Interestingly enough, the community that really began the process by which the poll tax regime erected in the American South in the late 19th and early 20th 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 19th and early 20th 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 19th 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
19th 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 19th 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 19th 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 19th
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 19th 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 19th 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 19th
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 19th and early 20th 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 3rd, 1964 by a margin of fifty-six percent. And while, by that time, the 24th 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.
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