The March 16th portion of the 1962 Senate debate on the proposal that would shortly become the 24th Amendment was opened, as aforementioned, by yet another attempt on the part of Southern senators J. Lister Hill and James Eastland to keep said proposal from reaching the floor. If the Senate was determined, they said, to “meddle in the affairs of the sovereign states” by approving an amendment that would nullify the poll tax laws still in force in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and Arkansas, then why not “go into all phases of that question” and seek to invalidate the poll tax laws of Maine and Vermont as well? The citizens of those latter states could not obtain driver’s licenses unless they paid their yearly levy. And wasn’t being unable to drive a far harsher practical restriction upon the day-to-day activities of the average American than being unable to vote? The Southerners’ intent, of course, was not really to be of assistance to the peoples of Maine or Vermont. Rather, they sought only to elicit a particularly spirited response from the representatives of those states then present in the Senate chamber. The more forceful the response, the more aggressively they would reply in kind, with the end result being – in theory – a long and acrimonious debate that did nothing more than divert attention away from the actual business at hand. And in the immediate, at least, they seemed to succeed. Senator Holland, Senator Keating, and Senator Aiken were all champing at the bit to respond to the pair’s proposal. Eastland was only too glad to yield the floor to each of them in turn. And why not? His plan was working. So long as his colleagues kept talking, they would never get around to voting.
Whereas Holland was the first called upon, however – and whereas it was ostensibly his proposal being debated – Kenneth Keating was in fact the first of the trio to take the floor. His remarks, Holland explained, were much shorter than the Floridian’s, and so he preferred to let the New Yorker take the first crack at a response. And Keating, as it turned out, was interested in seeking a compromise, or at the very least in reminding his colleagues in the Senate that their disagreement on the issue at hand seemed more a matter of execution than of substance. “Poll tax legislation [,]” he accordingly reminded his fellow legislators,
Has been passed five times in the
other body but has never been approved by the Senate […] On the other hand, the
Senate has approved a constitutional amendment to abolish the poll tax, but
this has never been approved in the House. Obviously there is overwhelming
sentiment in Congress against requiring any American to pay a fee before he can
vote. But a difference of views as to the appropriate procedure has prevented
final action. In my opinion it is more important that we break this deadlock
than that we continue to wrangle over procedure. I do not believe that a poll
tax amendment will set any precedent for dealing with other civil rights
problems by constitutional amendment, as some of my colleagues fear. Each issue
has its own setting, and I would never concede that those who vote for a poll
tax amendment are barred from supporting solutions to other civil rights
problems by simple legislation.
Keating had
evidently been paying close attention to both the general progress of
anti-poll-tax initiatives in the recent history of Congress as well as to the
specific objections raised thereto by segregationist Southerners like Hill and
Eastland. And while there was, he thus observed, a clear consensus among the
members of the House and the Senate alike that “requiring any American to pay a
fee before he can vote” was fundamentally wrong, the two bodies as yet seemed
unable to agree on how to best ensure that such practices were discontinued. “A
difference of views as to the appropriate procedure has prevented final action
[,]” he astutely remarked. But this need not have been the case provided those
involved remained open to compromise.
For his own part, Keating certainly had a preference in terms of how he felt the poll tax ought to be addressed. “In my opinion,” he went on to say, “we can deal with the poll tax problem either by statute or constitutional amendment. I favor the statutory approach because it is more likely to win House approval than a constitutional amendment and because a statute will not be subjected to the complicated and uncertain ratification process.” But this by no means was meant to indicate that the New Yorker was fundamentally against the idea of an amendment. He was, after all, one of the over sixty co-sponsors of Senator Holland’s aforementioned proposal and would continue to offer his support to the same until it was approved or withdrawn. The point, Keating affirmed, was not to ensure that one’s own pet initiative was the only one that ultimately succeeded – a sentiment arguably aimed at Holland as much as at anyone – but rather to ensure that whatever measure that seemed likeliest to secure enough votes to achieve passage was not starved of those votes in consequence of some misplaced fit of pique. Legislation, in his estimation, was the likelier of the two approaches to succeed, but this by no means should have disqualified Senator Holland from pushing for his amendment. Because whether the poll tax was ultimately abolished by way of statue or amendment, there could be no denying that it absolutely needed to go.
Keating said as much by way of his next remarks, aimed directly at Hill and Eastland. “The poll tax persists in only five States [,]” he observed,
Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi,
Texas, and Virginia. Whatever may have been its purpose in the early years of
our Republic, it is a fact of history that it was instituted in these five
States as a method of preventing Negroes from voting. In recent years, the poll
tax has become as much an obstacle for voting by poor white citizens as
Negroes, and those States which retain the poll tax have among the lowest
percentages of voting participation in the Nation. It is clear from the reports
of the Commission on Civil Rights that much more effective techniques have been
devised to disenfranchise Negro voters, but we do not have to close our eyes to
the history of the remaining poll tax provisions in determining the most
appropriate method for their abolition.
The aforementioned Southerners, recall, had spent a great deal of their collective time on the floor of the Senate during the present debate delivering lengthy and detailed overviews of the history of franchise restrictions in the states. Evidently, they were keen on establishing not only the constitutionality of such measures within the American system of republican government – none of the measures in question having ever been struck down by the courts – but also the existence of abundant precedent for what amounted to very fine-grained regulation by the states of their respective electorates. But whereas Keating did not attempt to deny any of the statistics that Hill and Eastland had sought to dispense, he did actively affirm that such facts were not relevant to the discussion at hand.
“Whatever may have been its purpose in the early years of our Republic,” he said of the poll tax in particular, “it is a fact of history that it was instituted in these five States as a method of preventing Negroes from voting.” This did Senator Keating, like Holland had done before him, attempt to drag the conversation away from the abstractions favored by Hill and Eastland and back towards an examination of the fundamental facts at hand. Yes, the New Yorker affirmed, many states had seen fit at some point in their history to restrict the electoral franchise to some supposedly worthy subset of the population at large. What mattered under the present circumstances, however – what was germane to the discussion at hand – was that the five specific states that the proposed amendment would affect instituted their respective poll tax laws for the specific purpose of denying the vote to an otherwise qualified portion of the electorate. And in the process, these selfsame states had also disenfranchised additional groups. They had aimed at poor Black people and ended up hitting poor white people as well. The result was that the five states in question boasted some of the lowest voter participation rates in the whole country. Was this a desirable outcome? Senator Keating did not think so, nor seemed willing to entertain the notion than any among his colleagues might believe that it was.
Despite his palpable sense of disappointment, however, Keating was attempting to chart a course of pragmatism. “It is clear from the reports of the Commission on Civil Rights that much more effective techniques have been devised to disenfranchise Negro voters,” he observed. The Civil Rights Commission, of course, was the bugbear of the contemporary Southern segregationist, and something from which even Senator Holland was careful to maintain a discreet distance. But Keating was a Northerner, and a Republican at that, and so seemed to have nothing to fear in invoking this particular investigatory body. And what was the specific finding the New Yorker had called to the Senate’s attention? Only that the states in questions possessed more effective means than the poll tax of deciding whom among their inhabitants could vote. Under different circumstances, this might have been a fairly damning accusation. As it was, it came off as something closer to a weary observation. The five states where the non-payment of a poll tax was sufficient to justify the denial of the franchise – all of which had instituted poll taxes for the express purpose of disenfranchising otherwise qualified Black voters – possessed ample alternative means of determining who could vote on the basis of skin color. And if that was true, why not just dispense with the poll tax altogether? Why continue to uphold the supposed legitimacy and desirability of what was not even the most effective means of limiting the electoral franchise? Again, this came off as something of a weary observation on Keating’s part. Indeed, it might even be taken as a concession to the supporters of segregation. But there was also something terribly practical – if unglamorous – in thus attempting to make the most of things. The region’s Black community was already being prevented from voting six ways from Sunday, none of which but the poll tax was then under discussion. So why not part with the poll tax, asked Keating, for all the difference it would make? Chances were, the white South would barely even feel it.
This was not all that Senator Keating had to say on the subject, to be sure. In addition to avowing that the poll tax was simply unnecessary to the white South’s primary objective of depressing Black participation in the electoral process, he also believed the poll tax to be unsustainable in principle. Specifically, he asserted that the rationale being deployed by Southerners like Hill and Eastland in defense of the tax simply didn’t hold up to scrutiny. Their argument, he said, was that “the poll tax is a “qualification” for voting under article I, section 2 of the Constitution and therefore beyond control by Federal legislation [.]” But, he then countered,
Not all qualifications for voting are
lawful. A qualification which is designed to deny the right to vote on racial
grounds can no more stand against the 15th amendment than a qualification
designed to deny the right to vote to women could stand against the 19th
amendment. Moreover, a property qualification for voting, in my opinion, is an
arbitrary qualification which is no more entitled to recognition under article
I, section 2, than would be a State law that redheaded people could not vote,
or those with one arm, or vegetarians.
Here, too, the New Yorker was attempting to cut through the layers of obfuscation lately deployed by his Southern compatriots. Various states had previously established qualifications on the franchise in keeping with the authority ostensibly granted to them by the terms of Article I, Section 2. But not only did this fact offer no protection whatsoever against certain kinds of qualifications being explicitly banned by way of constitutional modification – as in the cases of the 15th and 19th Amendments – it also did nothing to alter the simple truth that certain kinds qualifications could not possibly be justified. A state could, for instance, pass such laws as would prevent redheads, or amputees, or vegetarians from voting, but in no way would such legislation represent either a reasonable or a morally defensible exercise of that same state’s legal authority. And a poll tax, Keating avowed, was no different in principle, punishing people, as it did, on account of circumstances beyond their control.
Before finally surrendering the floor to endlessly patient Senator Holland, the New Yorker concluded by proceeding to clarify that there were more such reforms to come. That is, while the poll tax was the only topic presently under discussion, it represented only one of many aspects of the contemporary American electoral system that Keating believed desperately needed to be addressed. “Let me emphasize [,]” he stated accordingly,
That this is only one of the many
issues with which we must cope in order to bring our electoral processes up to
date. It will affect a relatively small number of Americans compared to the
number denied the right to vote by discriminatory literacy tests, by arbitrary
residence requirements, and by other obstacles to the exercise of the
franchise. Whatever we accomplish today will be only a small beginning in
overcoming the myriad of unreasonable impediments to voting which now prevent
millions of Americans from going to the polls on election day.
Whether this statement was meant to be taken as a veiled threat or a solemn promise, it would be difficult to say. Being a Northern Republican, Keating had relatively little reason to appease the Senate’s segregationist stalwarts like J. Lister Hill or James Eastland. Ideologically speaking, they were already more than likely to be completely and irrevocably opposed to one another more often than not. This was probably why Keating felt comfortable invoking the authority of the Civil Rights Commission. As a New Yorker from the same party as the president that had chartered the thing – Dwight Eisenhower, that is – he was already as good as guilty of whatever crimes men like Hill and Eastland believed it was in the process of perpetrating against the South. And if that was the case – if Keating was going to be suspected and distrusted by Southern segregationists no matter what he did – then it made about as much sense for him to apply a bit of pressure with his parting words as it did to say nothing at all. The New Yorker certainly did seem intent on striking some kind of compromise. But perhaps he felt that this could only be achieved by putting a bit of fear into the opponents of reform. By making them think he and his allies were coming for everything, maybe Keating could scare the likes of Hill and Eastland into making a few comparatively insignificant compromises. It was, if nothing else, at least worth a try.
Or so Senator Keating may well have thought. One does wonder what Senator Holland’s take might have been. Though evincing a degree of persistence that appeared to baffle his fellow Southerners, Holland never seemed intent on purposefully antagonizing or dismissing those who stood in opposition to his proposed amendment. Granted, there were times when he seemed to grow weary of the persistent posturing of Senator Hill and Senator Eastland. But for the most part, he demonstrated a degree of restraint perhaps best described as superhuman. He indulged in many diversions, seeking only gently to direct the conversation back to the topic at hand. And never once did he accuse his fellow Southerners of attempting to intentionally waste the Senate’s time. And they were doing exactly that, of course. They were wasting the Senate’s time. Holland could have stopped them, could have invoked cloture, used the sixty votes he’d lined up in advance and put the whole thing to bed. But he didn’t. He went carefully, gently, trying not to cause offense. He said nothing against the South, nothing against his fellow Southern senators. He kept things grounded, straightforward, simple. This wasn’t about civil rights, he said, knowing that to say otherwise would cause a great deal of self-conscious handwringing among his anxious Southern colleagues. It was just that Senator Holland wanted more people to be able to vote. Was that so radical? So revolutionary? So threatening to the Southern way of life?
Bearing all of this in mind, Senator Keating’s words of support – while outwardly welcomed by Senator Holland – must have struck the Floridian deep down as something of a mixed blessing. Holland was trying to be careful, trying to achieve his desired goal without upsetting too many of his fellow Southerners. And yet his close ally, Senator Keating, was seemingly doing exactly that. Having been in the chamber the day before when Holland barely got away with tiptoeing around the Civil Rights Commission and its activities, Keating had to know that name-checking the Commission explicitly would not play well with Hill and Eastland. He also had to be aware that declaring the abolition of the poll tax at the federal level to be only the first of many more reforms he intended to pursue was not likely to be an uncontroversial statement. Indeed, Keating seemed intent on antagonizing the Southerners and their ilk, presumably for the purpose of making them more willing to agree to minor compromises. But this, categorically, was not Holland’s objective. The two men may have had the same essential goal in mind – i.e., the elimination of the poll tax at the federal level – but they seemed to be approaching this common objective from very different angles.
Keating – like a lot of Northern legislators during this period in American history – had become increasingly alarmed by the sheer number of obstacles that stood in the way of millions of Americans exercising their basic rights as citizens and believed that it was among his duties as a United States Senator to attempt to remove these same barriers. The poll tax therefore represented to Keating but one of many “unreasonable impediments to voting” he and his fellow reform-minded lawmakers were intent on confronting and dispensing with over the course of their tenures in office. Holland, on the other hand, had no such lofty ambitions in mind. All that he cared about – all that he wanted to achieve – was the abolition of the poll tax at the federal level by way of a constitutional amendment. He said exactly this more than once in the course of the relevant debate, affirming time and again that he cared only about the plight of the luckless poor of five affected state. He had nothing to say about literacy tests, or voter intimidation, or the state of the electoral rolls in Southern counties with large Black populations and small Black electorates. He was not a reformer. All that Spessard Holland wanted was to replicate one of the great triumphs of his youth. As a newly minted state senator in Florida in the late 1930s, he’d helped make possible the repeal of that state’s poll tax in a fit of populist enthusiasm. And now, as one of Florida’s two representatives in the United States Senate, he wanted to extend this signal accomplishment into the federal realm as well. He didn’t want to upset anyone. He didn’t want to stir up trouble. He just wanted, if at all possible, to get this one thing done.
The resulting difference in perspective and intention between Holland and Keating is in many ways representative of the rather strange situation the former had put himself in by pursuing federal electoral reform into the early 1960s. He had pursed this same objective nearly from the moment he was first elected to the Senate in 1946, of course, and had come tantalizingly close to achieving success some two years prior during the 86th Congress. He was accordingly not in a position, as of 1962, to turn down the assistance of those whose immediate goals aligned with his own. And as a result of his open-mindedness – his willingness to work with those whose politics he would normally have abhorred – he managed to cobble together the majority he needed to see his beloved amendment passed. One potentially unpleasant consequence of this approach, however, was that some of the people who rose to speak in support of his proposal were bound to end up doing so in a way that Holland himself might have preferred to avoid. They talked of civil rights, mentioned other reforms they wished to pursue, and freely disregarded certain Southern sensitivities. And in so doing, they inevitably planted the seed – in the minds of the upper chamber’s other Southern members, at least – that Florida Senator Spessard Holland was openly in league that meddlesome group of lawmakers who just couldn’t seem to restrain themselves from interfering in the internal affairs of the South. Given how uncomfortable this all must have made the habitually conservative Holland feel, one is again given to marvel at just how much the issue of the poll tax seemed to mean to him.
But while the man did press on far longer than most others might have in his place, some degree of fatigue did eventually begin to show. His opening remarks for the day, delivered immediately after Keating concluded his own, were sober and honest, but also noticeably wearied. “The time of the debate up to now,” he observed,
With the single exception of that
just occupied quite briefly by my distinguished friend from New York has been,
I believe, entirely used by those who are opposed to the motion to consider the
joint resolution, in order that it may be made a vehicle for the proposed
constitutional amendment to outlaw the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting
for elective Federal officials [.] I shall speak on this subject at some length
later, but I wish the RECORD to show now I am grateful for this opportunity to
discuss the measure.
The man was nothing if not courteous. Though the Senate’s March 16th session had been going on for some time already, this was the first chance Holland had been given to speak in defense of the proposed constitutional amendment whose relative merits were the reason for the discussion at hand. The opponents of the measure had been permitted to speak first. One of the proposal’s Northern supporters was then given the chance to follow. Holland was now the fourth person to speak, and still he found it in himself to express his gratitude for the opportunity.
“This is the 14th year I have offered the proposal in the Senate [,]” he continued in the same tired but appreciative tone.
I have tried not to be discouraged
from Congress to Congress. I have had very courteous treatment from members of
the Committee on the Judiciary. On five occasions full hearings have been held
on the proposed constitutional amendment. On three occasions subcommittees have
reported the measure favorably to the full committee. I regret to say that our
distinguished friends on the full committee have never been given the
opportunity to report the measure. I think there never has been a time when it
was not clear that a majority of the membership of the full committee was in
favor of reporting favorably the proposed constitutional amendment. I shall
make no further comment on that, except to say I am grateful for the fact that
the leadership on both sides of the aisle is now supporting the bringing up of
the vehicle measure, in order to see if it may be adapted to the purpose which
I have just expressed; that is, that it may become a proposed constitutional
amendment of the sort I have described.
One could easily imagine just about any other senator giving up on their cherished pet project after so many years of thankless toil. Several times, Holland related, he came very near to success, between favorable hearings in the Judiciary Committee and the aforementioned close call in 1960. But time and again – doubtless thanks in no small part to the intervention of the long-serving chairman of said committee, one James Eastland of Mississippi – the relevant proposal failed to make it to the Senate floor and Holland was forced to begin anew in the next Congress. Bearing all of this in mind, the fact that Holland didn’t give up – that he plugged away at the same endeavor for fourteen years with seemingly little hope of success – becomes all the more remarkable. Clearly, this thing meant a great deal more to the Senator from Florida than anyone might have guessed.
This fact became clearer still as Holland next proceeded to excoriate the actions and arguments of his most ardent critics in the Senate. To Senator Hill, for example, he expressed gratitude for,
Establishing historically something I
probably would have had to establish in the event he had not helped me so
kindly; namely, that this is a constitutional question, requiring a
constitutional amendment, and that all the first States of the Nation either
had a poll tax or much more onerous provisions limiting and restricting the
exercise of the voting privilege.
Further to this,
the Floridian also remarked on the point of order Hill had adamantly declared
he was going to raise. Namely, that using a normal piece of legislation as a
kind of container for an amendment went against the rules of the Senate. In the
face of this implicit threat, Holland declared – in so many words – that he was
unimpressed and uncowed. “It appeared to me quite clear that the distinguished
Senator from Alabama had little confidence in the validity of the point of order
which he mentioned,” he observed,
Because if he had much confidence in
it he would have allowed us to make the joint resolution the pending business,
and would have allowed the point of order to come up for early disposition. I
would think, after listening to his learned and scholarly discussion of 4 or 5
hours yesterday, that he lacks confidence altogether in the validity of any
point of order as to the procedure which we are following, and I certainly
agree with him in that conclusion if he has reached it.
Hill’s partner in
crime was not spared this same treatment, Eastland having made his own threat
to arrest the process by which Holland’s amendment was to proceed to a vote. “I
also note that my distinguished friend from Mississippi [,]” the Floridian
continued,
Apparently also has little confidence
in that point of order, because he has outlined an amendment to the
constitutional amendment which he says he will propose in due time, having to
do with the good States of Maine and of Vermont and with the fact that they
levy a poll tax which has no connection whatever with the voting privilege but
is connected with the right of the citizens and residents to get automobile
licenses […] I agree with the distinguished Senator from Mississippi that there
is little confidence to be placed in the point of order, and I think we shall
note that that is the case a little later in the course of the debate.
The Senator from
Florida, it seemed, had decided to come out of his corner swinging. Suddenly
and unexpectedly – though without entirely losing his customary veneer of
long-suffering cordiality – the man had switched from patient persistence to
aggressive condescension. The result was a series of increasingly bruising
rhetorical and political condemnations. Florida, he went on to say in that vein,
was a rapidly growing state, having gained fully four Representatives in
Congress as a result of the Census of 1960. Maine, Vermont, Alabama, and
Mississippi, on the other hand, had all lost one Representative each. Most
observers would not necessarily have connected these ostensibly separate
developments, there being any number of other states besides these four from
which individuals might have migrated. In Holland’s mind, however, the precise
nature of what had happened was plain enough to see. “I am quite willing to say
that some of that gain,” he declared of his home state’s recent windfall, “particularly
in connection with the good people of Alabama and Mississippi, who have joined
us and who have been very welcome, must have been due to the fact that people
were trying to escape from the political aura that surrounds the poll tax.” The
same could apparently be said of the two New England states as well, the result
being that all four jurisdictions were supposedly bleeding away their
populations. “Some of the people from [Maine and Vermont] are attracted to us
[,]” he explained,
Because we have no such condition as
that about the issuance of drivers’ licenses, which, of course, has no relation
at all to the subject of the debate. I am [also] very sure that we are getting
many good people from Alabama and Mississippi because they resent the
imposition of the poll tax and they resent the political climate that has
resulted in some areas of those two grand States because of the poll tax
imposition.
Though he phrased his remarks politely enough, there could be no mistaking the Holland’s intent. He did not say directly, of course, that any of the four states in question had done anything wrong, or foolish, or morally questionable. Nor did he describe the “political climate” or “political aura” which resulted from the collection of poll taxes as being inherently undesirable in itself. He merely stated it as his opinion that some of the people who had left Maine, and Vermont, and Alabama, and Mississippi between 1950 and 1960 – some number of whom, he believed, had thereafter settled in Florida – likely did so because they did not like “climate” connected to the collection of poll taxes. Again, in a literal sense, this could not be described as a condemnation. In point of fact, it was simply a hypothesis based on a fairly cursory analysis of readily available population statistics. In its effect, however – the effect almost certainly desired by Holland – it was a sharp blow aimed directly at those who would attempt to question the Floridian’s motives.
More than once in the course of the 87th Congress, Holland’s Southern colleagues had questioned the rationale behind his anti-poll-tax crusade. What business was it of the Senator from Florida whether or not the states of Alabama, or Mississippi, or Texas, or Virginia, or Arkansas either collected poll taxes or made access to the ballot contingent on individual payment of the same? Weren’t the states sovereign entities? Weren’t they permitted, by the terms of the Constitution, to condition the franchise as they saw fit? The whole idea, in short, was baffling to them. Holland was a Southerner, a Democrat, and a supporter of states’ rights, just as they were. Why should he have made it the primary objective of his career in the Senate to circumvent state authority by way of a constitutional amendment banning poll taxes? Holland did attempt to explain himself, as plainly and patiently as he could manage. The poll tax depressed voting in the states where it was annually collected, he declared. It was manifestly unjust in the way it politically punished those who were already disadvantaged. Indeed, it was an abiding source of grief to Holland that people living in states like Alabama or Mississippi should lack certain of the privileges possessed by their fellow citizens in a state like Florida in consequence of conditions they could not control.
If the opponents
of the relevant amendment proposal actually heard any of these explanations,
of course, was another matter entirely. By and large, they seemed not to,
preferring instead to keep hammering away at the same mix of explicit threats
and doomsaying rather than actually engage with what the Floridian had to say.
And so, at length, Holland more or less let them have it. Florida, he declared,
was a growing, prosperous state. And Florida had been without a poll tax since
the late 1930s. Alabama and Mississippi, he meanwhile observed, were actively
in the process of shrinking. Between the Census of 1950 and the Census of 1960,
their respective populations had in fact each decreased enough to require the
loss of one of their Representatives in Congress. Both of these states also
ranked near the bottom of recent surveys in terms of voter participation. Was
it a coincidence that these two states were also among the tiny handful that
still required the payment of poll taxes as a condition for exercising the
franchise? Did Florida’s gain and their loss have nothing at all to do with one
another? Holland’s answer, of course, was that one directly contributed to the
other. Florida had abolished its poll tax, and now Florida was flourishing.
Alabama and Mississippi had stubbornly chosen to hold onto their poll taxes,
and now both states were seemingly languishing. Was this mere speculation on
Holland’s part? To some extent, certainly. But it was also a plainly observable
fact that the populations of Alabama and Mississippi had been
decreasing. These two states were losing bodies and, in consequence, were
losing power. Is that what their political leaders wanted? To drive people out
of their respective states while bleeding away their influence in Congress?
The poll tax
need not have been the only reason for these developments, to be sure. Economics
is almost always the primary driver of human migration. But Holland’s point
seemed to be that the poll tax was among the most obvious and easily managed of
the various potential causes. That people didn’t like poll taxes seemed to be
the general thrust of what he was saying. Why else would they be in force in
only five of the fifty states? Why else would every other state that had once
restricted access to the ballot based on their payment ultimately decide to do
away with them? Clearly, indisputably, poll taxes were no longer popular. Even
more so, perhaps, as the residents of states in which they continued to be
collected could freely observe the effects of their repeal in neighboring
jurisdictions. After all, why shouldn’t a poor Mississippian living in the
early 1960s have looked with jealousy upon an equally poor resident of the
nearby Sunshine State? Economically disadvantaged though they both might have
been, the Floridian possessed something which was beyond the Mississippian’s
grasp. So, why shouldn’t this have sparked migration? If all that it would take
for a disenfranchised Mississippian or Alabaman who was unable to pay their
poll taxes to once more take their place among the nation’s voting public was to
migrate a handful of miles, who could blame them for doing just that? Not all
of them would be able to afford it, of course. But those that could had a great
deal to gain and very little to lose by doing so. And wasn’t that a kind of
tragedy in itself, that Alabama and Mississippi should have thus engineered
their own gradual decline? That this need not have been the case was exactly
Holland’s point. Abolishing poll taxes at the federal level might not have
entirely staunched the flow of people out of Alabama and Mississippi, but it
certainly wouldn’t have made either state look any less attractive. And
what did they stand to lose in the bargain? Nothing, practically speaking. As
Senator Keating had earlier noted, in the five states in which access to the
ballot was still tied to the payment of poll taxes, local authorities still had
far more effective means at their disposal for depressing voter turnout in
certain minority communities. So, why not give it a shot? Why not listen to the
voice of the people who were actively leaving states like Mississippi and
Alabama and assist in the abolition of an ultimately self-destructive policy?
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