The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXV: “The Prime of Life and Capable of Earning Their Livelihood”

    Naturally, Spessard Holland was not about to ignore the condescension visited upon him by Richard Russell, a man who claimed him as a friend. Thus began, as the Senate session of March 14^th, 1962 wore on, a lengthy exchange between the two during which various other senators chimed in. To begin, Holland attempted to clarify with Russell that the former had approached the latter previously on the subject of a poll tax amendment and been met with signs of support. Russell avowed that while this was partially the case – Holland had approached him in 1949 in quest of support – he had never plainly stated that he was in favor of the measure in question. On the contrary, he went on to say, he had explained to Holland during their most recent conversation on the topic that he felt any anti-poll tax measures enacted at the federal level – in addition to flying in the face of the sovereignty of the individual states – was fundamentally wrongheaded in the era of the civil rights movement. “If there were any idea that the adoption of such an amendment would appease the so-called champions of the civil-rights program in the United States,” said Russell, the Senator from Florida “was entirely mistaken, but that, on the contrary, the adoption of this amendment would be like feeding a couple of peanuts to a hungry bear: It would only whet his appetite for more—in this case, for further legislation.”

    Holland, to his credit, did not rise to the bait which Russell’s invocation of the ongoing domestic struggle over civil rights plainly represented. The Georgian had just accused the Floridian of attempting to appease the liberal proponents of reform, the implication of which – from the perspective of a conservative Southerner – was arguably that the latter was somehow weak, overly fearful, or lacking in determination. But Holland’s response was only to declare that,

I [am] not interested in appeasement in any way […] In my opinion every citizen should, as a matter of right, be entitled to vote for President, Vice President, and Senators and Representatives; and that is all that is involved in this case. I do not like to think of the fact that in the part of Alabama just across the boundary line from the State of Florida […] there are citizens who cannot vote for President or Vice President unless they pay this tax, whereas directly across the boundary line, in Florida, the citizens who live there are not limited by such a requirement. I do not like to think of the fact that the citizens in our sister State, which we love so much, are confronted with that necessity.

In truth, Holland’s willful disregard for the fact that any conversation about the poll tax was bound, in 1962, to become a conversation about the civil rights movement didn’t do him any favors. The energy he spent repeatedly denying that his overall aim was in any way connected to the contemporary struggle on the part of the nation’s Black community for the full recognition of their political rights was undeniably energy which would have been better spent elsewhere. Nevertheless, one can almost admire his stubbornness. His objection to the poll tax, in his own words, was also admirably straightforward and clear. “Every citizen should, as a matter of right,” he said, “be entitled to vote for President, Vice President, and Senators and Representatives [.]” Being able to boil down his position to such a simple, arguably self-evident statement doubtless went a long way towards allaying many potential objections.

    Russell, unsurprisingly, chose this moment to pivot once again to a discussion of the supposedly meagre material cost of the poll tax rather than risk admitting that the thing was not morally justifiable. It made for a rather lengthy diatribe under the circumstances, but one still worth citing at length. The Georgia senator’s habit of dilatory exposition in an attempt to obscure the issue at hand was a classic example of the kind of rhetorical obstructionism regularly employed by Southern lawmakers in the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to stave off the passage of civil rights legislation. “I have always taken the position that this tax does not really prevent anyone from voting [,]” Russell accordingly began,

And I am not impressed by the arguments of those who today weep because of “the great burden of this tax” on voting […] in my own State this tax was not levied on women—women could vote without paying the tax; and it was not levied on veterans or on persons beyond age 55, as I recall. So the tax then applied only to a relatively small group of voters—those supposed to be in the prime of life and capable of earning their livelihood. Furthermore, every dollar received from the poll tax went into the school funds. It is said that the poll tax is a very onerous burden. However […] every one of the original States had voting restrictions much more onerous than the $1 poll tax […] Indeed, up to the time when there were some 25 or 30 States. there were very rigid property-ownership requirements or restrictions in connection with voting for instance, that one who wished to vote had to show that he had paid taxes on approximately $500 worth of property—and that was at a time when the dollar was really worth a dollar—long before the great inflation which has occurred since those days […] He had to own real estate or be a freeholder before he could vote. I had occasion to check into it and see just what proportion of the taxes paid in the United States today is involved in this horrendous, heavy, burdensome levy on the poor people to keep them from voting. It gets down to where one can hardly write the figure out. It is less than thirty-seven millionths of 1 percent of the total tax bill of the American people. If that is reduced to figures, one must put down a decimal, a 0, a 0, a 0, a 0, a 3, and a 7—thirty-seven millionths of 1 percent of the tax bill that the American people pay represents this crushing burden that is denying the people suffrage in the United States.

It is worth exploring the various components of this argument piecemeal, if for no other reason than to cultivate a more thorough understanding of precisely how the opponents of these kinds of reform measures attempted to sway their fellow senators against them. To that end, let us first consider this “relatively small group of voters” to which, Russell asserted, the poll tax in Georgia once applied.

    In the Peach State, the senator avowed, before its poll tax was repealed in 1945, said tax applied only to men who were not veterans and who were under the age of fifty-five. And in the decade between 1940 and 1950, Georgia’s population lay somewhere between about three and three and a half million. In consequence of these facts, even if these aforementioned exclusions ensured that as many as two million people were exempt from having to pay a tax in order to vote, that still left potentially one million Georgians subject to said monetary restriction. Russell’s claim, of course, was that these million or so people were “supposed to be in the prime of life and capable of earning their livelihood [,]” but this is fairly obviously an oversimplification. Not only did Russell have no way of knowing exactly what proportion of this supposedly able-bodied cohort was actually capable of regularly earning a living – that is, how many were free from chronic injury, chronic illness, or were considered broadly “employable” – but he entirely failed to account for the plainly observable fact that working even a fulltime job was not – and indeed is not – any kind of guarantee that the individual so employed will have access to discretionary spending. To this day, millions of people in the United States who work fulltime jobs live below the poverty line and cannot afford to spend even a single dollar on something other than their own survival. This state of affairs was doubly true in the relatively underdeveloped regions of the rural American South of the 1940s, and it was – and, indeed, is – triply true for those who belonged to the region’s Black community. Institutional discrimination within the economic sphere severely limited the job prospects of millions of Black Georgians – not to mention Black Americans across the nation – and effectively ensured that seemingly non-essential expenses like poll taxes were beyond their ability to pay.      

    Russell’s second point also represented something of an oversimplification. Or, if not that, exactly, then a kind of rhetorical bait-and-switch. It was very much the case, of course, that until the 1820s and 1830s, most states placed property qualifications on the ability of their citizens to vote. In New York, for example, until 1821, residents were required to own the equivalent of at least forty pounds of either private property or land in order to register as voters. This was also the case in Massachusetts – forty shillings in land or forty pounds in personal property – until 1820 and in Virginia – fifty acres of vacant land, twenty-fives acres of cultivated land, or a town lot and a house twelve feet by twelve – until as late as 1850. Compared to these kinds of restrictions – the purpose of which was to purposely disenfranchise the “lesser sort” within American society – being required to pay a single dollar every year would indeed appear to be hardly any kind of burden at all. A great accomplishment, one might call it, this shift towards universal suffrage. A triumph of American democracy. What such naval gazing fails to acknowledge, however – and that from which Russell doubtless hoped to distract his fellow senators considering – was that the elimination of onerous franchise qualifications was really only worth commemorating once every single American citizen of the proper age could vote. It was undeniable that the United States, circa 1962, had made great strides since its founding in terms of who qualified for citizenship and who among its citizens had access to the ballot. But the mere fact of these strides in no way excused the continued disenfranchisement of certain communities of American citizens. A far larger proportion of the American population could vote in 1962 than was the case in the 1790s, to be sure, but many millions were still barred from doing so by way of exclusionary measures like poll taxes. This was simply the fact of the matter.      

    Finally, Russell sought to conclude the cited diatribe with a bit of old-fashioned statistical obfuscation. What he had done, he explained, was “check into it and see just what proportion of the taxes paid in the United States today is involved in this horrendous, heavy, burdensome levy on the poor people to keep them from voting.” And the figure that he discovered – or purportedly discovered; he cited no sources whatsoever – was what one might charitably call vanishingly miniscule. “Less than thirty-seven millionths of 1 percent of the total tax bill of the American people [,]” he said, a number that “gets down to where one can hardly write [it] out.” But while thirty-seven millionths of 1 percent might sound like such a small amount of anything as to be practically insignificant, it was nevertheless provably the case that this relatively tiny component of the American republic’s overall tax bill still accounted for the disenfranchisement of millions of American citizens across the five states where poll taxes were still actively collected. What Russell was counting on, of course, was that his fellow senators would decline to consider the real numbers behind the calculations he presented. That, and the simple fact that many of them remained woefully uninformed as to the circumstances under which the poorest Americans were forced to live.

    Being senators, Russell and his colleagues naturally travelled in rather exalted circles, rubbing shoulders with business leaders, foreign potentates, and their fellow statesmen far more often than with the least fortunate among their constituents. And even among those who evidenced a more populist bent to their politics – who possessed strong connections with the labor movement, say, or kept generous hours at the constituency offices – the fact that economic disparities, as a rule, most strongly impact communities of color would still more or less ensure that most of the senators serving in the 87^th Congress in 1962 – an overwhelmingly white cohort of public servants – had never encountered someone who literally couldn’t afford to pay a poll tax. Russell’s argument, therefore, struck at two fronts. First, by discussing the impact of the poll tax in terms of percentages rather than real numbers, it gave the assembled senators an easy excuse to disregard out of hand the notion that said tax was in any way onerous or burdensome. And second, it played upon the almost certain inability of any senator to recall a specific example of one of their constituents being disenfranchised by the same. The poll tax, as aforementioned, remained active in only five states, all of which were in the American South and all of which were dominated by the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party. Not only were the representatives of these states in the Senate exceptionally unlikely to volunteer any concrete examples of voters having been disenfranchised by the poll tax in direct defiance of Russell’s assertion, but even if they wanted to, it was very nearly a certainty that none of them had ever had so much as a civil conversation with a member of one of the communities in their state most likely to be so affected.

    Unfortunately, before Senator Holland could offer his own analysis of the obvious flaws in Richard Russell’s arguments, another of his fellow Democrats inadvertently dragged the conversation into something of a discursive cul-de-sac. It was assuredly a well-intentioned interjection on the part of Illinois Democrat Paul Douglas (1892-1976), but one which sadly played directly into Senator Russell’s hands: did the Senator from Georgia likewise disapprove of the 19^th Amendment? In light of the Georgian’s stated antipathy towards any measure that infringed upon the sovereignty of the states, it was not necessarily an unreasonable question. After first making a joke of the fact that the amendment in question – that which removed any restrictions upon the ability of women to vote – has been approved several years before he even began his career in politics, Russell then stated that if he had been a member of the Senate in 1919, he probably would have voted against it. Not a surprising admission, in fairness, and certainly in keeping with the Georgian’s stated position. But when Douglas then asked Russell whether or not he likewise disapproved of the 15^th Amendment, the conversation took a turn form which it would recover only at length.

    What Russell proceeded to engage in, across several exchanges with his fellow Senators, is what was known in the context of late 19^th century American politics as “waving the bloody shirt.” Rather than engage in any kind of substantive examination of his feelings on the subject of the 15^th Amendment and the changes that it had wrought upon the basic fabric of American social and political life, the Georgian instead continually sought to recall the horrible loss of life which the Civil War had extracted from the South as though that selfsame bloodshed had earned Southerners perpetual immunity from being questioned on matters pertaining to the Reconstruction and its legacy. “That amendment [,]” he began accordingly, referring to the aforementioned 15^th,

Was written in the blood of the Civil War, and was inevitable after Appomattox, and the South is reconciled to it. We were not happy about it, but it was written in blood, by the bayonets of the soldiers of our friend from Illinois and other States who overpowered us in the most calamitous and fratricidal strife this Nation has ever seen. We paid a terrific price for our idea that we could depart in peace or that one Southerner could lick four Yankees. We were not able to show the latter. We found out one could lick three. We were confronted with that fact as a practical proposition. We were faced with that advantage, and I think we have very little to be ashamed of. But the 15th amendment was written in the blood that was so grievously shed in the Civil War and was a natural concomitant of Appomattox.

The question that Russell was asked – whether he favored the 15^th Amendment or not – was obviously meant to get at the degree to which his stated belief in the right of the states to determine the parameters of the franchise would extend to endorsing a position which, in 1962, was publicly unsupportable for all but the most rabid white supremacists. That is, it was meant to force Russell to admit that he would prefer it if any state that so desired could deny the vote to any of its citizens based on the color of their skin. But while he might have felt that such an end really was desirable, Russell could not publicly say so lest he turn the ongoing debate – in a way that he had just warned Senator Holland against – into a conversation about civil rights. Thus did he attempt a diversionary invocation of the American Civil War.

    A seemingly successful invocation, as it turned out. The debate then ongoing in the Senate almost immediately ceased to be about whether Russell favored absolute state control over the franchise – which, again, he very likely did – and instead devolved into a kind of memorialization of the suffering that the South had been forced to endure over the course of the first half of the 1860s. Russell’s position, in effect, was that he could not speak to the suffering being daily inflicted upon the nation’s Black community in the form of the poll tax because he was himself too distraught over the suffering of his Southern kinsman of a century past. In this mode, he thus continued.  “No, I cannot say,” he avowed,

Considering the sorrow and the great losses that were inflicted on the people of my blood and of my kin, that we rejoiced in the outcome of the Civil War, but I would not repeal the 15th amendment. I would not deny to a man of color or any other race the right to vote; nor would I deny it if I had the power to do so. But I am not enthusiastic about the amendment.

Regrettably, this was not the end of the conversation. Though he had gotten around to more or less answering Douglas’s question, Russell apparently still had some things to say on the subject of the Civil War. To that end, when further asked by his colleague from Illinois, Senator Douglas, about his thoughts on some of the provisions of the aforesaid 15^th Amendment, the Georgian first responded by asserting that he did not agree with certain interpretations of the same only to once more evoke the memory of the War Between the States. “If the Senator is going to try to get me to apologize for the Civil War at this late date [,] Russell declared,

Or to get on my knees any further than was necessary at Appomattox, I shall not do it. I am proud of our part in it, though it was one of the greatest tragedies this country was confronted with. I am proud of the record the people of my blood made in it, and men of my clan shed their blood on battlefields from Gettysburg to Brice’s Cross Roads.

Central to Russell’s plan, no doubt, was to appeal to the emotions of his fellow senators. In spite of the fact that it had taken place a century prior, the Civil War remained a deeply relevant cultural touchstone in contemporary American political and popular culture. More than a few Senators and Representatives could claim fathers or grandfathers who served on one side or the other, and the Southern political elite in particular continued to attach a great deal of importance to the events of the conflict and its aftermath. It would not have been difficult, therefore, to elicit a chorus of reactions in the Senate – even as late as 1962 – by invoking the Civil War and the suffering endured by its various participants. As each member of the Senate so roused took their turn speaking fervently of the contributions of their kin, the intended topic of conversation – an anti-poll tax amendment – would simply fade into the background. And for a moment, at least, this is what started to happen. New Mexico Democrat Dennis Chavez (1888-1962) asked for Russell to yield the floor and then proceeded to enumerate the various contributions of his own forebearers to that same conflict. His grandfather fought the Confederates during their campaign in New Mexico, he said. They did what was right, just as Chavez himself endeavored to do. Russell must have been overjoyed. Naturally, he thanked Senator Chavez for his and his forebear’s contribution. And then, in keeping with his latest obfuscatory strategy, he continued with his commemoration of the Civil War and its Southern participants. But while the Georgian’s next declaration on this particular topic thankfully turned out to be his last, it was also, arguably, the most distressing of the lot.

“The story of the Civil War [,]” said Russell,

Is a sad and tragic one, but I have no apologies to make for the South […] The southerners were mistaken in a great many instances, but they paid in blood for their mistakes. There is no higher coin in which payments can be made. I wish to say further that any man of southern descent has a right to be proud of the record made by those men who wore the gray, and history does not record a more indomitable or longer drawn out fight against overwhelming odds than was made by the Confederacy. Their valor was so great that it is a part of the common heritage of every part of this Union, and every good American should appreciate it as a part of the history of his country.

His attempt at distraction notwithstanding – his remarks were less about the Civil War than they were about anything other than the poll tax – there was something deeply troubling about the sentiment that Senator Russell seemed to be expressing. “The southerners were mistaken in a great many instances,” he said, “but they paid in blood for their mistakes. There is no higher coin in which payments can be made.” In what “instances” might the Southerners have conceivably been mistaken to a greater extent than their defense of the institution of slavery and their willingness to kill to uphold it? A grave error, that, and one that it would not seem wise to forget. And yet Richard Russell seemed to be claiming that recompense had been made. The people of the South, he said, “paid in blood for their mistakes [,]” as if that blood could wash away the essential fact of their grave error. As if the fact that they lost the war wholly absolved the Confederacy and its supporters of the crime that was – and is – slavery.

    What did any of this have to do with Senator Holland’s anti-pol tax amendment? Very little, looked at one way; a great deal, looked at another. The purpose of the poll tax – as enacted in the various Southern states over the course of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – was to essentially negate the effects of the 15^th Amendment by legally denying to most members of the region’s Black community their constitutionally-guaranteed right to the electoral franchise. It was a direct – if delayed – reaction to the outcome of the Civil War and very much carried the stamp of Southern bitterness concerning the same. By bending the conversation towards a memorialization of the conflict – specifically by invoking the mix of sorrow and pride with which Southerners tended to view it in retrospect – Russell was thus arguably serving to remind his fellow Senators of where the poll tax came from and what purpose it was intended to serve. That is, from his perceptive, the righting of a great historical wrong. At the same time, of course, Russell’s remarks could also fairly be construed as little more than a strategic distraction. As stated previously, the suffering that the senator was endeavoring to call to mind took place a century prior and was experienced primarily by soldiers who volunteered to fight in service of a group of pro-slavery insurrectionists. Their bloodshed was not meaningless, to be sure – their losses, and those of their families, were most definitely real and significant. But this fact obscured the vital reality that an anti-poll tax amendment was intended to address. While thousands of Southerners may have suffered for having supported and fought for the Confederacy over the course of the American Civil War, many millions more were suffering in the states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and Alabama at the very moment Senator Russell was speaking. Nothing more could be done for the Civil War dead that hadn’t been done already. But something most certainly could be done for those whose right to the franchise was being actively denied because they could not afford to pay a tax.

    Senator Holland, to his credit, was savvy enough to keep this fact squarely in mind. He was a Southerner himself, of course, and the son and grandson of Confederate veterans. But while he was willing, to an extent, to add his voice to that of Senator Chavez in celebrating the contributions of his forebears to the course of American history, he did not allow himself to be distracted from his ultimate goal. “I commend the distinguished Senator for speaking with such fervor about the service and the sacrifice of the men of the South,” he said,

And it would also be true to say the same of the women. It happens that both my grandfathers and my father bore to their dying day upon their bodies wounds they had suffered in various battles, and all of them on the southern side. The reason for my rising, however, is to avert what I fear might occur as the result of the questions of my distinguished friend, the Senator from Illinois, which might indicate that the 15th amendment was the only field in which the poll tax operated.

Notwithstanding the fact that he was among the intended targets of Senator Russell’s emotional diversion into the 1860s, Holland was adamant that the conversation remain firmly planted in the 1960s. That is to say, it was the poll tax that concerned him and it was the poll tax that the was prepared to discuss. When Russell responded that he did not think “the 15th amendment touches the poll tax in any place or in any shape, form or fashion, in my own view [,]” Holland seized upon the opening and began to steer things back on course.

“I agree with the Senator [,]” the Floridian said.

The point I make is that the poll tax amendment I shall offer later, when the appropriate time comes […] will operate in favor of colored people and of white people, in favor of people of all colors, religions, and creeds. It was shown in my own State, when we repealed the poll tax in 1937—and I had a modest part in doing that, as a member of the State senate at the time—that at the next election, in 1940, at which time the colored people were not voting in my State, there was an immense increase in participation in voting by the white people. This resulted from the fact that many people, because of penury or because of carelessness or because of a dislike of what they saw happening in some counties as a result of the poll tax, had not participated in the elections. These people came in to participate […] I think the Senator is correct in stating that the proposal does not come under the ordinary classification of the ordinary civil rights legislation. It applies to majorities, to minorities, and to every person of every color. It attempts to give to people who otherwise qualify the right to cast their votes for elected Federal officials. The Senator well knows that is the case. I merely wished to make the record clear.

Once again, Holland’s stubbornness arguably rises to the point of being admirable. Not everything that he said could necessarily be characterized as praiseworthy, of course. In specifically citing the role he played in his home state’s repeal of its own poll tax in the late 1930s, the Floridian gave evidence of the extent to which his efforts in favor of a federal ban on such franchise restrictions were bound up with his sense of personal and professional pride. Likewise, Holland’s offhand remark that, circa 1940, “the colored people were not voting in my State” completely – and doubtless purposely – elided the extent to which the government of the Sunshine State continued to engage in vote suppression even after its poll tax was repealed. But while Senator Holland’s motives might not have been entirely unimpeachable – moved as he was, it seemed, by pride more than any particular concern for the community that that poll taxes were designed to disenfranchise – his determination was nevertheless more than a little impressive. While Senator Russell cycled through one rhetorical approach after another in an attempt to either discredit the Floridian’s position or else divert the conversation entirely, Holland remained steadfast, resolute, unphased. He had labored for almost fifteen years to reach this pivotal moment, and the purposefully tangential ramblings of a crafty Georgian simply weren’t going to get in his way.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXIV: “One Aberration in the Course of a Long Career”

     The story of Arkansas’s eleventh-hour repeal of its state-level poll tax directly overlaps with – and was influenced by – the larger federal effort, of course. Indeed – and as aforementioned – it was the approval of an anti-poll tax amendment by Congress in August of 1962 and the impending creation of a two-track system of voter registration that prompted the Natural State’s powerbrokers to investigate and eventually settle upon wholesale abolition. So what, then, was going on at the federal level to cause this chain of events to occur? How was it that the anti-poll tax movement was able to transition from success in the states in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s to success in Congress by the beginning of the 1960s? The simplest answer to these questions is the name Spessard Holland. First a state legislator – during which time, as previously discussed, he worked to abolish the poll tax in Florida – then a governor, and then a senator from the Sunshine State, Holland effectively made the abolition of the poll tax at the federal level the leitmotif of his career in Congress. First appointed to the Senate in 1946 to fill an unexpected vacancy, Holland spent the better part of the next fifteen years introducing a resolution banning the poll tax in every session of every Congress between the 79^th and the 87^th. Twice, his efforts came relatively close to success. In July of 1947, his H.R. 29 was approved in the House by a substantial margin only to be filibustered to death in the Senate. Practically the same thing happened again in July of 1949, though this time the resolution suffered the quieter death of being bottled up in committee. Indeed, it was not until the summer of 1962 that Holland finally succeeded at making manifest what might fairly be described as his life’s ambition.

    But why should this have been the case at all? Why was Spessard Holland, an avowed segregationist who would go on to vote against the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), so ardently convinced that poll taxes – which had been designed and implemented in order to suppress the Black vote in the South – had no place in American democracy? The answer to this question has everything to do with the New Deal and its connection to Holland’s political career. As a young and ambitious Florida politician in the mid-1930s, it made all the sense in the world for a Democratic State Senator like Spessard Holland to come out strongly in favor of what could quite reasonably be characterized as a barrier to the political participation of the American working class. The Democratic Party was then in the midst of a massive political realignment in which economic and electoral populism would go on to play significant roles, and Holland was evidently canny enough to recognize that, specifically through the lens of class, abolishing the poll tax presented an ideal means of both solidifying the political base of the Florida Democratic Party and raising his own profile in line with his long-term career ambitions. That the Sunshine State’s Black community might also derive some benefit was very much incidental to Holland’s political calculus, an attitude which he would seemingly maintain throughout his tenure in Congress. Because while, by the early 1960s, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement had lent any measure touching upon voter enfranchisement a distinctly liberal, reformist cast, Holland’s own feelings on the inherent impropriety of the poll tax stubbornly refused to change. Far from seeking to make it easier for members of the Black community to vote – particularly in major urban areas where the threat of political violence was somewhat less severe – the Floridian senator was rather only seeking to relive a past accomplishment. Abolishing the poll tax in Florida was perhaps the most consequential thing he ever achieved in state politics, and it was perhaps only natural that he might seek to solidify his national reputation on that exact same basis.     

    Precisely how he finally achieved this feat is fairly simple on its face, though the effort was certainly accompanied by its fair share of parliamentary maneuvering and histrionics. After having tried and failed to secure the abolition of the poll tax by way of a constitutional amendment for nearly fifteen years as of 1962 – the most recent attempt having been only a year prior in 1961 – Holland’s final – and ultimately successful – effort started innocuously enough with a bit of legislative housekeeping. On March 12^th, noting the previous defeat of Senate Joint Resolution 58 in 1961, the Floridian announced to his colleagues that while he had lost two of his sixty-odd cosponsors – Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire (1898-1961) and Senator Andrew Schoeppel of Kansas (1894-1962) – he had gained two more in their place – namely their replacements, Senator Maurice Murphy (1927-2002) and Senator James Pearson (1920-2009). Presumably, this was intended as something of a signal. Though he had been defeated less than a year prior in attempting to once more eliminate the poll tax, Holland was not yet ready to give up on the effort. That last defeat, it was true, had been a painful one – the Senate passed the resolution only for a House committee to then dismantle it – but here he was, in ‘62, ready to start the process over again. Not ready to offer it quite yet, mind you, but fully intending to do so at some point in the near future. 

    As should come as no surprise, the opponents of any such amendment to the Constitution of the United States did not take Holland’s announcement lying down. Two days later, on March 14^th, Mississippi Democrat John C. Stennis (1901-1995) took the opportunity to warn his colleagues – though a proposal had yet to be offered which would have accomplished anything of the sort – that the banning of poll taxes by constitutional amendment was, “just the opening shot of a major battle to enact Federal legislation to prohibit literacy tests and provide that a sixth-grade education would qualify a person to vote.” Holland’s aim, of course, was not to abolish literacy tests but to ban the poll tax, but in the minds of men like Stennis, it was all one and the same. Measures like that which Holland was pursuing, he continued,

May open the door to an all-out civil rights battle. It is unfortunate that the net result of these efforts may bring the important business of the Senate to a standstill, possibly for many weeks, while this blast aimed at only five States is fully debated and discussed.

“Civil rights,” it seemed, was the dread specter that Holland’s efforts looked set to arouse. The Floridian, as aforementioned, had no particular interest in the issue of civil rights, no connection to the contemporary civil rights movement, and no stated desire to initiate a civil rights debate in the Senate. But as far as Stennis was concerned – and he may, in fact, have been right – Holland’s intentions mattered less than the most likely effect of his actions. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, civil rights had indeed become an increasingly significant topic of debate in state and federal political circles. To that end, a debate on the merits of something as tied to the Jim Crow era as the practice of levying poll taxes was more or less bound to instigate a larger discussion on the nature and parameters of certain fundamental rights. Would this, as Stennis feared, “bring the important business of the Senate to a standstill, possibly for many weeks [?]” Likely, it would. But whereas Stennis thought this was a bad thing – that the advancement of civil rights wasn’t worth the trouble it would cause – Holland remained of the unswerving opinion that such a price was worth paying if it meant finally eliminating the poll tax.   

    The Floridian’s stubbornness – and his relative obliviousness – was made clear by his response. “This is no new step [,]” he explained to Stennis. 

This follows the same pattern which was followed when the woman's suffrage amendment was submitted and adopted. After many States had found that women should vote and that their participation was wholesome, the Congress submitted a constitutional amendment, which appealed to the consciences of people in the States generally, and it was approved by the jury of the States in a very short period. I think we have a somewhat similar situation now when only five States have continued the poll tax requirement for voting.

Doubtless, Holland believed that this was a comforting sort of comparison. “I’m not trying to bog us down in a debate that may drag on for weeks,” he was effectively saying. “I’m only adhering to the precedent that this body had previously set.” In 1919, Congress had indeed voted to support an amendment to the Constitution banning gender discrimination at the ballot box. Only a handful of states still withheld the electoral franchise from women at the time, and it was ostensibly deemed acceptable by the House and Senate that they and the American people should be able to remedy this situation if a majority in all cases so chose. This, Holland seemed to be saying, was simply how it worked. Notwithstanding the intentions of the governments of a small subset of states, Congress could ally itself with the government of the other states in order to effectively force change on the holdouts.

    Why Holland thought that drawing attention to this fact would in any way assuage his opponent’s concerns rather surpasses understanding. For one thing, it had become a critical talking point among Southern political leaders since the era of the Reconstruction that the continued expansion of federal oversight into policy areas traditionally allocated to the states was bound – intentionally or not – to lead to the complete disintegration of the latter as sovereign political entities. Holland’s invocation of a precedent that ostensibly favored this much-feared trend would accordingly seem calculated to achieve rather the opposite of calming his fellow Southerners’ sensitive nerves. Not only that, but Holland also showed himself to be shockingly ignorant of the increasing attention paid to the issue of civil rights within the mainstream American political sphere. The ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920 had indeed represented an erosion of the states’ ability to independently regulate the franchise, but it also occurred in the midst of a period of relative federal inactivity. The Wilson Administration, over its eight years in office, certainly expanded federal power into new policy and regulatory areas, but much of this was in answer to first attempting to avoid war and then waging one. The 1920s accordingly witnessed – with the end of both the Wilson presidency and the conflict in question – a general recession of federal activity within the domestic policy sphere. Indeed, it was not until the 1930s and the election of Franklin Roosevelt that the United States Government once more became particularly active in pursuing a domestic policy agenda. Conservative Democrats who favored states’ rights managed to ride this era out by strategically allying themselves with Roosevelt in some moments and withholding their support in others, but the midpoint of the century marked a decided change in their fortunes.

    The Southerners’ power, as a bloc, was wanning, Northern Democrats and Northern Republicans had increasingly embraced the cause of civil rights, and it was no longer entirely clear how – or even if – the advocates of states’ rights could succeed in holding back the cresting tide of federal intervention into certain key facets of domestic policy under the nominal authority of the states. Holland’s invocation of the process that gave birth to the 19^th Amendment was therefore arguably twice as galling for how out-of-touch it must have seemed. Not only was he effectively advocating for the kind of federal meddling in state affairs that the conservative South had been laboring to fend off for the better part of the preceding century, but he was doing it at a time when he and his fellow Southerners were effectively staring down the barrel of their own irrelevance as a political force. Northern politicians, as a group, had increasingly come out in favor of the robust protection of civil rights, they were increasingly eager to begin dismantling the Jim Crow regime, and a major standoff was in the offing between the proponents of federal power and state sovereignty. And the fact that Senator Holland, in spite of being a fairly conservative Florida Democrat, either couldn’t see these things or simply didn’t care was surely a source of confusion and resentment on the part of his fellow Southerners.

    But Holland’s mind was made up, it seemed. He’d been an opponent of the poll tax since 1937, and the lamentations of a few of his colleagues that the ongoing crusade for civil rights represented an existential threat to state sovereignty was not about to shake him from his self-appointed crusade. To that end, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (1903-2001) – pursuant to agreements made between himself, his supporters, and Senator Holland – set the amendment process in motion later on that same day, March 14^th. First, Mansfield introduced a previously scheduled piece of legislation, the purpose of which was the designation of the home of Alexander Hamilton as a national monument. Then, immediately, he declared that said legislation would be substituted by Holland with his anti-poll tax amendment. As this defied the expectations of the proposal’s opponents – they had been led to believe that the measure would be submitted in the form of an ordinary bill – they were accordingly caught flatfooted and reacted with what might fairly be described as restrained outrage. But while Georgia Senator Richard Russell (1897-1971) first gave voice to this sense of outrage by loudly complaining of the supposed impropriety of introducing a constitutional amendment as a substitution for a piece of ordinary legislation – such a maneuver, he said, was “completely out of order” – he soon enough came to the real source of his passionate concern.

    “I have never been able to understand [,]” he declared,

How poll tax legislation can be called civil rights legislation, or how it ever got into that area at all, because we had poll taxes before we had the right of suffrage. It is the oldest tax known to mankind. However, I realize that a little matter like the Constitution is worthy of very short shrift when we become involved in one of the so-called civil rights bills.

Like Stennis, it seemed, Russell was of a mind to dismiss civil rights as something of a tempest in a teapot. But whereas Stennis had restrained himself to expressing concern for the time that a civil rights debate was bound to take up in the Senate, the Georgian was more inclined to dismiss the notion on its basic merits. “The poll tax amendment [,]” he said, his words fairly dripping with disdain,

Is one of the most notable fantasies that has ever found its place in the history of the Republic. It is a political fantasy which has been pursued vigorously by a number of political paladins on white horses, and carrying shields and spears and swords, since long before I ever came to this body […] If ever there has been a scarecrow that has been completely exercised by having been dragged around this Chamber and presented in different forms, by different means, in different ways, by different men, and for different purposes, it is the so-called poll tax legislation.

The senator for Georgia, it seemed, was in no mood to be coy or deferential. On the contrary, he appeared to take the introduction of yet another anti-poll tax amendment as an opportunity to vent his spleen on a number of subjects that troubled his mind while at the same time putting on a bravura rhetorical performance. 

    To that end, he next segued his line of argument about the supposed meaninglessness of an anti-poll tax amendment into a discussion of what he seemed to feel was one of the great deficiencies of the era. “Yet here we are,” he began,

In this good year 1962, pushing, hauling, and shoving around the Senate a proposal to abolish the poll tax; and debating whether we shall amend that great document, the Constitution of the United States, so as to get at five States which still levy a poll tax, and make them conform. This is a day of conformity. What made this country great was that it was not a country of conformity. It was the fact that the States were compartmentalized and did not have to conform; that there was no great figure of a king or a magistrate, having unlimited power, who could tell the States what to do. Because the States did not conform or have to conform, the Nation grew faster, built a better system of government, and developed the American way of life, a way of life that has been the envy of mankind all over the world. No other people have ever known anything like it. But now, having developed this great country under this system, and having developed the American way of life under it, we are met by the demands of the conformists […] Instead of debating some issue that affects the States where they live and run for office, they raise the issue of the poll tax and seek to make five States conform.

Notwithstanding the fact that he was attempting to defend a vital component of the racist Jim Crow regime, this really was an impressive piece of oratory on the part of Senator Russell. Not only had he effectively changed the topic of conversation from a discussion of the merits of abolishing the poll tax to an exploration of what he perceived to be an emerging flaw in the contemporary American character, but he did so in such a way as to make supporting an anti-poll tax amendment appear antithetical to the core values of “the American way of life.”

    The issue, it seemed, was fundamentally one of conformity. What Congress would be guilty of, he said, in attempting to force but five states to cease levying poll taxes upon their citizens was attempting to coerce them to conform to a fundamentally meaningless standard. It wasn’t the poll tax itself that Holland and his cosponsors cared about, Russell asserted accordingly, but rather their own need – pursuant to the spirit of the era – to simply make every state behave in the same collectively-defined way. The great majority of states no longer placed any kind of financial qualification on voting, and so it seemed only logical to these mindless conformists that every state should deferentially follow suit. But this kind of conformity was un-American, Russell avowed. “What made this country great [,]” he said, “was that it was not a country of conformity […] Because the States did not conform or have to conform, the Nation grew faster, built a better system of government, and developed the American way of life, a way of life that has been the envy of mankind all over the world.” By thus seeking to tie non-conformity – in essence, state sovereignty and states’ rights – to the “American way of life,” the Georgian endeavored to shift the basic premise of the debate at hand to one more favorable to his desired objective. If he argued that abolishing the poll tax by way of a constitutional amendment was either legally dubious or entirely unprecedented – which it was neither – he stood a poor chance of succeeding. But if he could convince enough of his Senate colleagues that support for an anti-poll tax amendment was fundamentally at odds with the American character, he quite possibly could have succeeded in choking off enough support to sink it.

    Cunning though this rhetorical approach undeniably was – specifically as it played upon the politician’s constant need to publicly reaffirm their patriotism – Russell was evidently of a mind to offer as many different arguments as possible. Yes, he avowed, banning the poll tax represented an un-American act of conformity. And doubtless, this approach would work as intended upon a certain kind of senator. But if this sort of claim wasn’t convincing – if appeals to nationalism left one unmoved – there was also a blanket dismissal on financial grounds to consider.  “There may have been a time [,]” Russell continued,

When the poll tax discouraged someone from voting. But what is its effect today? The levy is $1 a year on a person; and if he does not pay his poll tax, he is not entitled to vote. At least, that was true in my State under the old system. Mr. President, the tax on a package of cigarettes in some States, when the Federal tax is included, is from 12 to 14 cents. The tax on a few gallons of gasoline is more than the amount of the poll tax for a whole year.

The thrust of the Georgian’s argument, in this case, was essentially, “do the math.” A person who buys ten packs of cigarettes, in certain states, will already have paid more in taxes than the dollar demanded by the poll tax. A person who buys a few gallons of gasoline, in certain states, will find themselves in the same position. In the course of a year, therefore, people pay far more in terms of state taxes, day in and day out, than the comparatively meagre sum which the poll tax requires of them. In what way, then, was the poll tax at all a burden? In what reality did it prevent anyone from casting a ballot? Someone who can afford to drive their car can afford to pay the poll tax. Someone who can afford to smoke, as a habit, can afford to pay the poll tax. And did this not account for the overwhelming majority of Americans?

    Notwithstanding Russell’s characteristically cunning use of rhetoric – the deployment of which might have easily convinced any number of his fellow senators – the answer to this last question begged by the line of argument cited above was, quite simply, no. While it was true that, as of the early 1960s, nearly half of Americans smoked cigarettes regularly, not every American who smoked could afford to pay the retail rate in order to keep up their habit. Nor, for that matter, could every American who ostensibly needed to be able to get themselves to work every day afford either a car or the gasoline to run it. The poorest Americans – in the 1960s as today, disproportionately people of color – tended to live hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck, and did their best to save whatever money they possibly could. Rather than drive to work – or to do groceries, or to attend doctor’s appointments – they walked, or rode bicycles, or took buses, or hitched rides. And rather than pay the going market rate for tobacco products, they borrowed from others, or bought untaxed cigarettes from illicit sources, or simply didn’t smoke at all. Russell’s intention, of course, was to identify aspects of life ostensibly fundamental to the contemporary American experience which were already taxed in excess of one dollar per year. But what he failed to consider – or else simply declined to consider – was that millions of American either could not partake of these experiences at all or else could not do so in the same way as the contemporary mainstream of American culture. It did not occur to Russell, evidently, that anyone could be that poor. Or if it did, he was counting on the fact that it would not occur to anyone else.

    Finally – and perhaps most gallingly – Russell closed his initial remarks by addressing himself to Holland specifically. “I am grieved that my good friend,” he said,

The Senator from Florida, whose intentions are of the very purest and noblest, is spearheading the fight in favor of the adoption of this amendment. However, I believe that any man who has been a consistent supporter of constitutional government should be entitled to one aberration in the course of a long career of public service; and I regret that, from my point of view, this is the one period of aberration on the part of my good friend, the Senator from Florida. Certainly I shall not hold it against him, because I know he is proceeding in the very best of faith.

Holland, as aforementioned, appeared to take a great deal of pride in having helped make possible his home state’s abolition of its own poll tax in the late 1930s. The fact that he spent fifteen years in pursuit of a constitutional amendment aimed at accomplishing this same end nationwide in the face of his own status as a Southern Democrat – the guiding principles of which cohort were essentially states’ rights and Jim Crow – would seem to attest to this fact. For one of his colleagues in the Senate – and a fellow Southern Democrat, no less – to refer to his latest effort to this end as an “aberration” therefore doubtless came as something of a blow. Here was Richard Russell, senator from Georgia, entirely dismissing the one thing that Spessard Holland had spent his entire career in Congress pursuing. “I shall not hold it against him,” said the Georgian, “Because I know he is proceeding in the very best of faith.” It would be difficult, given the circumstances, to imagine a more condescending remark. But such was Russell’s entire rhetorical approach. His aim was to minimize, to dismiss, to reduce to practical nothingness. The poll tax was not a problem, he said; the effort to abolish it was. The poll tax was not a burden, he said; it cost less than the taxes on gasoline and cigarettes. The poll tax was not a worthy object of opposition; those who fixated on it were misguided. It was nothing. It was not with bothering with.    

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LXIII: The Southerners and These Women

    Interestingly enough, the community that really began the process by which the poll tax regime erected in the American South in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was eventually and totally dismantled was never intended to be one of its primary targets. The main purpose of the poll taxes levied in the various jurisdictions of the South during this period, of course, was to enact the legal disenfranchisement of the region’s Black inhabitants. Suffering, as they did, under a simultaneous campaign of economic discrimination – whereby all but the most menial, low-paying jobs were systematically withheld from them – the great majority of Southern Blacks simply couldn’t afford to pay an additional fee in order to vote. That this arrangement also had the effect of disenfranchising poor whites was seen as being to its advantage as well. Though not the main target of such measures, low-income Southern farmers had given the Democratic powerbrokers who controlled the Southern political system reason to fear over the course of the 1890s and 1900s by increasingly aligning themselves with the emerging populist movement that at times looked set to topple the established two-party dichotomy. Southern whites were accordingly willing to countenance the political marginalization of their poorer white brethren along with the whole of the region’s Black community if it meant staving off the rise of a viable reformist third party. But neither of these groups, as aforementioned, really began the process by which this situation was finally undone. Rather, it was the work of the same community which had successfully spearheaded some of the most consequential grassroots political reform campaigns in the history of the United States. That is, it was the work of a relatively small group of American women.

    In retrospect, this fact should perhaps not be so surprising. Not only had countless American women involved in campaigns for the abolition of slavery, the banning of alcohol, and their own electoral enfranchisement shown themselves to possess the political savvy and organizational genius to achieve just about anything they put their minds to, but the whole idea of a poll tax – as implemented in the American South of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – was never intended to apply to women as a potential voting bloc in need of suppression. That is to say, the authors of such taxes had not had women in mind. And when confronted with the fact that their mothers, wives, and daughters were likely to remain unable to vote in spite of the monumental effort that they had just put forward for that exact purpose, certain of these same powerbrokers were given cause to reconsider. Not all of them, mind you. It can be taken for a certainty that no small number of white Southern men had been vehemently opposed to the whole idea of the female franchise from the start and remained so even after the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in August of 1920. The poll tax, to their thinking, doubtless still served a useful purpose. As few women, in that era, had independent incomes – and as, in places like Georgia, they had virtually no legal identity once they were married – the inability of most women to pay the requisite tax – and the ability of husbands to legally withhold such funds from their wives – seemed to more or less ensure that the 19^th Amendment would come to naught. Bearing this fact in mind, it accordingly fell to Southern women to once more attend to their own interests. There was a chance, to be sure, and a hope that those capable of initiating reform could be convinced. All that was required was for a sufficient number of women to make their case sufficiently…convincing.

    The nature and character of any such campaign, of course, would very much be determined by the relevant legal situation. While poll taxes, by and large, had been erected quite uniformly across the South, Southern lawmakers did not react uniformly when it came to time to consider how such institutional barriers to voting would interact with the obligations conveyed by the aforementioned 19^th Amendment. In some states, because the relevant laws that described voter eligibility and the mechanism of the poll tax used explicitly gendered language – referring specifically to “men” in the text thereof – women were simply held to be automatically exempt. In others, lawmakers took steps to ensure that the payment of a poll tax was not a prerequisite for women in particular to vote. And in others still, poll tax payments were held to be applicable to men and women alike. The most frustrating approach of all was undoubtedly that of Georgia. Rather than make a point of clarifying whether women who intended to vote were required to pay the poll tax or not, the government of the Peach State opted to stay entirely silent on the matter. When certain women then sought to pay the poll tax anyway – reckoning, no doubt, that it was worth the loss of a few dollars to dispense with the resulting uncertainty – the outcome was like something out of a postmodern novel. While women could certainly pay the poll tax if they wished, it would not then permit them to cast their vote in the fall of 1920. Why? Because payment of the poll tax was required to take place at least six months before any election in which the registrant intended to vote. And the 19^th Amendment had only been ratified three months before the November elections.

    The resulting patchwork of responses on the part of Southern lawmakers led to a similar patchwork of approaches on the part of the women affected. In some cases, of course, women could and did vote as normal. The poll tax didn’t apply to them and so they paid it no mind. In others, however, obliged to pay the tax, women who had previously worked on behalf of the national campaign for the passage of the 19^th Amendment shifted their focus to registering women to vote while encouraging compliance with local electoral law. Having just gained the franchise in part by emphasizing their innate sensibility, many of these campaigners were doubtless deeply conscious of how closely their conduct was going to be scrutinized going forward. The fact that the national campaign for women’s suffrage had been of a largely middle- and upper-class character – and bearing in mind that many Southern women had promoted their own enfranchisement by arguing that the votes of white women could conceivably help to further dilute what little electoral power the region’s Black community could claim to possess – this would seem to be par for the course. Southern women, after all, were still Southerners at their core, and were in many cases as invested in the notion of respectability and the ideal of white supremacy as any Southern man. There were, of course, exceptions, some particularly notable. Take, for example, the State of North Carolina.

    In the Tarheel State, far from being so concerned with traditions of gentility as to cultivate an attitude of political disinterest, women emerged from the campaign for the ratification of the 19^th Amendment tremendously energized and willing to continue the fight for their essential political rights. In 1919 – acutely aware that their impending victory in the form of the 19^th Amendment was bound to be complicated by the state of local electoral law – they campaigned for and succeeded in adding a referendum on the poll tax to the upcoming 1920 ballot. Then, after undertaking yet another statewide campaign, they succeeded in having the poll tax repealed by way of an amendment to the North Carolina Constitution. In the years that followed, these victories in turn gave rise to a solid core of women activists and campaigners who went on to rally significant local support for Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith (1873-1944) in 1928, helped to defeat many anti-Smith incumbents who chose to bolt the party rather than support a Roman Catholic – not the least of which was Senator Furnifold Simmons (1854-1940), the architect of North Carolina’s poll tax law – and then stumped aggressively for Smith successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Surveying the state of women’s participation in state and federal politics in the early 1930s, the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee – led, at the time, by Mary Dewson (1874-1962) and Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) – were deeply impressed by the achievements of the women of North Carolina and chose to base their approach to encouraging female activism going forward on the aforementioned string of successes.

    The result, over the course of the next decade or so, was the gradual but inexorable coalescence of interest groups, political activists, wealthy doners, and party strategists at both the state and federal levels for the purpose of rendering the poll tax null and void. In many cases, women who had successfully campaigned for the female franchise over the course of the 1900s and 1910s were able to leverage the connections and methods they had developed as a result towards forming new organizations whose stated purpose was abolishing the poll tax. Individual activists Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) and Marcy Church Terrell (1863-1954), for example, worked to rally the National Council of Negro Women to support anti-poll tax legislation at the state level with no small amount of success. National organization like the League of Women Voters and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, meanwhile, began pressuring their representatives in Congress for the equivalent federal legislation. And on the part of the Democratic Party – whose monopoly on political power in the South meant that reform would have to come from within – the aforementioned Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee adopted a broad-based strategy of pressuring state lawmakers, promoting reform on the part of Congress, working to sway public opinion, and sponsoring court cases directly in opposition to the various poll tax laws in the states. The resulting efforts, to be sure, were not as cohesive or as successful as previous campaigns had been on the part of prohibition or the female franchise. They failed to turn public opinion overwhelmingly against the poll tax, that is to say. Nevertheless, the activists involved definitely notched out their share of victories.

    In Florida, for example, local chapters of the League of Women Voters and the League of Democratic Women succeeded in locating useful allies in a group of reformist state senators led by Ernest Graham (1886-1964) and the aforementioned Spessard Holland. While these female organizers had begun speaking very publicly in response to claims by certain state officials that women’s participation in Florida politics was somewhat less than had been promised during the campaign for the 19^th Amendment – in part by talking to newspapers reporters about their intention to begin holding male politicians to a higher standard of behavior than was previously the case – the likes of Graham and Holland had independently made the rather distressing observation that many Floridians were only able to vote because some special interest or other had paid their poll tax for them. Combining their resources, these two groups ultimately succeeded in pushing a repeal bill through the Florida state assembly, the result of which the abolition of the poll tax by the end of 1937. Similarly, members of the League of Women Voters in neighboring Georgia – as led by prominent social activist Josephine Wilkins (1893-1977) – found a powerful ally in their twenty-year struggle to abolish the poll tax in reformist Governor Ellis Arnall (1907-1992), a liberal Atlanta Democrat and the state’s former attorney general. Working together, Wilkins and Arnall created the pro-reform Georgia Citizens Fact-Finding Movement, promoted the passage of anti-lynching laws, and supported the drafting and ratification of a new state constitution in 1945. Naturally, one of the most important provisions of said document was the total abolition of the poll tax.

    In Tennessee in particular, the successful repeal campaign – in its final form – was one of particularly impressive scope and scale. Initially spearheaded by the local branch of the League of Women voters – led, at the time, by women like Violet Bray Lindsey (1896-1986) and Hazel Schaeffer (1914-2007) – the Volunteer State’s anti-poll tax campaign began in earnest in 1939 with the introduction of three bills in the state assembly that would each have accomplished the deed. Unfortunately – if unsurprisingly – all three of these same bills were subsequently sent off to various committee from whence they entirely failed to emerge. Undeterred, the campaigners then secured the introduction of two proposed constitutional amendments, either one of which would have rendered poll taxes a nullity in Tennessee. When this effort was likewise defeated – one being tabled, the other lacking a seconding vote – the repealers managed to make a third approach by getting a pair of bills introduced on the floor of the state senate. These bills also never made it out of committee, but that didn’t seem to do much to discourage the League or its leaders. Two years later, having gained the support of the Davidson County Democratic Women, the Tennessee Federation of Labor, and the Tennessee Congress of Industrial Organizations – local chapters of the two largest labor federations in the country – the campaigners again pushed for a repeal bill in the senate and were again foiled in the attempt.

    By 1943, the League had enlisted the further support of the Tennessee Farm Bureau and the Tennessee State Grange – both local chapters of major agricultural advocacy groups – the YWCA, and as many as thirty additional civic and religious organizations based in the Volunteer State, all of whom combined their resources to form the Committee for Majority Rule. When the Committee then approached the state assembly and requested that the poll tax be repealed, they were finally met with affirmation and a repeal bill was quickly passed. Unfortunately, in answer to a lawsuit filed by a county sheriff alleging that the law was unconstitutional, the Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately voided the repeal. The Committee was then forced to reorient its efforts towards amending the state’s constitution. A promise was subsequently extracted from state legislators that a referendum authorizing a constitutional convention would be placed on the ballot for November of 1949. Said convention was finally summoned in 1952, and the poll tax was subsequently abolished once the resulting amendments were approved over the course of the following year. In all, while it took nearly a decade and a half and involved the cooperation of several dozen civic, religious, agricultural, political, and labor organizations, the women of Tennessee – as embodied by the Tennessee League of Women Voters – had accomplished their stated objective.

    The only state in which a successful repeal campaign took longer was Arkansas, from start to finish something just shy of thirty years. The first serious repeal attempt took place in 1937, at which time the state assembly was prompted by a coalition of local activists made up largely of clubwomen – that is to say, they were members of the many and various women’s civic and social clubs that sprang up across the country over the course of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – to place an amendment to the state constitution on an upcoming ballot. And while the resulting referendum was emphatically defeated – some eighty-three thousand against to forty-two thousand in favor – it arguably served as something of a point of inspiration for subsequent efforts on the part of local politicians and reformers. Sidney McMath (1912-2003), for example, who ran for and won the governorship in 1948, made the repeal of the poll tax an explicit plank of his electoral platform and used his inaugural address in 1949 to specifically ask the state assembly to submit another referendum to the voters. This effort also ended in failure – electoral reform being one the more controversial items McMath included on his rather lengthy policy shopping list – but the governor seemingly refused to give up. In 1956, after having been defeated in both his 1952 reelection attempt and his 1954 Senate bid, McMath allied himself with a group of local labor organizations and the Arkansas section of the League of Women Voters to once more request the state assembly to put forward a poll tax repeal referendum. Yet again, the state assembly acquiesced, and yet again, the voters rejected it. Given that the 1956 ballot in Arkansas also witnessed the statewide approval of an “interposition” amendment – whereby the state government claimed the right to essentially ignore federal directives that it considered to be unconstitutional – this was not, perhaps, so very shocking. It would have seemed a strange thing indeed for the people of Arkansas, in the same breath, to authorize the repeal the poll tax and effectively nullify the effects of Brown v. Board of Education.        

    Eventually, with the approval by Congress of a federal anti-poll tax amendment in the summer of 1962, the governor and legislators of Arkansas were effectively forced to revisit the notion of maintaining such a system in the face of its partial abolition. If they so desired, the relevant powerbrokers could have opted to implement a two-track system of voter registration whereby one voter roll was maintained for the purpose of federal elections and a second roll maintained for the purpose of state and local elections. But while most of the states which had yet to abolish the poll tax decided to do exactly that – namely, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia – Arkansas ultimately concluded that the amount of work required to maintain such a system simply wasn’t worth the effort. Granted, this decision was only arrived at by way of a long and convoluted series of discussions between Governor Orval Faubus (1910-1994), state legislators, county officials, the state courts, and a group of activists led by the League of Women Voters and the AFL-CIO. The resulting constitutional amendment proposal was approved by the Arkansas Attorney General’s office in April of 1964. The same group of activists that had advocated for the referendum then began the process of gathering allies and campaigning for its passage. By the summer of 1964, the resulting coalition now included – in addition to the LWV and the AFL-CIO – the State Federation of Business and Professional Women, the Arkansas chapter of the American Association of University Women, the Arkansas Education Association, and the Arkansas chapter of the Republican Party. Republican gubernatorial candidate Winthrop Rockefeller (1912-1973) personally endorsed the effort, calling for a rigorous bipartisan campaign, and an ostensibly non-partisan – though quietly Republican-supported – think tank called the Election Research Council began publishing particularly brazen examples of the abuses and corruption that the poll tax had made possible. At long last – following a campaign characterized by political stunts, copious advertising, and the eventual endorsement of the previously reluctant Governor Faubus – Arkansas’s anti-poll tax amendment was approved by the voters on November 3^rd, 1964 by a margin of fifty-six percent. And while, by that time, the 24^th Amendment had already been ratified by the requisite number of states, Arkansas was nevertheless able to claim the distinction of being the last state with a poll tax on the books to abolish the same on its own initiative.