"Mind How You Vote, Boys": The Crisis of Economic Voter Intimidation in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States, 1873-1896

Cohn-Postar, Gideon

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3f1h-r856

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"Mind How You Vote, Boys": The Crisis of Economic Voter Intimidation in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States, 1873-1896

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This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did not perceive it as a threat to democracy. White Americans' fear that wage labor rendered them as economically precarious, and thus politically dependent, as they believed African Americans were, provoked a prolonged crisis. Concern over the threat that economic voter intimidation posed to white men's citizenship shaped the ongoing debates over the nature of manhood suffrage, the role of the federal government in protecting African American men's political rights, and the future of industrial capitalism. Politicians, ordinary workingmen, and labor, reform, and socialist advocates saw employer coercion as a threat to both American democracy and industrial capitalism because it seemed to undermine the independence—and therefore manliness and whiteness—of industrial workers. Between 1888-1892, these reformers transformed the way that Americans voted in nearly every state by enacting ballot secrecy laws to break the chain of information between employers, their employees, and their employees' ballots. The combination of ballot secrecy and a cultural backlash against economic voter intimidation spurred by employers' excesses during the fraught 1896 presidential election drove the practice out of the mainstream in American political culture by the turn of the century.

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