White Voter Suppression was, and is, REAL.
When I wrote "Poll Taxes: Not Just for Negroes (and never were)" and " "Where the White Women Vote?"," my wish was that they flagged that modern Voter Suppression has deep roots. And, of course, that when they implement Voter suppression, it harms poor White voters, as well as the targeted Black vote.
The Game done Changed
Now, those articles are signposts of Trump's desperation to win. He's willing to allow the destruction of the Postal Service -- a service long-hated by conservatives -- to win. He's eager to suppress easing voting,knowing the fewer that vote, the more likely his win.
Game the same. Just got more fierce.
The ideal of universal suffrage has always been more a pipe dream for many.
It’s just we “forgot” that that dreams fulfillment for White folx — even White Men — was, and still is, a lot shakier than we recall.
I want to dive into that using one of the most anti-Democratic regimes in American history -- the Antebellum South...
...and specifically, how White Men were abused.
(Any parallels to modern issues are, of course, for the reader to divine.)
See, we tend to have little-to-no awareness of just how Authoritarian the group that would, post-War, create the Lost Cause were, prior to the War. Not only were Educational opportunities sparse on the ground, those that did exist were mostly paid programs.
That need to pay meant there was a class of folx who couldn't read to begin with. That aligned with the massive effort to censor publications, including State controls over anti-slavery publications. Even the Federal government capitulated, allowing Censorship of mails on the State level:
"The Post Office Act of 1836 asserted that postmasters could not “unlawfully” refuse to deliver the mail, but did not specify what constituted an unlawful refusal. Many Jacksonian postmaster generals interpreted that law as prohibiting postmasters from delivering anti-slavery literature in states where that literature was prohibited."
Gillman, H., Graber, M. A., & Whittington, K. E. (2013). Congress Debates Incendiary Publications in the Mail (expanded). In AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM: Vol. II (Issue 1833, pp. 1–15). http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/fdscontent/uscompanion/us/static/companion.websites/9780199751358/instructor/chapter_5/congressdebatesinc.pdf
The worst part, though, is that this was all, more or less, by design. There's no need to go looking for a "conspiracy," when there's a open one sitting right here, in our history books!
Writings on Poor Whites in the Antebellum south are thin on the ground. So: I'll be going back to Historian Keri Leigh Merritt -- specifically, her work MASTERLESS MEN: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South .
In that work, Merritt lays out the core of the problem -- both political and financial power had been consolidated int he hands of slave-owners:
[...]in the Deep South, both state and local governments were dominated by a small but powerful group of wealthy slaveholders. Slave- and land-owning yeomen certainly participated in politics, and even some of the “respectable,” more well-to-do poor whites became involved on a minor level. But for a majority of the truly poor, political power was never within reach, and it became more elusive throughout the late antebellum period. While members of the affluent master class occasionally paid lip service to democracy in the 1830s, by the 1850s many of the region’s leaders were openly touting the benefits of oligarchy and aristocracy, while condemning the free states for rule by mobocracy. Within slave societies, these dens of “oligarchal despotism,” as Helper referred to them, the entire system was set up to serve slaveholders.
And those modern cries about the imbalance of the Senate, of the Electoral College? Yes, they have precedent:
The southern slave power, of course, had long dominated the federal government. Controlling the presidency, the legislature, and even the judiciary, slaveholders and their allies wielded wildly disproportionate power. As DuBois pointed out, slave owner aims to protect the peculiar institution directly infringed upon the civil rights of non-slaveholding whites at both the federal and state levels.
Indeed, she notes that, due to how the 3/5ths Clause was implemented, it took votes away from African slaves and Whites who didn't own slaves.
As a result, in the years running up the War, the vast majority of southern State legislators were slave-owners. Indeed, in Tennessee, it was, by one estimate all but one stage legislator who owned slaves.
And to keep them in power? They kept the population uneducated. If you got education, they kept you ignorant to any criticism.
If you managed to build up criticism? They ensured your vote was drowned out.
Literally, at times.
In the above articles, I described some of the stunts pulled to manipulate voters. Drinking was a key one: "Voting Day in the Deep South was a raucous, drunken, hedonistic affair, at least on its surface. Behind the scenes, of course, powerful slaveholders were in complete control of the day’s events."
Voting was public -- everyone knew everyone else's voting. Not only public, but oftentimes "viva voce, or 'by word of mouth.'" Since the same people who would hire you also ran elections, you see the bias inherent in the system, from jump.
Poll taxes were also a key issue, as per the title of one of my articles. Property requirements weren't unknown, either. On top of that, there were residential requirements in many areas.
All in all, they managed to frame up voting to keep the rich in power, and controlling every aspect of the situation in the southern US. No wonder that, after the compromise of 1870, the American South just...reverted back to this setup, in Jim Crow. Was able to sell so many the lie, in the Lost Cause.
Jim Crow wasn't an aberration. It was a return to the mean.
And it was a mean that, historically, was nearly as eager to bust White heads, as Black, to stay in power.
Leaving the Game
This is why I keep yelling about Whites and Voter Suppression. If they go thru all this chaos and trouble to stop you from voting, to stop you from knowing...it must be for a reason, right?
You want to be empowered? You have to get into the reading, and the study. You have to know what you're voting for, and not just voting for chaos or a "change".
Your informed vote scares the hell outta them. It's why they spend millions on TV stations and websites and bots to distort the modern conversation.
Don't let a meme think for you. Get wise, get witty, get ready to vote.
Send 'em running scared.