At this stage in the present discussion, there would seem to remain only two further questions worth answering. The first has to do with the legacy of the 24th Amendment. Namely, what was the immediate practical result of the elimination of the poll tax at the federal level? The second concerns the wider theme that we have sought to address here. That being, was the 24th Amendment fundamentally institutional or popular in character? As previously discussed, the circumstances that accompanied the passage of the 24th Amendment through Congress in many ways gave evidence of the United States having just recently entered a transitional era in its cultural and political history. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision was less than a decade in the rearview, and while segregationist political leaders in the American South continued to offer stiff resistance to government-mandated efforts to achieve the full integration of American public schools as well as further civil rights reforms, their efforts at resistance were growing steadily less effective. Whereas, for the entire history of the United States between the middle 1870s and the late 1950s, Conservative Southern Senators had succeeded in using the filibuster to prevent the passage of any federal civil rights legislation, between 1957 and 1964, two civil rights bills were approved by Congress and two civil rights amendments were added to the Constitution. Conservative Southern Democrats attempted to thwart all of these measures, of course – and in the case of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, they mostly succeeded – but their successes were increasingly few and of limited scope. Why and how this came to be would seem a question worth exploring, and the 24th Amendment would seem a useful lens through which to do so.
As far as the immediate effects of
the amendment in question are concerned, one ought naturally to turn their
attention to the reactions of the five states wherein poll taxes – circa 1964 –
remained the law of the land. Of these five – Alabama, Arkansas, Texas,
Virginia, and Mississippi – only Arkansas sought to comply in anything like an
enthusiastic manner. Its lawmakers opted to draft an amendment to the state
constitution banning poll taxes at all levels, the final version of which was
submitted to a referendum vote during the Election of 1964 and subsequently
approved. Virginia, meanwhile, offered comparatively firm resistance by
enacting a kind of contingency plan intended to achieve the same effect as a
poll tax. Specifically, state lawmakers created a mechanism whereby, rather
than paying a poll tax and presenting a receipt when attempting to vote,
Virginia residents who wished to cast a ballot in federal elections could
instead file for a certificate of residency within six months of the election
in question and present said certificate to the relevant election officials.
Naturally, the enactment of this procedure – which could serve no other purpose
than to decrease the overall number of ballots cast in federal elections in
Virginia – led to the filing of lawsuits, one of which – Harman v.
Forssenius – was eventually appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
The Court’s finding – handed down in April of 1965 – subsequently held that because
the 24th Amendment established a constitutional right – that is, the
right to cast a ballot in federal elections without having to pay a poll tax –
and because the Virginia statute in question placed a real obstacle in the path
of those who would attempt to exercise this right – that is, the filing of
paperwork within a rigid and specific timeframe – the relevant Virginia statute
was necessarily null and void. As Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891-1974) noted accordingly,
“For federal elections, the poll tax is abolished absolutely as a prerequisite
to voting, and no equivalent or milder substitute may be imposed. Any material
requirement imposed upon the federal voter solely because of his refusal to
waive the constitutional immunity subverts the effectiveness of the
Twenty-fourth Amendment and must fall under its ban.”
As for the four states that retained
a poll tax requirement for participation in state elections, the matter was
eventually settled by another Supreme Court ruling handed down the following
year. In Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966), the Court
found that – pursuant to claims made by Virginia resident Annie E. Harper – “A
State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever
it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral
standard. Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not
paying this or any other tax.” Notably, this decision made no reference to the
recently ratified 24th Amendment, relying rather on the much older
14th Amendment and its guarantee of protection against state attempt
to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws
[.]” Likewise, Harper v. Virginia paid no heed to the Court’s own prior
findings in Breedlove v. Suttles (1937). In that case, the Hughes Court
unanimously declared that,
To make payment of poll taxes a
prerequisite of voting is not to deny any privilege or immunity protected by
the Fourteenth Amendment. Privilege of voting is not derived from the United
States, but is conferred by the state and, save as restrained by the Fifteenth
and Nineteenth Amendments and other provisions of the Federal Constitution, the
state may condition suffrage as it deems appropriate.
What was it, then,
that made the Court depart from its own precedent when it did? A number of
things, to be sure. The general character of the Court, for one thing, had
become far more liberal in the intervening thirty years, particularly with the
additions of William O. Douglas (1898-1980), William J. Brennan (1906-1997),
and the aforementioned Chief Justice Warren. The Court also could not have
failed to observe the trend that was then unfolding across various facets of
American culture which increasingly favoured a general liberalization of
customs and mores.
This isn’t to
say that Warren and those who concurred with him felt the need to enforce some
kind of abstract ideal of mainstream American morality lest the Court become
subject to accusations of irrelevance. Rather, it is simply to point out the
essential fact that the Warren Court existed within a particular socio-cultural
context. Its members were not only observers of American culture, but active
participants in the same. And so, not only were they liable to be moved by the
same social currents that were increasingly driving many of their fellow
Americans to embrace a more liberal vision of American citizenship than had
been embraced by prior generations, but they were also apt to be conscious of
what kind of decision that a majority of the American people would be liable to
tolerate. And while the 24th Amendment itself may not have factored
directly into their decision, its recent ratification very likely influenced
the Court’s finding. What better indication, after all, of the general feeling
of the American people on the issue of the poll tax than a decision on the part
of a sizeable majority of their directly elected representatives to abolish the
same? Seeing this, Warren and his fellow justices would at the very least have
had a strong indication of how their fellow citizens would react to having the
validity of the poll tax upheld at the state level. That the logic deployed by
Justice Douglas in his decision also mirrored many of the arguments raised
during the Senate debate cited herein at length would likewise seem to indicate
that the Court was on essentially the same page as the American people and their
elected lawmakers.
For example,
Douglas echoed many of the 24th Amendment’s supporters when he
stated that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment
demanded,
Substantially equal state legislative
representation for all citizens […] whether the citizen, otherwise qualified to
vote, has $1.50 in his pocket or nothing at all, pays the fee or fails to pay
it. The principle that denies the State the right to dilute a citizen's vote on
account of his economic status or other such factors by analogy bars a system
which excludes those unable to pay a fee to vote or who fail to pay.
Likewise, Douglas
was as skeptical as many senators had shown themselves to be of any attempt to
draw a comparison between the payment of a fee in order to vote and the payment
of a fee in exchange for a license. “The interest of the State,” wrote Douglas,
When it comes to voting, is limited
to the power to fix qualifications. Wealth, like race, creed, or color, is not
germane to one's ability to participate intelligently in the electoral process
[…] To introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter's
qualifications is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor.
And in seeming
response to those senators in opposition to the amendment who claimed that the
payment of a poll tax demonstrated the kind of personal investment and interest
in public policy that the United States supposedly required of its voters,
Douglas repeated the same basic argument as had Spessard Holland and his
various allies. Namely, that, “wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no
relation to voting qualifications; the right to vote is too precious, too
fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.” The Breedlove v. Suttles decision
was thus overturned, and the poll tax was thus deemed unconstitutional at the
state level as well as the federal level.
As to what kind of amendment the 24th
was, according to our previously established rubric, the answer would seem to
be fairly obvious. While there was certainly an institutional element to the
subject that the 24th Amendment sought to address – the nature of
state authority over voter qualifications, the federal/state power dynamic, the
definition of voting as either a right or a privilege, etc. – it would be
difficult to deny the extent to which the success of the same was the direct
result of mounting popular agitation in the contemporary United States for
wholesale civil rights reform. The achievement of meaningful civil rights
reform, of course, was not the intended goal of the amendment’s principal author.
Notwithstanding his unwavering desire to eliminate payment of the poll tax as a
condition of voting in the United States at the federal level, Florida Senator Spessard
Holland, at the end of the day, was a conservative Southern Democrat who
believed in the baseless principle of “separate but equal,” who strongly
opposed the integration of public schools in the American South, and who would
go on to oppose further civil rights reforms as enacted by Congress over the
course of the 1960s. What Holland did intend, however, was nevertheless
distinctly popular in its character. He may not have desired to promote racial
equality at the polling place. But he did – in a very New Deal, 1930s, Southern
populist sort of way – wish to advance a degree of economic equality on behalf
of the South’s poorer residents.
What he wanted,
he said himself, was to be of aid to those, “Oppressed by penury and poverty.”
And the people of the five holdout states were certainly being oppressed. Not
those with money in their pockets, of course. The wealthy, in any context, are
hardly ever made the victims of state power. But the poor? Those without money
to spare to pay for the privilege of casting a ballot? They were in the
position of having a fundamental right stripped away. And this, Holland avowed,
could not possibly be justified. “So far as I am concerned,” he said, “I think
a citizen is entitled to vote for his President, his Vice President, his
Senators, and his Representatives, regardless of what may be the law of the
State with reference to local elections.” Taking its author at his word, the
purpose of the 24th Amendment would thus seem to have been specifically
popular. And not just in the sense that its direct beneficiaries numbered in
the millions. Yes, Holland was working directly on behalf of millions of
American citizens whose right to vote had been curtailed by the existence of
poll tax laws in the five aforementioned states. But he was also labouring in
service of the many millions more who lived in the other forty-five states of
the union and whose moral sensibilities could no longer stomach the thought of
wealth being a determining factor in voter qualification. Many of these people
lived in his home state of Florida, of course, the voters thereof having ratified
Holland’s desire to eliminate the poll tax many times over since first sending
him to the Senate in 1946. But many more lived in states that Holland did not
represent.
They lived in
Illinois, for example, home state of Senator Paul Douglas. Paul Douglas, who
had long since established himself as a champion of civil rights. Paul Douglas,
who ardently supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and who was the only
senator to vote against confirming Southern segregationist James Eastland as
chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee. Paul Douglas, who famously
declared, during the Senate debate over the 24th Amendment, that
what he and his allies really wanted was,
To set free the economically
disfranchised majority of the South, both white and black alike. We want to
open up the doors of more adequate education for the disinherited, both white
and black alike. We want to open up the gates of opportunity so that the
abilities of white and black alike may function more effectively.
If the people of
the Prairie State wanted Paul Douglas to represent them – and the results of
the senate elections of 1948, 1954, and 1960 would seem to make it clear that
they did – then it would likewise seem fair to say that the people of the
Prairie State wanted civil rights reform to be a national priority.
So too, it
seemed, did the people of Texas, at least in part. In spite of being a Southern
state, in spite of it still having a poll tax law on the books, and in spite of
its representation in the Senate including the notoriously conservative
Republican John Tower, Texas was the home state of Senator Ralph Yarborough,
one of the most dedicated progressives that the Senate has ever seen. Tower, of
course, voted against the amendment in question. And after all, it was he who
sought to warn his fellow senators of the potential implications of the same by
observing that while, “We may think that we could never have a totalitarian
system in this country […] Mr. Hitler came to power in a free election. It
could happen here.” But it was Yarborough – whom the people of Texas had also
granted their faith – who memorably asserted that,
As man reaches for the stars in
space, so must he reach for the stars on earth: for stars of fairness and
justice and for the dignity of the individual. The time has come to drop the
word "privilege," meaning some governmental granted boon, and to
substitute the word "right," insofar as the franchise is concerned.
Clearly – based, if
nothing else, on the fact that the people of the Lone Star State continued to
elect this man to represent them until 1970 – some millions of Texans were also
in favour of eliminating the poll tax. So must have been the New Yorkers who
had elected Kenneth Keating and Jacob Javits. So must have been the Tennesseans
who elected Estes Kefauver. Indeed, if the list of senators who voted to
approve the 24th Amendment is any indication, the vast majority of
Americans in 1962 favoured the abolition of the poll tax regardless of the
states’ rights issues that such a course of action potentially entailed.
Indeed, the situation seemed to be
precisely as Spessard Holland described it on the floor of the Senate on March
15th. Notwithstanding, he had said, the rights of the five states in
which poll taxes remained in force to establish and administer their own voter
qualification laws,
The other 45 States, which have
considerable interest in the election of the President, the Vice President, and
the Members of Congress, also have some rights, including the complete
privilege and right, under the Constitution, to ask that this matter be
submitted to the conscience of all 50 States [.]
There was, to be
sure, something of a conflict at play, morally if not legally. The Constitution
did grant to the states the right – albeit not the exclusive right – to
determine how congressional and presidential elections were to be held within
their confines and whom among their citizens were qualified to vote in the
same. It therefore did seem to go against the spirit of the Constitution
for a group of Senators to then attempt to use the power of Congress to force
any state or any group of states to alter or abolish their voter qualification
laws. It did not violate the letter of the Constitution, of course, that
same document having granted to a supermajority of both houses of Congress and
the legislatures of the states the right to make any alternations to the text
of the Constitution that they collectively desired. And then again, in terms of
the spirit of the thing, there was also Holland’s aforementioned argument.
There could be no doubt that the individual states had a vested interest in
determining which of their citizens – at least in terms of age and legal status
– could legally cast a ballot. But it was also true that the American people as
a whole had an equally vested interest in the outcomes of congressional and
presidential elections.
Consider, by way of illustration,
the following scenario. An individual or group of individuals who intend to
vote for the Republican candidate in the forthcoming presidential election in
1964 would most certainly have a vital political investment in the notion that
every Republican vote in every state of the union will be properly recorded and
tallied. What they want, after all, is for the Republican candidate to be
elected. And the more Republican votes that are counted, the more likely said
candidate is to ultimately emerge victorious. And now, notwithstanding the
complex electoral calculus of how American presidential elections work in
practice, let us simply imagine that the state of Texas is closely divided, in
terms of the partisan loyalties of its inhabitants, between the Republican
Party and the Democratic Party. Indeed, as of the early 60s, this would seem to
have been precisely the case. And let us also imagine that Black Texans are
both statistically poorer than white Texans – which they still are – and
statistically more likely to vote Republican than Democratic – which they still
were in the early 60s. And let us finally remember that, as of the early 60s,
Texas only allowed those of its citizens to vote who had paid their allotted
poll tax and could present a receipt to that effect at a polling place.
Now, if a
presidential election was held under these specific circumstances, only the
citizens of the State of Texas who had paid their poll tax would be permitted
to cast a ballot. Which is to say, a proportionately smaller number of Black
Texans would ultimately be able to vote. Which is also to say, a
proportionately smaller number of ballots would be cast for the Republican
candidate. Depending on the circumstances, of course, this might practically
mean very little. If the Democratic candidate were to win in a landslide, the
fact that a few thousand votes for the losing candidate were never cast would
seem to be neither here nor there. But if the election was very close? If a few
thousand ballots could mean the difference between either the Democratic
candidate or the Republican candidate winning all of the Lone Star State’s
Electoral College votes? And furthermore, if the substantial parcel of
Electoral College votes awarded by the Lone Star State ended up deciding the
presidential election as a whole? Well, suddenly the voter qualification laws
in place in Texas would seem to be of great interest to Democrats and
Republicans nationwide. More than that, even, it would seem to be something
that directly affects their own ability to accurately express a given electoral
preference. No one votes in a vacuum, after all. Knowledge of partisan support
in regions other than one’s own – particularly in the context of a national
election – can and does influence how one ultimately decides to cast one’s own
ballot. And if one knew that their party’s support was being artificially
depressed in certain localities by the action of certain laws? It would only
seem natural and to seek some form of legislative remedy.
This, of course,
is what Senator Holland claimed to desire. The rationalization, that is, of
state voter qualification laws so as to ensure that all American citizens –
regardless of where they lived or how much money they had in their pocket –
could vote in presidential and congressional elections and so that no
particular party was disadvantaged in terms of the ability of its supporters to
vote. A simple objective, to be sure, but one far reaching in its implications.
As discussed above, the difference of a few ballots here or there being cast or
disallowed could conceivably mean the difference between one candidate or
another winning all of a state’s electoral votes. And as American history has
amply shown, the difference between winning or losing the electoral votes of a
given state can sometimes mean the difference between being elected President
or not. Bearing this in mind, would it not have been fair to say that electoral
laws such as those that required the payment of poll taxes represented an unfair
advantage in terms of the partisan support that they necessarily disallowed?
Granted, poll tax laws were not applied in terms of the party affiliation of
the individuals to be taxed. But if it could be proven that the majority of
those who were denied the right to vote on the basis of being unable to pay
their poll tax in Texas would have voted Republican, how is that not the
concern of Republican voters living in New York, or Illinois, or Kentucky? Were
it not for the electoral laws in place in Texas, their preferred candidate
might be in a position to scoop up the Lone Star State’s Electoral College
Votes. Why shouldn’t these same Republican voters – along with whomever else
among their fellow citizens wished their nation’s elections to be conducted in a
more equitable fashion – have made use of the power at their disposal to
instruct or otherwise indicate to their representatives in Congress that an
amendment to the Constitution was what the situation at hand called for?
They did, in
fact, do just that. Whether by directly instructing their elected
representatives – by writing letters, making phone calls, or making personal
appeals at their constituency offices – or by simply continuing to vote for
those whose stated positions reflected their own, the American people
effectively created a situation whereby, circa 1962, supermajorities in both
houses of Congress favoured the elimination of the poll tax at the federal
level by way of amending the Constitution. This took time to arrange, of
course. Spessard Holland began advocating for the elimination of poll taxes in
the Senate in 1946. In July of the following year, he managed to get an
amendment resolution passed in the House, only for the resulting measure to
then be filibustered in the Senate. When one peruses the membership rolls of
the 80th Congress, this ends up coming as little surprise. Present
and accounted for in the summer of 1947 were John Sparkman, J. Lister Hill, J.
William Fullbright, Richard Russell, Allen J. Ellender, and James Eastland, all
of whom would speak out against Holland’s ultimately successful attempt to
secure the same objective in the spring of 1962. And serving along with them
were such like-minded segregationists as Mississippi’s Theodore G. Bilbo – who
once wrote a book advocating for the deportation of Black Americans to Liberia
as the ultimate expression of “separate but equal” – Texans Tom. T. Connally
and W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel – the latter of whom would go on to assert that the
Brown v. Board of Education decision was part of a Communist conspiracy –
and the otherwise respected internationalist, Georgia’s Walter F. George. By
combining their efforts, these men would have had little trouble defeating this
early effort on the part of Senator Holland. But in doing so, they doubtless
also stoked the interest of those citizens and their representatives who did
not live in poll tax states.
Consider, by way
of confirmation, Holland’s next attempt in 1949. In July of that year,
the Floridian once again managed to secure enough support in the House to gain
passage for his anti-poll tax resolution by a commanding margin. But rather
than attempt another filibuster – which they surely would have done if they
knew the numbers were on their side – his opponents in the Senate this time
made sure that the proposal never emerged from the Committee on Rules and
Administration, the membership of which included the aforementioned John C.
Stennis, Louisianan Russell B. Long, and North Carolina’s Willis Smith.
Bottling proposals up in committee, of course, was and is the favoured tactic
of legislators who find that they have no means of defeating them otherwise. It
was what Senator Eastland had done to Holland’s proposed amendment for some
time, forcing the latter to concoct the “bait-and-switch” maneuver that
ultimately took place in 1962. And it was almost certainly what had happened in
1949. Why? Because Holland had already managed to frighten his opponents into
believing that the poll tax was under threat. Within just three years of
entering the Senate, he had managed to secure passage through the House of two
separate anti-poll-tax proposals. The first had taken a filibuster in order to
defeat. And evidently, a second filibuster was not considered a worthwhile
risk. Public opposition to the poll tax was on the rise.
It would seem to
be something of an open question as to whether or not Holland’s efforts were
directly responsible for this ongoing shift in public opinion. To be sure, the
man spent no small amount of time agitating among his fellow legislators for
their support in his anti-poll-tax crusade. And it seems likely that he managed
to convince at least one or two of them over the course of fourteen years. But
without the support of the American public at large – and specifically the
support of the populations of certain states – Holland’s desired reform would
surely have proven to be functionally impossible to achieve. The question
remains, then: to what extent did Spessard Holland himself make the elimination
of the poll tax by constitutional amendment a reality? Consider this. Between
the time that State Senator Holland helped engineer the repeal of Florida’s
poll tax in 1937 and the first appearance of United States Senator Holland in
the hallowed halls of Congress nine years later, a single state opted to
nullify its own poll tax law – that being Georgia in 1945. And following the
beginning of Holland’s Senate tenure in 1947 and the successful approval of the
24th Amendment by Congress, a further three states – Connecticut
(1947), South Carolina (1951), and Tennessee (1953) – had followed suit. Was
this solely the result of Holland’s long-suffering labours? Most assuredly not.
But it certainly could not have hurt – and very likely did a fair bit to help –
that throughout these years, as campaigners on the ground worked tirelessly to
change a blatantly discriminatory status quo, there remained a lone senator in
Washington patiently hammering away at the same objective. It could not but
have given people a sense that they were not alone. And it very likely
convinced more than a few senators that their own views on the poll tax
warranted airing.
In any case, it
was the American people collectively deciding that they were finished with poll
taxes that ultimately doomed them to the dustbin of history by way of the 24th
Amendment. The efforts of Spessard Holland in the United States Senate may have
influenced or encouraged campaigners in South Carolina and Tennessee, but it
was the people of those states and the legislators that they elected who
finally brought about the repeal of local poll tax laws in the early 1950s. And
just so, while Senator Holland did a great deal to keep the dream of a poll-tax
ban alive at the federal level – through much patient prodding, cajoling, and
encouraging – it was the American people who elected the majority that in due
course voted to abolish the poll tax. And it was the populations of the various
states who elected the majorities that ultimately voted to ratify the 24th
Amendment. Granted, all amendments must enjoy an overwhelming majority of
support in order to proceed from the proposal stage to formal ratification. But
in the increasingly fraught socio-political atmosphere of the early 1960s, it
is especially noteworthy that an overwhelming majority of the American people –
as represented in Congress and in the legislatures of the states – opted at
this time to approve of a pro-civil rights amendment to the United States
Constitution. They were not being asked to endorse the modification of one of
the various institutions of the United States Government – to alter the
jurisdiction of the federal courts, say, or grant the federal government access
to a larger tax base. Rather, they were being given the chance to decide
whether or not to extend the right to vote – one of the most fundamental rights
of citizenship – to those of their fellow citizens who, because they lived in
certain states and were financially disadvantaged, were otherwise prohibited
from taking part in the democratic process. Indeed, they were essentially being
asked to help redefine who was and wasn’t a full citizen. And the fact that
they overwhelmingly decided to expand the franchise rather than maintain the
narrow, discriminatory definition that had been articulated in the various
Southern states at the turn of the 20th century would seem to both
speak to the popular appeal of the subject at that moment in time and
foreshadow the other similar reforms which were to follow over the course of
the 1960s.
