The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXII: “The American People, Generous, Liberty-loving”

    Compared to its predecessor, the 23^rd Amendment – the effect of which was to permit voters in the District of Columbia to take part in presidential elections – the 24^th Amendment to the United States Constitution arguably stands as one of the most consequential additions to the nation’s governing charter since the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments in the aftermath of the Civil War. It did not abolish slavery, of course, or ensure the equal protection of all persons under the law. But by unambiguously eliminating what had become a major impediment to the ability of millions of American citizens living in a particular region of the country to vote in federal elections, the 24^th Amendment effectively removed one of the most pernicious elements of the Southern Jim Crow regime and advanced the monumental project of social and political reform begun by the Reconstruction for the first time in nearly a century. The impediment in question, of course, was the so-called “poll tax,” the implementation of which required citizens to pay a nominal fee in order to successfully register to vote. So it was that the text of the 24^th Amendment, fully ratified by the states on January 23^rd, 1964, declared that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” But why was such a constitutional reform necessary at all? Why did any citizens of the United States suffer to have their right to voted essentially locked behind a paywall and who was it that finally sought to have this grossly immoral restriction abolished?

    As with so many of the alterations wrought to the basic framework of American democracy during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the elimination of the poll tax had its roots in the radical reformism of the aforementioned Reconstruction and the organized Southern reaction thereto. During the period in question, between about 1865 and 1877, the federal government oversaw a campaign of social and political restructuring in the occupied states of the defunct Confederacy, the most notable accomplishment of which was undoubtedly the passage of the series of constitutional amendments mentioned above. The 13^th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, the 14^th Amendment redefined citizenship and mandated equal protection under the law, and the 15^th Amendment – most relevantly to the present discussion – declared that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Unsurprisingly, none of these mandates – as handed down by a Congress to which most Southern states had not yet been readmitted – sat particularly well with Southern whites. Not only – from their perspective – had a federal government in which none of them were represented conspired to rob them of their property by forcing them to acknowledge the freedom of those that they had sought to keep enslaved, but it was also going to force them to acknowledge the basic political rights of these newly-freed peoples as well? A reaction, one can be sure, did not take long to coalesce.

    Tennessee was the first state in which white lawmakers were able to set things in motion, not the least because the Volunteer State was readmitted to the union before the rest of its Southern counterparts on July 24^th, 1866. By October 4^th, 1869, the local wing of the Democratic Party had already regained control of the state government following a brief period of Republican dominance, and by 1870 a new constitution had been adopted which included a provision for a poll tax within its text. Georgia followed a similar tack upon its own readmission to the union on July 15^th, 1870. As in Tennessee, first the government of Republican Rufus Bullock (1834-1907) was dislodged in 1871 – specifically under threat of violence directed by the Ku Klux Klan – and then in 1877, a new constitution was enacted which made the payment of a poll tax a prerequisite for exercising the franchise. In both cases – and in all of those that would follow – the aim and intention of white powerbrokers was very simple. Being nominally non-discriminatory – inasmuch as they were not based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” – a voter registration fee was thought unlikely to arouse the scrutiny of the federal courts while at the same time taking advantage of the relative poverty of the Black community of the contemporary South. Such taxes accordingly offered Southern lawmakers a way of circumventing their newly established constitutional obligation to recognize the citizenship of formerly enslaved peoples by essentially reasserting the basic principle of wealth-based voting that had previously been abandoned during the heyday of the Jacksonian Era in the 1830s. Poor whites would also be subject to this same democratic discrimination, of course, but this was generally seen as a small price to pay in exchange for the near-total disenfranchisement of an entire community of “undesirable” voters.

    Notwithstanding how quickly Tennessee and Georgia moved to act on this strategy, however, neither state actually implemented their poll taxes until a significant amount of time had passed. Florida, in the interim, adopted its own tax law in 1885, but also neglected to activate it until the beginning of the following decade. Indeed, it wasn’t until Mississippi legislators approved a poll tax of their own in 1890 that the dominoes began to fall. Georgia’s tax provision was activated in 1890 as well, along with Florida’s and Tennessee’s. This was followed by Arkansas’s adoption of a poll tax in 1891 – ratified by popular referendum in 1892 – South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina in 1900, Alabama in 1901, Texas and Virginia in 1902, and finally Georgia in 1908. By 1910, the whole of the former Confederacy was operating under an electoral regime whereby any voter, Black or white, unable to pay the stated fee and provide proof of payment upon request was denied the ability to cast their vote in any race, state or federal. Why had it taken almost fifty years following the end of the Civil War for the former Confederate states to follow through on their explicit desire to legally restrict the Black vote within their boundaries? In all likelihood, it was a combination of expediency and fear.

    During and immediately after the period of the Reconstruction, federal attention was closely fixed to the South and its local powerbrokers. Numerous states spent years at a time under the auspices of federally appointed military governments and former Confederates were subject to widespread disenfranchisement. The result was a degree of caution on the part of disgruntled Southern whites. As much as they might have desired to begin the process of reasserting their political and social preeminence, they were also aware that moving too quickly or too aggressively would only prolong and intensify the scrutiny of federal authorities. The creation of clandestine vigilante organizations like the Ku Klux Klan – the purpose of which was to harass, intimidate, or assault anyone and everyone who opposed the supposed supremacy of the white race – was one response to this situation, the threat of violence ever serving as a reliable means of discouraging undesirable political activity. The implementation of poll taxes and literacy tests was another, of course, though such methods need not have been attempted so long as a climate of fear was sufficiently stoked. The emergence of entities like the White League and the Redshirts to pick up where the Klan left off after its forcible disbandment in the early 1870s more or less ensured that as the Reconstruction came to an end, white politicians remained legally blameless – if only because their connections to the ongoing violence could not easily be proven – while white vigilante groups continued to suppress the Black vote. Some states, as aforementioned, did make a point of including poll tax provisions in their post-Civil War constitutions, but this was likely viewed as more of a precaution than a necessity. In most cases, in most states, fear was enough to reduce Black political participation to a barely perceptible minimum throughout the 1870s and 1880s. By the beginning of the 1890s, however, it was Southern Democrats’ turn to fear.                 

    What’s important to note, at this point in American history, is that while the Republicans remained the dominant party within the national political sphere – thanks to their continued association with the Union’s victory in the Civil War, the martyred Abraham Lincoln, and the successful adoption of the aforementioned Reconstruction Amendments – they were no longer quite the same Republicans as they had been in the 1860s. The 1870s and 1880s had witnessed rapid industrialization, the increasing urbanization of the nation’s economy, and tremendous growth on the part of railroads, mining, and even agriculture, all of which the governing Republicans – whose effective monopoly on power throughout this period was interrupted only once by the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) for a single term as president in 1884 – were only too happy to take credit. Indeed, it steadily became a primary concern for the party to keep this growth and prosperity going for as long as possible, the result of which was a gradual shift in Republican priorities away from high taxes, civil rights, bureaucratic reform, and flexible monetary policy and towards a rigorously pro-business agenda centered around high tariffs and maintaining the gold standard. By the beginning of the 1890s, the former party of Lincoln and abolitionism had accordingly become the party of industry and banking whose interests seemed to mainly revolve around mediating interparty squabbles and deciding whether or not to raise federal taxes on imports. The Reconstruction, which had been the brainchild of the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, had ended some thirteen years prior in 1877, and it was generally no longer seen as particularly important on the part of party leadership to continue to promote Black civil rights or guarantee Black political participation in the states of the former Confederacy.

    None of this is to say, mind you, that there wasn’t a single Republican in a position of power at the beginning of the 1890s who felt that there was something worthwhile in continuing to support the South’s beleaguered Black community. On the contrary, there were at least two. Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) was a two-time representative from Massachusetts and a close friend and ally of Theodore Roosevelt while George Frisbie Hoar (1826-1904) was a senator from the same state who had made a career out of supporting progressive social issues alongside orthodox Republican fiscal conservatism. Lodge, to be sure, was a fairly hard-hearted individual when it came to the plight of those whose lives and values did not align directly with his own, but he was also tactically flexible enough as a party strategist to seize upon potentially lucrative opportunities in spite of his own personal doubts. Later in the decade, for instance, in spite of his vocal disdain for the so-called “lower races,” he came out passionately in favor of American intervention on behalf of the Cuban people in their fight for independence from Spain. “Of the sympathies of the American people, generous, liberty-loving,” he famously remarked, “I have no question. They are with the Cubans in their struggle for freedom.” In truth, Lodge cared far less for the oppressed people of Cuba – whom his preferred immigration policies would not even have allowed into the United States – than for the chance that Spain’s inability to control what remained of its colonial empire provided to the United States to establish an empire of its own. But such was Lodge’s political genius. If principle got in the way of achieving a useful goal, then, simply put, to hell with principle.

    Senator Hoar was rather the opposite to Lodge in this respect, among others. Though both men were Massachusetts Republicans who maintained the primacy of so-called “sound” financial thinking – the gold standard, high tariffs, fiscal conservatism, etc. – Hoar was always ardently sympathetic to the downtrodden and disenfranchised to whom he felt the United States owed a debt. This did not necessarily extend to the working poor, it bears noting, whom Hoar would doubtless have seen fit to lecture about the virtues of hard work. But he was never less than an enthusiastic opponent of all forms of political corruption and institutionalized bigotry. He supported the full enfranchisement of Native Americans, for example, campaigned for Black civil rights, and called the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – the brainchild of men after Lodge’s own heart – “nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.” He was also an early proponent of women’s suffrage, a critic of American imperialism, and an opponent, in his capacity as a senator, of the annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines. Bearing all of this in mind, one might fairly say that from the perspective of a man like George Hoar, the Republican party of the late 1880s and early 1890s was really only living up to half of its responsibilities. On the one hand, it had managed to promote and maintain a degree of economic prosperity that had improved the lives and living standards of millions of Americans. On the other hand, however, by ignoring the plight of those whom the narrow-minded regarded as “inferior,” the party had simultaneously failed to ensure that this selfsame prosperity had been equitably distributed to all the various citizens of the American republic.

    Herein, at the intersection of Lodge’s opportunism and Hoar’s humanitarianism, we find the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, drafted and sponsored by the two Bay Staters and endorsed by virtually every Republican up to and including President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901). What did it entail? It was, in truth, a rather spicy cocktail by which the federal government would essentially take on the role of overseeing congressional elections by way of court-appointed monitors. Specifically, it would have allowed the federal circuit courts, pursuant to a petition signed by five hundred citizens of any congressional district in the country, to assign supervisors to watch over the conduct of an upcoming federal election. Said supervisors would have the power to physically attend the election in question, verify voter information flagged by state election officials, administer oaths to voters whose eligibility was held in doubt, inquire into voter registration lists, certify the final count, and even call upon the United States Marshals for the purpose of securing contested polling places. In light of the fact that Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution customarily establishes the states as the default administrators of popular voting at the federal level, the passage of an act containing the provisions described above would have represented a fundamental shift – if also a perfectly permissible one – in the practice and character of congressional elections. But while the Lodge-Hoar bill, as written, would have applied to the entire country as a whole, it was also clear to all concerned in 1890 that it was really only aimed at altering how congressional elections were conducted in the South.

    Southern Democrats were the ones responsible for keeping the Reconstruction Amendments from achieving their full effect, after all. Granted, formal legal discrimination in the form of literacy tests and poll taxes had yet to become particularly widespread. But the decades that followed the defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery bore witness to many incidents of politically motivated violence and coercion directed by the region’s white powerbrokers against its newly enfranchised Black community. In Louisiana in 1873, for example, in the aftermath of a gubernatorial election marred by mass voter intimidation, a group of Black militiamen who had converged on the Grant Parish courthouse in an effort to ensure that local Republican officials would not be forced from office by their Democratic rivals were taken prisoner by an opposing white militia force and summarily executed in an event since memorialized as the Colfax Massacre. The following year, in Eufaula, Alabama, a local chapter of the paramilitary White League ambushed a group of Black voters as they were approaching their local polling place and proceeded to kill fifty of them, wound seventy others, and drive off as many as a thousand. Two years later, in yet another such incident, Black members of the Hamburg, South Carolina militia were attacked, captured, and murdered by a force of Red Shirts and local white planters intent on frightening Black Republicans away from the polls in the midst of the turbulent Election of 1876. These were but some of the most high-profile cases, of course, and could hardly be said to represent anything like an exhaustive list. What they do demonstrate, however – and what they demonstrated at the time– was the brazen willingness of white citizens and political leaders in the South to use violence, intimidation, and murder to circumvent their aforementioned legal obligation to recognize the basic political rights of the region’s Black inhabitants. In each of these cases, the parties responsible made no secret of their identities, submitted themselves to the appropriate – and uniformly white – legal authorities, and were summarily acquitted.

    While it was true that, in some cases, local Republican authorities were complicit in the worst of these incidents – with many anti-Grant Republicans joining forces with the Democrats during the 1872 election cycle – the national party remained at least nominally outraged by such flagrant examples of vigilante violence being perpetrated in the name of white supremacy. This sense of outrage did not necessarily arouse the party leadership to take a stand in favor of support for Black civil rights, per se – the limp and ultimately pointless Civil Rights Act of 1875 being very much a case in point – but there did at least remain a simmering undercurrent of outrage within certain sections of the Republican caucus. Senator Hoar was one such section all on his own, having personally shepherded the aforementioned civil rights act through the Senate in tribute to his colleague, the lately departed Charles Sumner (1811-1874). Doubtless, Hoar grew increasingly agitated as the years went by between 1875 and 1890 and no further federal aid to the nation’s besieged Black community materialized. When that latter year dawned, therefore, and Representative Lodge offered forth his ambitious federal elections bill, Hoar naturally offered his endorsement and became the most ardent co-sponsor that his fellow Bay Stater could have hoped for. Lodge himself, as aforementioned, was likely not acting out of purest concern for the plight of his fellow Americans. The man was, after all, something of a white supremacist himself. But he was also, above and beyond that, both a Republican and a keen political strategist. And if he could manage to use the federal courts to re-enfranchise potentially millions of likely Republican voters across the American South, the Democrats would be left scrambling and Republican dominance – which had begun slipping – would once more be reassured.

    Ironically enough, it was the fact that the Republican Party had begun to lose the primacy of place to which it had become accustomed since the conclusion of the American Civil War that in many ways doomed the Lodge-Hoar Bill to ignominy and defeat. Though the Republicans had taken back the White House in 1888 with the election of former Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison as president while also recapturing control of Congress, their majorities in both houses were particularly slim. At the first meeting of the 51^st Congress in March of 1889, in fact, Republicans controlled the Senate by only two seats and the House by only four. This changed somewhat over the course of the year that followed with the admission of South Dakota, North Dakota, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana as states – all of which sent Republicans to represent them in Congress – but even by the late summer of 1890, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats in the Senate by a margin of forty-four to thirty-six, there still wasn’t enough room for the governing party to effectively guard against filibusters. It was also becoming exceptionally clear that the Democratic Party had nearly recovered its national powerbase. The election of Grover Cleveland as president in 1884 was proof enough of that, as was his superior popular vote total in the Election of 1888. Republicans, in consequence, were inclined to tread somewhat carefully. Certainly, they felt they’d earned a mandate to enact most of the financial legislation they desired, with the hope that a continually buoyant economy would reflect favorably upon their leadership. But if they pushed too far, failed to mollify the right constituencies, the whole edifice of Republican dominance could have easily come tumbling down.

    So it was, in the wanning months of 1890, that the Republican Party found itself in a somewhat awkward position. There were, in the Senate, three key pieces of legislation at that moment up for debate. One, the Silver Purchase Act, sought to shore up Republican support in the newly admitted Western states and stave off the growth of agrarian populism by mandating the federal purchase of silver in exchange for treasury bills redeemable in gold. The second, the Tariff Act, proposed to adjust certain taxes on imports as a means of protecting domestic industries from foreign competition. And the third, of course, was the Federal Elections Act, which looked to use the federal courts to better enforce the provisions of 15^th Amendment as they applied to congressional elections. The Tariff Act – brainchild of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman William McKinley (1843-1901) – was, for its part, seen by Republicans as an essential component of the popular mandate that they had secured in the Election of 1888. The protectionist policies of the 1870s and 1880s had succeeded, to that point, in spurring the rapid growth of a number of domestic industries – from railroads, to mining, to manufacturing, to textiles – and it seemed clear to Republican legislators that, by returning them to power, the American people were effectively demanding more of the same.

    The Democrats – who, at this time, principally represented the nation’s rural population – were conversely opposed to any such measures, particularly as they threatened to raise the purchase price of domestic goods that might have been more cheaply sourced from overseas. With many of their constituents still feeling the aftershocks of the Panic of 1873 – brought about by overinvestment in railroads and a drop in global silver prices – they instead advocated a policy of controlled inflation whereby the federal government would purchase silver mined in the West and flood the domestic market with cheap dollars that farmers could then use to pay off their heavy debt loads. The passage of the Bland-Allison Act in 1878 – cosponsored by Missouri Democrat Richard Bland (1835-1899) and Iowa Republican William Allison (1829-1908) – went some way towards accomplishing this goal, though the nation’s rural interests and its silver miners remained substantially unsatisfied. The admission of several Western states to the union over the course of 1889 and 1890 where silver mining was particularly prominent further complicated the issue by adding a significant number of pro-silver votes to the House and the Senate at a time when the governing Republicans could ill afford to start hemorrhaging support. The result was the drafting of the Silver Purchase Act of 1890, a kind of retread of the Bland-Allison Act that aimed to increase the amount of silver that the federal government was required to purchase on a monthly basis. As the resulting scarcity of domestic silver would drive up the material’s commodity price, the Western mining interests were very much in favor. And as the increased minting of silver coinage would reduce the value of the dollar and allow farmers nationwide to pay off their debts more easily, rural interests favored it as well. The group that remained either unsure or opposed, of course, were the bankers, the industrialists, and their “sound money” Republican supporters.

    Inevitably, something of a showdown ensued. With only forty-six votes in the Senate – of the fifty-nine needed to reach a two-thirds supermajority and shut down a filibuster – Republicans could not afford either to spit their own caucus or alienate too many Democrats. Pro-business, pro-gold Republicans and their handful of Democratic allies favored the passage of Congressman McKinley’s Tariff Act but were wary of the Silver Purchase Act and the monetary destabilization it seemed apt to promote. Western, pro-silver Republicans and their rural Democratic allies, meanwhile, were eager to both secure the loyalty of the newly admitted Western states and prop up the nation’s ailing agricultural interests but viewed the McKinley Tariff as a needless and ultimately costly attempt to fulfil a campaign promise that should not have been made in the first place. Compromise was possible, of course, provided both sides were prepared to haggle a little over the details. Quite simply impossible, however, was the passage of any bill by way of Democratic support so long as Republicans insisted on putting forth the aforementioned Federal Elections Act. Enough Democrats were willing to swallow another raft of high federal tariffs if it meant delivering aid to their rural constituents in the form of a program of inflationary silver purchases. But no Southern Democrat desirous of keeping their seat in Congress was willing to countenance the imposition of federal oversight in the realm of congressional elections. And no Northern Democrat interested in being able to govern again at some point in the future was interested in alienating their Southern co-partisans by getting anywhere near such a radical proposal.

    The Federal Elections Act, in consequence, was quickly and unceremoniously scrapped. It may have enjoyed the tacit support of every Republican in Congress, but when push came to shove, the party leadership simply wasn’t willing to jeopardize its national financial program over the plight of a community whose political support they’d managed to get along with just fine without. The Silver Purchase Act was accordingly approved by Congress in July of 1890, followed three months later by the McKinley’s vaunted Tariff Act. Pro-business Republicans got what they wanted in the form of more protectionism, pro-silver Republicans got what they wanted in the form of inflationary silver purchases, and the South’s Black community was effectively left to go hang. This latter outcome in particular sent a powerful signal to Southern whites who had but lately been given cause to worry that their stranglehold on local political power was about to be disrupted by increased federal oversight. The national Republican Party, they were given to conclude, no longer particularly cared about Black civil rights. Or at the least, it didn’t care enough to make it a legislative priority. The door was accordingly now wide open to much more blatant and much more thorough forms of electoral discrimination than had previously been thought possible. Mississippi, as aforementioned, set the trend that was to follow by approving a poll tax bill before the year was out. Within two decades, every Southern state had followed suit, the result being the imposition of a legal regime of voter suppression far more effective than the scattershot violence that had characterized the 1870s and 1880s. Federal opposition to such practices, while not quite nonexistent, consistently failed to materialize in any way that could be described as substantial. Repeated challenges in the federal courts were shot down one after another – Williams v. Mississippi (1898), Giles v. Harris (1904), etc. – and by the end of the first decade of the nascent 20^th century, it had become settled law and settled fact that poll taxes were constitutional and that they were very much here to stay.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXI: Faults and Aspirations

    The resolution which would eventually become the 23^rd Amendment to the US Constitution was approved by the various states in much the same manner as its predecessors. In stages, that is to say, though perhaps with uncommon speed. The Senate had finally approved what remained of the original S.J. Res. 39 – whereby the inhabitants of the District of Columbia would be granted the right to choose a number of delegates to the Electoral College no greater than that permitted to the least populous state – on June 16^th, 1960, at which time the proposal was submitted to the state legislatures. In most cases, the immediate result would have been a quick burst of ratifications by a small handful of states – presumably those whose legislators were particularly enthusiastic for the measure at hand – followed by a pause until the next regular meeting of state lawmakers in the winter. In this, the 23^rd Amendment was no different than its predecessors, with Hawaii (June 23^rd) and Massachusetts (August 22^nd) both voting for ratification before the summer was out before a lengthy pause ensued stretching into the winter of 1960/61. At his point, however, things rather took off. Following New Jersey’s ratification on December 19^th, January alone witnessed seven more states add their names to the list, followed by thirteen in February, and fifteen in March. Ultimately, with the affirmative votes of Kansas and Ohio on March 29^th, the process was complete, the threshold of thirty-eight states having been reached in less than a year. Never before had an amendment been approved so speedily. Indeed, if one considers the passage of the original Senate resolution on February 2^nd, 1960 as the actual beginning of the process, the addition of the 23^rd Amendment to the Constitution took only thirteen months in total from conception to ratification. Why was this the case? Well, it’s really rather simple.

    On the one hand, the specific reform on offer wasn’t really all that significant. As discussed previously, the addition of three Electoral Votes to the total then being contested during the quadrennial presidential contests of the era would almost certainly have made no difference at all to the margin of victory of any given candidate for office. And so, since allowing the District of Columbia to participate in presidential elections was exceptionally unlikely to tilt the balance of power in favor of any existing party or interest, there was simply no good reason for the legislators of any of the states to stand in opposition to the amendment in question. Had the proposed amendment gone as far as allocating a number of representatives in Congress to the District of Columbia – as its authors had originally intended – the result would doubtless have been a bit more resistance from certain quarters. While two or three more congressmen would not have done much to upset the existing dynamic of the lower house of Congress, it would almost certainly have resulted in some potentially ugly confrontations between the leadership of the aforementioned Committee on the District of Columbia and the newly minted representatives chosen to speak for the inhabitants of the same. And if the amendment had gone as far as to establish representation for the District in the hallowed halls of the Senate? The addition to two more senators to what was then a body of one hundred would most definitely have altered the manner in which said body functioned.

    Four more senators had just been added in 1959, of course, with the admission of Hawaii and Alaska as states, but this earlier expansion of the upper house of Congress had at the very least carried with it a fairly predictable set of consequences. Hawaii and Alaska, that is, had both been organized territories before being admitted as states, and both had accordingly been possessed of locally elected governments. There was little reason to wonder, therefore, how these territories-cum-states would lean politically upon their formal admission to the union. One need only have observed the events of the so-called “Democratic Revolution of 1954” – during which a series of strikes and protests helped bring about the collapse of Republican Party control over Hawaii’s insular government – to know that, upon admission, Hawaii would send Democrats to the Senate. Just so, one need only have made note of the party affiliation of the most popular proponents for statehood – Ernest Gruening (1887-1974), William Egan (1914-1984), and Bob Bartlett (1904-1968), to name the most prominent – to know that the Alaska Territory would likewise almost certainly end up being represented by Democrats in the Senate. The District of Columbia, by comparison, was something of a black box. Circa 1960, there was no home rule mayor or city council, no congressional delegate, nor even an elected board of education. The Board of Commissioners administered the District from one day to the next and the aforementioned committees in Congress saw to its broader financial and infrastructural needs. Who could say, then, bearing all of this in mind, how the people of D.C. would vote once actually given the chance? Would the District’s Black majority incline them to side with the historically pro-civil rights Republicans? Or could the Democratic Party turn D.C. into a partisan stronghold by coming out strongly in support of an enfranchising amendment? In an era increasingly defined by bitter partisanship at the federal level, the fact that these kinds of question could not easily be answered helped make the prospect of D.C. enfranchisement something of a non-starter.

    Paradoxically, the inability of contemporary political observers to definitely identify the likely partisan loyalties of the inhabitants of the District of Columbia likely also helped ensure that the 23^rd Amendment was ratified. The addition, as aforementioned, of just three Electoral Votes to the existing tally – circa 1960 – of five hundred and thirty-five may have been unlikely to tip the balance of any given presidential election in favor of one candidate or another, but the prospect of winning these selfsame votes wasn’t something that either major party had any real reason to turn down. And since it remained, until the next presidential contest following the ratification of the amendment in question, something of a mystery exactly how the residents of D.C. would end up casting their votes, both Democrats and Republicans had reason enough to come out in favor of the same. It was not a particularly urgent thing, mind you, as made plain by the fact that almost all of the states that voted to ratify opted not to hold a special legislative session in order to do so. But the fact that the sitting president, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), as well as both major party candidates to succeed him, Republican Vice-President Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994) and Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), all endorsed the proposal upon its approval by the Senate was certainly no small thing. The forthcoming election was unlikely to be decided by a margin of three votes, of course. But in the realm of electoral politics – and particularly within the heightened context of the United States Electoral College – even a single vote, properly applied, could potentially have an outsized impact.

    This isn’t to say that everyone with any say in the matter was unambiguously supportive of the ratification of the 23^rd Amendment. Of the fifty states then – and now – included in the union, only forty have voted to ratify as of November, 2022. Of the ten that remain, one voted to reject the proposed amendment in January of 1961 and nine opted to take no action whatsoever. This result, in itself, is really not all that strange. The 21^st Amendment, formally approved in December of 1933, has only been ratified by thirty-eight states to date, with two states voting to reject it and eight more declining to take it up. Just so, the 22^nd Amendment has so far been ratified by only forty-one states, likewise accompanied by two rejections and no activity on the part of five states. Once an amendment crosses the threshold of formal approval, by and large, activity tends to drop off. That is, unless the reform which it contemplates is of particular moral or societal consequence. The fate of the 23^rd Amendment, in consequence, was quite in keeping with the norm, at the very least in terms of the number of states that ultimately approved it. What was strange, however – or at the very least noteworthy – was exactly which states specifically opted either to reject or ignore it. There were, as aforementioned, ten of them in all. Arkansas was the sole state that voted to reject the amendment out of hand. And the nine that opted to ignore it were Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia. Do all of these states have anything in common besides declining to ratify the 23^rd Amendment? Yes, in fact, they do. In addition to being, every one of them, located in the American South, there were all, as of the winter of 1960/61, under the control of segregationist Democratic governments.

    In light of the fact that Washington, D.C. had just become, as of the 1960 Census, the first major city in the United States with a Black majority population, the fact that nine Southern states could not even bring themselves to consider granting the city representation in the Electoral College – while a tenth actually voted to reject said grant – should perhaps not come as very much of a shock. While it was very much the case that the three Electoral Votes to be granted to the District of Columbia would almost certainly amount to very little in terms of their ability to sway a given presidential contest, the notion of enfranchising a Black majority city to any degree at all was surely too galling to many Southern segregationists to even contemplate undertaking. But this wasn’t just a question of partisan affiliation. Both major parties, as noted above, were officially for the effort. And while the original sponsors of the components of S.J. Res. 39 relevant to the District of Columbia – Kenneth Keating, Francis Case, and J. Glenn Beall – had all been Republicans, the man to whom they claimed inspiration was the late Matthew Neely, a West Virginia Democrat in good standing. In consequence, it would seem fair to say that though the success of the 23^rd Amendment was truly the result of bipartisan support, those who disfavored it were united less by party than by racial animus. Consider, to that end, some of the politicians who were in a position to decide whether their state took up the amendment.

    The Governor of Virginia during the winter of 1960/61 was one J. Lindsay Almond (1898-1986), a member of the Democratic political machine controlled by segregationist Senator Harry F. Byrd (1887-1966). While Almond was perhaps more moderate than Byrd on certain issues within the context of the ongoing struggle for Black civil rights – inasmuch as he did ultimately bow to federal desegregation orders during his terms as governor – his public rhetoric was nevertheless in keeping with his patron’s reactionary politics. When faced with the prospect of actually having to having to implement the finding of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), for example, his first reaction was to deliver a vitriolic public address in which he denounced, “Those whose purpose and design is to blend and amalgamate of the white and negro races” and whose goal, it seemed to him, was to replicate “the livid stench of sadism, sex immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere [.]” In South Carolina, meanwhile, the office of Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives was in the hands of a man named Solomon Blatt (1895-1986), a member of the so-called “Barnwell Ring” of influential local politicians. Though Blatt was himself the son of Russian Jewish immigrants – a fact which one might assume would grant him a degree of sympathy for those who face cultural or legal exclusion – he spent his entire public career – some fifty-three years in total – fighting against the desegregation of American public life.

    Texas, at this same time, was under the leadership of Governor Marion Price Daniel (1910-1988), a Democrat from Liberty County who, as the state’s Attorney General in the early 1950s, defended the University of Texas before the United States Supreme Court when it declined to admit a man named Herman Sweatt as a law student for no other reason than he was Black. Several years later, having been elected to represent Texas in the United States Senate, Daniel joined nineteen of his fellow senators – but was pointedly not joined by his fellow Texan, Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson – in signing the aforementioned Southern Manifesto. And then, in Mississippi, there was the inimitable Walter Sillers (1888-1966), Speaker of the Magnolia State’s House of Representatives and possibly one of the most racist figures in the history of Mississippi politics. In 1948, when President Truman sent a message to Congress requestion the implementation of the policies recommended by his Committee on Civil Rights, Sillers hurriedly led a group of Mississippi Democratic legislators in telegraphing the members of their state’s House delegation to resist any pressure they might have felt to go along. “We join with all the white Democrats in Mississippi [,]” read the dispatch, “who appreciate your forthright, outspoken denunciation of the president’s message and the damnable, communistic, unconstitutional, anti-American, anti-Southern legislation recommended to Congress [.]” Several years later, when Southern progressive journalist Hodding Carter (1907-1972) penned a derisive expose in Look magazine decrying the spread of White Citizen’s Councils in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Sillers famously responded on the floor of the Mississippi House that the article was a “Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor” and that Carter himself was, “Unfit to live in a decent white society.”

    With men such as these having risen to positions of power and influence in the states of Virginia, South Carolina, Texas, and Mississippi, it would seem plain enough precisely why they and their Southern sister states all declined to even take up the question of the 23^rd Amendment. Circa 1960/61, the United States was very much still grappling with the consequences of the Brown v. Board decision, the result of which, in most Southern states, was a degree of ideological retrenchment arguably not seen since the era of the Reconstruction. As federal authorities slowly but surely oversaw the process of desegregation in the nation’s public schools, state authorities in places like Louisiana and Alabama became increasingly confrontational in their response, the result of which was a general rousing, across the South, of popular suspicion of federal power and the amplification of increasingly hateful political rhetoric on the part of Southern officials. Within this specific context – which notably witnessed the Governor of Arkansas, one Orville Faubus (1910-1994), call out the state’s National Guard in 1957 in an attempt to prevent the integration of a public high school in Little Rock and saw Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd formulate a plan in 1956 to circumvent desegregation by closing any school that integrated while funneling public funds to private “segregation academies” – even a modest reform like that embodied by the 23^rd Amendment would doubtless have seemed a complete nonstarter on the part of the increasingly reactionary Southern political class. Three Electoral Votes, as aforementioned, would not have made much difference no matter which candidate they ultimately went to. But it would nevertheless have been extremely difficult, even if they felt the proposal in question to be generally a desirable one, for Southern powerbrokers to explain to the constituents they’d invested so much energy into riling up why it was acceptable on the one hand to grant the nation’s only Black majority city the ability to cast its vote for President but unacceptable on the other hand to let Black children attend the same schools as white children.

    This dilemma – if one may indeed call it that – is in many ways emblematic of the complicated moral and legal circumstances out of which the 23^rd Amendment ultimately arose. From the time that slavery became illegal in the District of Columbia with the passage of the Compensated Emancipation Act in 1862, to the inauguration of D.C.’s current home rule government in January of 1975, to the District’s currently stalled attempt to achieve admission to the union as a full-fledged state, the relationship between the capital city of the United State, the federal government, and the states themselves has been both fraught with tension and dominated by the issue of race. For generations, representatives and senators – among them notably those from the Jim Crow South – have treated the District of Columbia as though it was their own personal playground, taking away its elected governments, turning low-income neighborhoods into monumental public spaces, advancing infrastructure funding for the purpose of benefitting commuters, and pointedly ignoring the interests of the jurisdiction’s constantly growing Black community. Problematic legislators – men like aforementioned Theodore Bilbo, who was too vehement in his racism for even his fellow Southern Democrats – were shunted off onto the twin committees on the District of Columbia, the logic being that they would cause less harm there. And whenever a representative or senator was brave enough to lift their voice in defense of the District’s disenfranchised inhabitants, men like Spessard Holland or Joe Broyhill would rise and complain about how the City of Washington truly belonged to the American people and how, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, its citizen population could not really be compared to that of even the smallest state. Where all of these actions couched in explicitly racial terms? No, they were not. But did all of these actions have deeply racial implications? Absolutely. Indeed, it could not be otherwise.

    Since the District became a haven for former slaves in the early 1860s, the story of the nation’s capital has been one of the persistent white manhandling of an increasingly dominant Black population. One might, in fact, argue that the postbellum history of D.C. is really the history of the United States in microcosm across that same era. The Black community therein has alternately been tolerated and ignored, disenfranchised and manipulated, its fortunes only beginning to shift as its numbers became impossible to disregard. The story of the 23^rd Amendment, in turn, is a point of punctuation within this same chronicle. It is representative of a moment in the history of the United States wherein the unquestioned and unquestioning policies of the past were forced to justify themselves on one of the most prominent stages in the mainstream political sphere in the midst of a larger social and legal reckoning with institutionalized racial discrimination. Brown v. Board of Education had cracked open the armored shell of the Jim Crown South, leading to retrenchment on one side and rising hope on the other. If federal officials were actually willing to direct federal power towards the elimination of segregation in the nation’s public schools, what else might be possible? By what other means could those possessed of power within the federal political sphere further enfranchise Black Americans while also circumventing the authority of the often violently reactionary states?

    The District of Columbia provided the most obvious opportunity to accomplish exactly that. Not only was it the largest city in the county with a majority Black population, but it fell entirely within the authority of Congress to alter its situation. The Southerners would try to halt any progress, of course, in keeping with their record, but it was at least worth attempting to address one of the most embarrassing contradictions at the heart of American democracy. And the attempt was so made, bravely and earnestly. But just as it was only natural for the anti-segregationists and the reformers in Congress to try to use their constitutional authority over the District of Columbia to push forward the tide of positive change that the Supreme Court had inaugurated in 1954, so too was it arguably inevitable that the forces of the Jim Crow South would ultimately triumph. While the time would soon come when their policy of blanket obstructionism would reach the limit of its viability, the pro-segregation Southerners yet held the advantage at the beginning of the 1960s. And so, while the 23^rd Amendment was ultimately ratified and the District of Columbia granted its Electoral Votes, that was all that the proposal’s sponsors had been allowed to get away with. The result was something of a hollow, if not quite hopeless, victory. The more substantial reform of permitting D.C. to have representation in Congress had been struck down in committee without even the benefit of a debate on the floor. But for the first time since the 1870s, the ability of the District’s inhabitants to democratically express themselves had been expanded rather than curtailed. It was a small step, admittedly, but definitely a step in the right direction.

    As far as where it fits in terms of the dichotomy previously established – being primarily institutional or primarily popular in character – the 23^rd Amendment would seem to have the rare distinction of being one of the few institutional amendments to have been ratified since 1913. To reiterate, the 17^th Amendment shifted responsibility for electing senators from the various state legislatures to the voters of the states themselves upon its ratification on April 8^th, 1913. And this, in turn, has had the effect of altering the character of the kinds of constitutional amendments since proposed by Congress and ratified by the states. The reason for this change is that the 17^th Amendment has helped to make the drafting process of subsequent amendments more susceptible than was previously the case to popular agitation. Before the ratification of the same, only one of the two bodies responsible for writing and approving proposed amendments, the House, was subject to direct election by the voting public. The other, the Senate, was comparatively insulated from popular backlash by being directly responsible to the various state assemblies rather than to the voters themselves, creating a situation in which most senators were more beholden to the directives of their party and its local powerbrokers than to the citizens of the various states. The popular election of senators has naturally altered this arrangement, allowing the popular will to weigh wholly and directly upon the process of formulating amendments. In consequence, while amendments ratified previous to the 17^th were generally institutional in nature, haven arisen from discussions occurring entirely within the confines of the various institutions of state and federal power and taking as their object the amelioration or alteration of specific institutional conditions, amendments ratified since the 17^th have conversely been mainly popular in nature, having spun out of grassroots pressure campaigns and having been subject, at times, to intense public scrutiny and organization.

    That the 23^rd Amendment appears to defy this formulation is not proof that the formulation is false, however. Rather, it is simply a testament to the unusual nature of the subject matter concerned. The amendment in question was not subject to the kind of public agitation which has accompanied the formulation, debate, and ratification of most constitutional amendments since 1913 because, in this specific case, there was no public either willing or able to agitate. Unlike, say, the 18^th Amendment, which, once ratified, would apply to and effect the entirety of the United States of America, the 23^rd Amendment, as ultimately proposed to the states by Congress, only applied to the District of Columbia and its inhabitants. And since this jurisdiction was not represented in Congress in any manner – and would not be, even upon ratification – there was simply no reason for the amendment in question to become the subject of meaningful public organization. Doubtless, the citizens of D.C. themselves were eager to partake of any control over the affairs of the nation to whose laws they were subject. But the fact that they could neither threaten nor reward their representatives in Congress for either supporting or rejecting the measures under consideration – for the very simple reason that they had no representatives in Congress – ensured that their opinions on the subject effectively mattered the least.

    The inhabitants of the states, on the other hand, had it within their power to both influence the drafting and approval of the original proposal and exert their collective will upon the process of ratification in their respective state legislatures. What they lacked, however, was any compelling interest to undertake to accomplish either. The disposition of the District of Columbia and its inhabitants, in a very real sense, had essentially nothing to do with the daily lives and experiences of American citizens living elsewhere in the country. Three Electoral Votes was not nothing, of course. That was three more Electoral Votes up for grabs come the next presidential election. But as the addition of the same would almost certainly have no impact upon which of the more populous states ultimately chose the next president, what did it matter to let D.C. have its say? It was not an urgent thing, to be sure – nothing that called for a special session – but a bit of business that could be attended to without either anxiety or excitement. A bit of housekeeping, in essence, as far as the general public was concerned.

    For better or worse, it was really the members of Congress who had both the prevailing interest in what became of the District of Columbia and the power to enact whatever change they could collectively agree upon. One might fairly ask why it was that Congressmen from places like New York and Wyoming and Senators from places like Florida and South Dakota were so deeply concerned about the disposition of this tiny jurisdiction as to spend hours on end debating whether its inhabitants were worthy of exercising what should properly have been considered their essential rights as American citizens. Indeed, any reasonable person might have taken one look at the situation and concluded, as a matter of course, that the citizens of the District of Columbia were naturally entitled to the same political considerations as any of their fellow Americans. Unfortunately, as aforementioned, the historical relationship between Congress and the jurisdiction it calls home has but rarely had its basis in what was natural or reasonable. On the contrary, D.C. was, is, and may yet continue to be a sort of blank canvas upon which generations of lawmakers continuously seek to leave their mark. Often, they have treated it like a kind of political tool, either for the purpose of burnishing their own reputations “back home” or else in pursuit of some kind of personal legacy. And while, at other times, a senator here or a representative there have sought to use the power at their disposal to right the self-evident wrong that is the District’s inability to either govern itself or represent itself, these nobler efforts are arguably still tainted by the circumstances from which they arise. For even if a given lawmaker works to lift the District of Columbia to a political status functionally identical to that of a state out of the purest motives imaginable, the fact that the inhabitants of that selfsame jurisdiction must depend on the largesse of those who just happened to take an interest hardly rings of the American ethos of self-government.

    The 23^rd Amendment is, in many ways, symbolic of this entire arrangement. It was not the product of grassroots efforts intent on forcing popular policy change upon an otherwise staid and stubborn political class. Rather, it was the direct product of the continual infighting of that class, specifically as its various members sought to either appease their own sense of injustice or validate their own personal convictions. Given that the subject was the District of Columbia, this was more or less bound to be the outcome. D.C. essentially belonged to Congress – had been designed that way from the start – and though its inhabitants were still citizens of the United States of America, their fate had never really been theirs to decide. Were the framers of the original version of S.J. Res. 39 in the right when they attempted to remedy this situation by granting the District entry into the national political sphere? Most definitely. Indeed, the fact that Senators Keating, Case, and Beall all tried to enfranchise the people of the District of Columbia with no possible hope of reward – and in spite of the fact that such efforts took time away from their normal duties on behalf of the states that they each represented – really was a commendable thing. But the fact that these men were able to take on a project of such magnitude for those that it effected – seeking, as it did, to permit them to exercise certain of their rights as citizens for the first time in the American history – on what was essentially a whim rather echoes the problem that they were actively seeking to confront.

    Namely, that the District of Columbia was – and, in some ways, still is – a kind of plaything for the members of Congress to bat around at their leisure. They could play nice with it, or be cruel to it, or ignore it for years at a time. But whatever they did with it – whatever reforms they enacted, whatever policy changes they pursued – the end result would always reflect their faults and their aspirations. So it was that the 23^rd Amendment, upon its ratification by the state of Ohio on March 29^th, 1961, granted to the District of Columbia the same number of Electoral Votes as the smallest state in the union. Not because the people living there had successfully campaigned for this privilege. And not because a popular movement for the same had swept across the states. But only because certain members of Congress felt the need to right a wrong that troubled them personally while certain other members of Congress felt the need to uphold what seemed to them to be a beneficial status quo.