Authors: Ira Katznelson
In assessing the effects of war on liberal democracy, Ronald Krebs has underscored how the pressures of total war in the 1940s enhanced political participation.
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David Mayhew’s examination of warfare’s impact on American political history identifies soldier-voting rights, including the poll tax exemption, as one of nine key policy advances of World War II.
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Even more expansively, the historian Reeve Huston has written that “during the war, Congress passed Soldier Voting Acts, which enabled all soldiers to vote without racial exclusions.”
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Mayhew’s and Huston’s source is Alexander Keyssar’s grand history of the evolution of suffrage in the United States, which stressed how, over the course of American history, it was warfare and its sacrifice for democratic values that emboldened the disenfranchised and placed opponents on the defensive. Keyssar characterized the World War II measures as “standardizing and federalizing” the right to vote for members of the armed forces. Appraising this development as “not surprising” at a time of patriotic fervor and national cohesion, he positively judged soldier voting to have been a critical step toward nationalizing and advancing voting rights for all American adults.
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In light of these assessments, it seems curious to read a dry scholarly monograph that dramatically takes note of the legislation’s “enormous controversy”; to discover a leading student of soldier voting summarizing how the issue was “seething with controversy”; to come across
Newsweek
’s report of how “the soldier-vote promised to be one of the most explosive of this 78th Congress [and] could turn the 1944 election into one of the most controversial in history”; to notice that the journalist (later novelist) Allen Drury recorded in his contemporaneous Senate journal that “the soldier-vote bill” is “rather less of a patriotic contest than the public has been led to believe”; to see Samuel Rosenman, a key Roosevelt adviser and White House counsel between 1943 and 1946, recalling how “the bitter fights with Congress . . . on soldier voting” revealed that the president “had lost control . . . of his own party in Congress”; to become aware of the
Chicago Tribune
’s report of how, in “one of the wildest sessions in years,” lasting “nearly four tumultuous hours, the Mississippian [John Rankin] fought to prevent his colleagues from considering legislation to permit members of the armed forces serving in the continental limits of the United States and Alaska to cast absentee ballots in the forthcoming November election”; and to read
The Nation
’s description of the soldier-vote issue “as one of the most partisan fights in American history.”
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It is even more unexpected to learn that fully fifty-three members of the House of Representatives voted against the soldier-voting bill in September 1942; and to discover that, in July 1944, the Senate approved soldier voting by a 47–38 margin, hardly an indicator of a sweeping consensus about liberal rights, democratic imperatives, and republican citizenship at a time of national peril.
The disputes that split Congress and ultimately led to President Roosevelt’s humiliation lay precisely with the “standardizing and federalizing” attributes that Keyssar’s account appreciatively, but wrongly, portrays as the legislation’s primary features. These questions strained the spirit of national unity that Roosevelt had started to invoke even before Pearl Harbor. In his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union message of January 1941, the president had underscored, wishfully, how circumstances in Europe and Asia called on all Americans to build a shield for democracy beyond special interest or partisan divisions. Calling for “an all-inclusive national defense,” expressing a determination to keep “war away from our Hemisphere” by “resisting aggression,” and refusing “to acquiesce in a peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers,” the speech utilized the phrase “by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship” to begin the three consecutive paragraphs expressing, in this way, “our determination that the democratic cause shall prevail.”
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Echoing this language, Massachusetts Republican Joseph Martin, the House minority leader and chairman of the Republican National Committee, who later led his party’s support for soldier-voting legislation, underscored that “partisan politics have no place in the consideration of war activities.”
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Yet by moving questions about federalism and eligibility to the fore, soldier voting pit such calls for national unity against other strongly held beliefs and values, most notably inclinations to favor a modest federal role and protect Jim Crow. These preferences sometimes coalesced. In an atmosphere of heightened anxiety on the part of some southern members in the House and Senate about the war’s impact on the persistence of white supremacy, debate in both chambers disclosed tensions within the usually solid South on matters that concerned race. Further, in 1942, and again in 1944, the House proved more willing to acquiesce to southern anti–poll tax sentiment, just the reverse of the voting pattern that prevailed when the poll tax was considered in a freestanding manner, thus exposing tensions between symbolic and sincere behavior with regard to civil rights.
Contrary to Keyssar’s canonical assessment, the most notable features characterizing both the burdensome process that was authorized in 1942 and the simpler and more timely 1944 statute were, in fact, decisions not to standardize the ballot and not to give significant powers of oversight, implementation, and sanction to the federal government despite the imperatives of total war.
Technically a set of amendments to the existing act, the 1944 law did gesture toward a standard federal role by establishing a three-person Federal Ballot Commission (the secretaries of war and navy, and the administrator of the War Shipping Administration) to prepare, deliver, and receive ballots for federal offices. This procedure was intended to facilitate voting when a state did not provide for absentee voting, or when a soldier would swear an oath after October 1 that a state ballot properly applied for had not been received. Votes cast by soldiers utilizing this federal ballot would be counted in the tally for national offices in the local jurisdictions to which they would be delivered. Further, the amended act did not repeal—at least not explicitly—the poll tax waiver for soldiers.
Nevertheless, what stands out is not the “not surprising” impulse to extend voting possibilities to members of the armed services but the “emasculation of a stronger Soldier Vote Act”
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by a congressional coalition that successfully resisted the vigorous effort Roosevelt and his administration mounted to offer all soldiers a standard federal ballot.
In all, the 1944 statute contained numerous features that made it a pantomime of federally secured voting rights. Its provisions incorporated features the president had denounced as “fraud on the soldiers, sailors, and marines now fighting for us, and a fraud upon the American people” in late January, when they first had appeared as the defining elements of a bill for soldier voting sponsored in the House by John Rankin and in the Senate by James Eastland, also from Mississippi.
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“The bill reduced the United States War Ballot Commission to largely printing, compiling, and record keeping, it had ‘no general supervisory authority’ to judge the qualifications of potential military voters.”
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The statute’s provisions included the requirement of an oath of qualification, and a stipulation that “under this act the states are free to determine for themselves whether or not the voters under the act are qualified to vote under the laws of the state.” The law simply recommended, but did not mandate, that states waive their registration requirements for voters in the armed forces. It only suggested that they make available absentee ballots for state and local as well as federal positions in both primary and general elections.
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The federal ballot applied exclusively to members of the armed services serving
outside
the country, unless the person’s state made no provision for absentee voting whatsoever (at the time, only Kentucky and New Mexico met this test). Most important, Title III stipulated that the federal balloting provisions of the law would be subject to state-by-state legislative approval. Each governor would have to confirm that “the use of ballots provided for by this title is authorized by the laws of such State,” thus ensuring that the standard federal ballot would be counted only in states that officially and publicly certified their use by July 15. Any conflict between federal provisions and state law, moreover, would privilege the latter.
Just twenty of the forty-eight states approved the federal ballot. Fewer than 85,000 soldier voters utilized it. Of the 9,225,000 persons of voting age in the military in 1944, 2,961,160 voted, the vast majority by utilizing ordinary state procedures for absentee voting. This turnout clearly was a huge advance over that of 1942, but it fell well short of widespread expectations, including the estimate of 6,000,000 soldier voters that had been offered by statisticians at the American Institute of Public Opinion months earlier.
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In a March 1952 message to Congress about soldier voting in the midst of the Korean War, President Truman judged this record, without elaboration or an explanation of the cause, to have been “not good,”
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observing how “during World War II, an effort was made through State action and congressional action to facilitate voting by men and women in the armed services, but it was never really as successful as it should have been.”
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In 1944, the South had lagged far behind. The poorest military-turnout performers were Alabama, South Carolina, Delaware, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. With the exceptions of Georgia and Virginia, where state governments actively courted white soldier voters, the turnout record in the other southern states was only marginally better.
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Of the weakest southern performers, only one, Texas, sanctioned the federal ballot.
Not just the federal ballot but also the poll tax dispensation first enacted in 1942 hinged on the certification by governors that the federal ballot would be an acceptable form of soldier voting. Asked by Iowa Republican Karl LeCompte if the poll tax provisions of the earlier law had been repealed, Eugene Worley replied, “I say they are not expressly repealed, but they are effectively nullified. We have tied them down to such an extent that they are dead unless the Governors make the necessary certification. . . . Until he makes such certification, [the 1942 stipulations] are stone dead.”
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In all, with these provisions and stipulations, the symbols but not the substance of voting rights were extended to American soldiers.
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to finish, the South’s qualms hung over soldier voting. Any account must show how, under the leadership of Senator Eastland and Congressman Rankin, southern members sought to mobilize sectional solidarity, command congressional rules, and invoke cherished values associated with the federal principle of limited central government. Crafting a states’ rights alternative to Wechsler’s Department of Justice bill, which came to be sponsored by Democratic senators Theodore Green of Rhode Island and Scott Lucas of Illinois,
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they sought to ensure that any enacted legislation would not upend the region’s rules for, or control over, its low-franchise, exclusionary voting system.
John Rankin had represented Mississippi’s First District for twenty-four years. He had been a leader in the House in crafting legislation that created the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, and was a consistent supporter of the expansion of public-power facilities. As chairman of the Committee on World War Veterans Legislation, he had championed general pensions for World War I widows and orphans, and played a key role in 1944 in writing the GI Bill during the period soldier voting was being debated.
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He also was a fervent and unashamed racist, famous for having labeled antilynching legislation a proposal to encourage rape, for threatening “that thousands of blacks would be killed” if the poll tax were to be repealed by the federal government, for supporting Japanese internment on racial grounds (“The white man’s civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. . . . Once a Jap always a Jap”), and for rabid public anti-Semitism.
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In 1942, his speech had been dependably unconstrained, calling the bill “an insult to the uniform” that had been “pushed by the Communist Party, through the C.I.O. for the purpose of giving those radical elements power over our electoral machinery.”
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By contrast, during the soldier-ballot debates of 1943 and 1944, Rankin spoke fairly loftily about constitutional law, remonstrating that a federal ballot would “destroy the States’ control of elections, wipe out the independence of our elections, and destroy the States’ election machinery,” characterizing the administration’s initiative as “one of the most dangerous measures so far as the welfare and safety of our American institutions are concerned that has ever been proposed to the Congress of the United States.”
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Explaining how the House conferees had managed to accede to the formalities of a federal prohibition of the poll tax while ensuring that it could be nullified, he more laconically observed, “We were trying to bring this law within the scope of the Constitution of the United States.”
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James Eastland’s soldier-vote rhetoric was rather less restrained. Starting the first of five terms—a career that culminated in a long chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee and service as permanent Senate president when the vice presidency was twice vacant in the 1970s, he rose to “speak the sentiments of the hundreds of thousands of young men from Mississippi and the South who wear the uniform of their country. When they return to take over,” he declared, “they desire more than anything else to see the integrity of the social institutions of the South unimpaired. They desire to see white supremacy maintained.” Affirming “that we shall maintain control of our own elections, and our election machinery, and that we will protect and preserve white supremacy throughout eternity,” Eastland, who controlled his family’s six-thousand-acre plantation in the Delta’s overwhelmingly black Sunflower County, insisted that he was doing no more than representing his soldier constituents, “the men in the armed forces of Mississippi and from other states in the South.” Hundreds, he reported, had written to convey that “above all things they do not desire to see the election laws of the South or the powers of the States in defining the qualifications of electors tampered with. Those boys are fighting to maintain the rights of the States. Those boys are fighting to maintain white supremacy.”
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