Compared to its predecessor, the 23rd Amendment – the effect of which was to permit voters in the District of Columbia to take part in presidential elections – the 24th 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 24th 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 24th Amendment, fully ratified by the states on January 23rd, 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 13th Amendment
abolished slavery in the United States, the 14th Amendment redefined
citizenship and mandated equal protection under the law, and the 15th
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 24th, 1866. By October 4th, 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 15th, 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 51st 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 15th 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 20th century, it had become settled law and settled fact that poll taxes were constitutional and that they were very much here to stay.
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