| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Glenn Feldman. The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama. Athens: University of Georgia. 2004. Pp. xiv, 311. $39.95.
According to Glenn Feldman, the "disfranchisement myth" assumes that early twentieth-century poor whites in Alabama opposed suffrage restrictions for African Americans because they feared the curtailment of their own voting rights. Feldman focuses his study on the debates over the 1901 Alabama "disfranchisement constitution." His book argues, first, that previous historians have perpetuated a romantic myth that poor whites (or, as he calls them, "plain whites") opposed disfranchisement and, second, that this opposition was primarily class-based. Feldman argues, on the contrary, that plain whites were far from "innocent" in the process of disfranchisement. Many of them supported the 1901 constitution in spite of provisions that would disadvantage them economically and politically. In making their Faustian bargain with white supremacy they lost their own right to vote.	1
In this admirably researched work, Feldman contextualizes the process of disfranchisement in the call for a constitutional convention in Alabama in 1901, the battle over ratification, and the debates over an all-white Democratic primary in 1902. The purpose of the new state constitution would be, at least in part, to remove voting rights from black people as well as to restrict economic reform initiatives that would leave power firmly in the hands of white elites. Feldman uses that story—which includes a careful study of the convention deliberations, newspaper editorials about the ratification of the new constitution, and finally, Democratic party convention proceedings that debated an all-white Democratic primary—to show how plain whites, by cooperating with elites, essentially destroyed their own voting rights.	. . .

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