Defy the Founding Fathers—Vote!

With exactly four weeks until Election Day, to avoid discussions of voting, it might be necessary to tune into reruns of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.  Virtually everywhere else, talking heads will be droning on about polling among registered voters, polling among likely voters, potential polling errors, the gender gap, speculation on turnout, fears of voter fraud (by Republicans) and voter suppression (by Democrats). 

Also at issue is the nature of voting rights themselves.  Conservatives view voting as a privilege, available only to those who can satisfy certain rigid requirements, including positively documenting citizenship, proving continuous residency, and having a signature that looks precisely the same each time.  In addition, they insist the United States was not founded to be a racially diverse, religiously homogeneous society, but rather one in which racial and religious purity were to be the core of both government and civil society. 

Liberals demur, maintaining that voting is a right and that the Constitution was written to create the modern world’s first democracy in the spirit of lofty phrases, such as “all men are created equal,” and the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  As such, the voting restrictions conservatives are attempting to perpetrate are contrary to the nation’s founding principles.

Sorry, liberals, but when it comes to the Founding Period, the conservatives are correct.

Then, and at the Constitutional Convention as well, virtually every member of the nation’s elite believed rule was to be by the few, not the many.

In addition to other restrictions, almost to a man—and man is the appropriate word—they believed the right to vote should only be available to those who owned real property.  In the early 1780s, only male landowners with title to at least 50 acres could vote in Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and North Carolina.  During the same period, Connecticut, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts also limited voting to freeholders, but qualification was based on the value of the land, rather than acreage. 

The rationale was that only those who owned real property had a sufficient “stake” in the system to be capable of making vital decisions freely and wisely.  Such paragons of democracy as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams are all on record as opposing granting the vote to ordinary citizens.

In a 1775 pamphlet, “The Farmer Refuted,” Hamilton cited the great British legal philosopher, William Blackstone, who, in his classic Commentaries on the Laws of England, wrote that those “under the immediate dominion of others”—workers—or “persons of indigent fortunes”—the poor—could not be trusted to “give his vote freely, and without influence of any kind, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty.”

At the Convention, Hamilton asserted, “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God, however it is not true in fact.  The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.  Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.”

In a letter written only six weeks before he would sign the Declaration of Independence, John Adams expressed a firm conviction that those without property should be not allowed to vote.  “Such is the frailty of the human heart that very few men who have no property have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by Some Man of Property, who has attached their Minds to his Interest.”

Adams’s views grew more extreme after independence.  “Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy…there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other.”

In Philadelphia, Madison attempted to write a provision in the Constitution limiting the vote to freeholders but it was rejected because voting requirements were to remain the province of individual states.

Other restrictions abounded.  Five states prohibited Catholics from voting and four banned Jews.  In Massachusetts, only Protestants or Catholics who renounced papal authority were allowed to hold public office.  New York barred Catholics from holding office, and Delaware demanded office holders sign an oath avowing the Trinity.  

The Founders agreed that the country was to remain white.  Although there was no definition of “citizen” in the Constitution, in the Naturalization Act of 1790, only white males of good character could apply for citizenship, and therefore be eligible to vote.

One of the few prominent Americans who favored liberal voting rights was Benjamin Franklin, who jabbed at those who thought property owners were the only qualified voters in a fable that become known as “Franklin’s jackass.”

“Today a man owns a jackass worth 50 dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies.  The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government and his acquaintance with mankind are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers—but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote.  Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage?  In the man or in the jackass?”

Another noteworthy American who favored expanded voting rights—at least among adult white males—was Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in 1789, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

Perhaps it was a coincidence that Jefferson’s power base was among small farmers and others of limited means.  Perhaps not. In any event, his preferences were ignored.

So indeed, the United States was hardly founded on the principles most Americans claim to value and respect. 

But that is only half the story. 

Whether or not the United States was created on the prejudices of the day, be they racial, religious, or class oriented, the glory of this nation, what has made it the envy of the world, is its struggle over the ensuing two and a half centuries to expand the very rights that the Founders sought to limit.  One by one, previously banned groups were allowed into the political process, first in choosing the nation’s leaders and then by becoming them.  Property holding requirements to vote were eliminated in the first decades of the nineteenth century.  Black Americans were guaranteed citizenship and the right to vote by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and were allowed to become naturalized citizens in 1870.  Women were granted the vote by the 19^th Amendment in 1920.

Equal rights struggled ahead as well.  Chinese, Japanese, East Asians, Southern Europeans, and Native Americans were eventually prohibited by law from being denied what was termed in the Fourteenth Amendment as the “privileges and immunities of citizenship.”  Catholics and Jews, once despised religious minorities, were permitted to aspire to any position in government they so desired and have become among the most prominent of the nation’s leaders.  That the current Supreme Court, where Christian nationalists have found so much support, is dominated by the very brand of conservative Catholic that was once the focal point of religious prejudice is the ultimate irony.  

But slow and tortuous as widening the right to vote may have been, it has always moved in the same direction.  Forward.

Until now.

What conservatives are trying so hard to achieve is a legal and philosophical u-turn, to return the United States to the very outmoded values the Founders foisted on the nation at the end of the eighteenth century.  Voting is to be limited, citizenship restricted, religious dogma substituted for tolerance, the legal system structured to keep minority groups from threatening white pre-eminence, and warmed over theocracy substituted for democratic rule.  All this under the banner of making America great again. 

Americans who welcome the progress the nation has made and believe in continuing the slow march to “a more perfect union” need to defy both the hypocrisy of today’s conservatives and the conservatism of the men who founded the nation. That means they should perform one simple act.

Vote!