republican schemes of voter suppression has emerged. The party, increasingly dominated by conservative whites, has demonstrated not only its id but also its deepest fear: the loss of power in the face of demographic change it cannot control.
Mr. Trump’s newfound opposition to mail-in voting (having voted by mail himself in the past), claiming it is an invitation to fraud, is just one more example of the latest turn in the Republican obfuscation of reality. An “epidemic of fraud” stalked the Texas election system, claimed its attorney general (now governor) Greg Abbott, in 2005. In 2011 and 2012 alone, before the Shelby decision, 180 new voter restrictions were created in 41 states, and 27 specific laws were enacted in 19 states, nearly all controlled by Republicans.
Mr. Berman called this process “Old Poison, New Bottles.” And he’s right: Conservative voter suppression has always emerged in perceived crises and necessitated new variations on old lies about the threats of blacks or other marginalized groups to “civilization” or social “order,” or the “liberty” of the powerful. After the 2008 election, the Republicans paid lip service to a new inclusivity; the Obama coalition scared them. But the Tea Party, financial conservatives and Trumpian white nationalism have driven them instead into a spiral of moral panic and voter suppression.
When Trump stumbled into this history, he linked the crisis of his profound failure to manage a pandemic with the recurring challenge of how to conduct fair elections with the ballot truly free. We have many diseases to conquer. Lies and cunning sustain voter suppression in its many forms. Only truth and fierce political action can reveal and defeat it.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author, most recently, of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for history.
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