Authors: Ira Katznelson
3
P. Orman Ray, “Military Absent-Voting Laws,”
American Political Science Review
12 (1918): 461, 469;
New York Times,
May 19, 1918.
4
“Should Soldiers Have the Vote? They Say Yes, Congress Maybe,”
Newsweek,
December 4, 1943, p. 54.
5
Additionally, New Jersey sent out some 58,000 ballots on the initiative of the state. See
New Republic,
September 6, 1943, p. 803.
6
Anderson, “Politics, Patriotism, and the State,” p. 90; Martin, “The Service Vote in the Elections of 1944,” pp. 725–26. The Census Bureau, Anderson reports, summarized the reasons for the restricted use as including an insufficient time for states to devise good procedures, and for soldiers, especially those abroad, to get and return ballots. The bureau also noted that “in the South the November elections traditionally drew less interest than the primaries, particularly in off year elections.” See Anderson, “Politics, Patriotism and the State,” p. 90. A Department of Defense report written thirty-five years later noted that the law had “had almost no impact at all,” as it was enacted just weeks before the general election. See U.S. Department of Defense,
The Federal Voting Assistance Program, 11th Report
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), p. 2. A 1952 report by the Special Committee on Service Voting of the American Political Science Association, a study that had been commissioned by President Harry Truman, found that the legislative efforts in 1942 “to facilitate voting in the Armed Forces came too late.” The act “had almost no effect on the number of servicemen who were able to vote in the general election.” See “Findings and Recommendations of the Special Committee on Service Voting,”
American Political Science Review
16 (1952): 513. The committee was chaired by Paul David. Its other members included Robert Cutler, Samuel Eldersveld, Bertram Gross, Alexander Heard, Edward Litchfield, Kathryn Stone, and William Prendergast. Truman thanked APSA, observing that “people need an organization like this to study government and politics in a scientific way, without a lot of drumbeating and headline-hunting” (p. 512).The president made the report the basis for his message to Congress on March 28, 1952, suggesting how soldier voting should be conducted during the Korean War.
7
I. C. B. Dear, ed.,
The Oxford Companion to World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 931, 936, 938. A detailed overview can be found in Russell F. Weigley,
History of the United States Army
(New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 421–50.
8
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Christmas Eve Speech—Report on the Teheran Conference,” December 24, 1943, in
Nothing to Fear
, ed. Zevin, pp. 378–87.
9
In all, American forces suffered 291,557 battle deaths and 113,182 deaths from other causes. See U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970,
part 2. (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, 1976), p. 1140.
10
Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union address, January 1944, in
Nothing to Fear,
ed. Zevin, p. 395.
11
Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution stipulates that for elections to the House of Representatives “Electors in each state shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” The identical language is used with regard to the Senate in the Seventeenth Amendment. Further, Article I, Section 4, stipulates, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof”; but it also stipulates that “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators,” which then were the state legislatures. The Supreme Court regularly upheld congressional supremacy over federal elections, including in
Smiley v. Holm,
a Minnesota redistricting case, when it held, referring to this feature of the Constitution, that
[it] cannot be doubted that these comprehensive words embrace authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections, not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes, duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making the publication of election returns; in short, to enact the numerous requirements which experience shows are necessary in order to enforce the fundamental right involved.
See
Smiley v. Holm,
285 U.S. 355 (1932). For a contemporaneous overview of the constitutional issues during the period of soldier-voting debates, see Charles M. Boynton, “A Study of the Elective Franchise of the United States,”
Notre Dame Lawyer
20 (1945): 230–302.
12
Roosevelt, State of the Union address, January 1944, in
Nothing to Fear,
ed. Zevin, p. 395.
13
New York Times,
April 1, 1944.
14
Frank Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny
(New York: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 503. “The conference bill,” Michael Anderson concluded, “amounted to a victory for opponents of a meaningful federal ballot.” See Anderson, “Politics, Patriotism, and the State,” p. 94.
15
Congressional Record
, 78th Cong., 2d sess., March 15, 1944, p. 2623.
16
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt
, vol. 13 (New York: Macmillan, 1945), pp. 111–15.
17
New York Times,
April 1, 1944. The earliest advocacy of an assertive standardizing federal role in shaping state regulations for absentee voting during World War II that I have found is the proposal made in May 1942 by Urban Lavery, a Chicago lawyer who was prominent in the Democratic Party; he later authored a leading volume on administrative law. He urged Congress to draft “a uniform legislative program to lift rigid restrictions in many states” that would be superintended by a nonpartisan national elections commission. See
Chicago Daily Tribune,
May 1, 1942.
18
“Should Absentee Soldier Voting Be Federally Controlled?,”
Congressional Digest,
January 1944, p. 4. “The laws of politics being what they are,”
The Nation
editorialized, “a Congressman would no more dream of opposing the right of soldiers and sailors to vote than he would of sponsoring a measure for compulsory polygamy.” “Let Them Vote, But—”
Nation,
December 4, 1943, p. 655.
19
Chicago Daily Tribune,
April 18, 1942.
20
“No—should not” garnered support of 5 percent, with 3 percent undecided. See “Public Opinion Polls,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
8 (1944): 131. Three in four thought such a plan to be feasible. Fifty-eight percent preferred a “federal law providing for the Army and Navy to give ballots to all men and women over 21 in the armed forces”; 30 percent favored “each state send ballots to men and women over 21 in the armed forces who will be eligible to vote under the laws of their states.” A January 16, 1944, NORC survey asked, “Do you think Negroes over 21 in the armed forces should be allowed to vote or not (in the Presidential election of November 1944)?” An unqualified yes was offered by 77 percent of respondents, and another 2 percent endorsed voting for blacks if they qualified in their home state. Opposed were 12 percent, and another 5 who were against soldier voting irrespective of race (p. 131).
21
When these votes were taken, on July 23 and August 25, 1942, less than a third of the House was present, and just over half of the Senate. In the pre-air-conditioning age, many members fled Washington’s oppressive summer heat and humidity. For an account of the difference to practices and partisanship that air conditioning later made, see Nelson Polsby,
How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 84–86.
22
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 2d sess., March 15, 1944, p. 2617.
23
An exception is David Kennedy’s brief treatment of soldier voting, stressing the limits of the 1944 legislation. David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
24
In
Breedlove v. Suttles,
a 1937 challenge to Georgia’s poll tax by a white citizen, the Supreme Court found that the poll tax was a legitimate means of raising revenue, not an instrument of disenfranchisement violating the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the Constitution. See
Breedlove v. Suttles
320 U.S. 277 (1937).
25
“The present law,” Senator Green observed in discussing the 1942 act, “has nothing to do with the constitutionality of the poll tax anywhere. It is perfectly logical for anyone who voted for it . . . and still oppose the repeal of the poll tax. This bill has nothing whatever to do with that. The question is simply whether the collection of such a tax from men in the armed forces in time of war can be used to prevent their voting; that is all.” See
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 1st sess., November 22, 1943, p. 9794.
26
Joseph E. Kallenbach, “Constitutional Aspects of Federal Anti-Poll Tax Legislation,”
Michigan Law Review
45 (1947): 719.
27
The report was dated November 29, 1943. Isaiah Berlin,
Washington Despatches, 1941–45: Weekly Political Reports from the British Embassy
, ed. H. G. Nicholas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 280. Wendell Willkie, it might be noted, endorsed Roosevelt’s proposed legislation in January 1944, stating, “I do not believe it is possible as a practical matter under State statutes for every member of the armed forces to be given opportunity to vote. . . . I would not wish to be elected President without every member of the armed services having an opportunity to decide whether I should be.” See
New York Times,
January 20, 1944. Ohio senator Robert Taft, by contrast, warned that the soldier-vote bill “might throw the whole election into a legal tailspin.” See
New York Times,
January 24, 1944.
28
Recalling his role in drafting soldier-voting legislation just before his appointment as assistant attorney general in charge of the War Division of the Department of Justice during World War II, Wechsler remembered this as his “toughest assignment . . . in anticipation of the presidential election of 1944 . . . to formulate a solution to the potential disenfranchisement of the ten million Americans who were overseas or otherwise out of reach of the ordinary absentee ballot provisions of the state voting laws.” See Norman Silber and Geoffrey Miller, “Toward ‘Neutral Principles’ in the Law: Selections from the Oral History of Herbert Wechsler,”
Columbia Law Review
93 (1993): 879. Informative appreciations by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “In Memory of Herbert Wechsler,” and Henry Paul Monaghan, “A Legal Giant Is Dead,” appeared in the
Columbia Law Review
100 (2000): 1359–61 and 1370–76, respectively.
29
New York Times,
September 2, 1942. Brown, who also founded and led the National Negro Council, was the author of
What the Civilian Conservation Corps Is Doing for Colored Youth
(Washington, DC: Federal Security Agency, Civilian Conservation Corps, 1940).
30
Ronald R. Krebs, “In the Shadow of War: The Effects of Conflict on Liberal Democracy,”
International Organization
63 (2009): 190–92. See also Ronald R. Krebs,
Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Michael Sherry writes of the “militarization of social change” during the war, but he does not discuss soldier voting as an instance of how the war affected the place of black soldiers in American society. See Michel Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 101–2. Likewise, there is no mention of the issue in John Morton Blum,
V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
31
David Mayhew, “Wars and American Politics,”
Perspectives on Politics
3 (2005): 479; see also David Mayhew, “Events as Causes: The Case of American Politics,”
Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen
, ed. Ian Shapiro and Sonu Bedi (New York: NYU Press, 2007), p. 114. There, Mayhew writes how “World War II brought another dose of small but real progress for southern blacks by way of the Soldier Voting Act of 1942.”
32
Reeve Huston, “Battling over the Boundaries of the American Electorate,”
Reviews in American History
29 (2001): 632. A recent positive assessment of the Roosevelt administration and race relations underscores how the Soldier Voting Act the president had signed in 1942 “set up the machinery to allow qualified servicemen to file absentee votes in federal elections without paying a poll tax, thereby allowing many southern soldiers (including African-Americans) to vote for the first time.” See Kevin J. McMahon,
Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 158. Another important study of race in American history, in commenting on the 1942 act, finds that “just as in the Revolution and the Civil War, black military service had proven instrumental for obtaining black political rights,” observing that “the law provided the first legislative expansion of black voting rights since the 1870s.” See Philip A. Klinker and Rogers M. Smith,
The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Inequality in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 174–75. Similarly, a history of southern segregation and voting restrictions stresses the “advance” made for civil rights by the Soldier Voting Act of 1942. “Though Southerners held any tampering with the notorious poll tax—a device designed almost solely to keep blacks from the ballot box—to be an assault of the ‘Southern way of life and on white supremacy,’ the federal legislature passed the Soldier Vote Act in 1942, giving service members an absentee ballot and the right to cast it without having to pay any tax. For the first time since Reconstruction, voting had been made easier or freer for African-Americans.” See Jerrold M. Packard,
American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow
, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 2002), p. 202.