Book Review

Canada and the United States

"All we want is a small vote and a large count," wrote an Alabama white man to the Democratic State Executive Committee as they plotted to revise the state constitution in 1901 (p. 180). Michael Perman's book explains how ten southern states accomplished that goal between 1889 and 1908. By the end of the period, seventy percent of eligible southern voters did not vote, discouraged by a variety of measures including poll taxes, unfairly administered literacy tests, and direct primaries that included only white voters. The fraud of the 1880s abated because white southerners had erected legal structures to insure a small, overwhelmingly Democratic vote. Their aim, as one South Carolinian put it, was to assure the "permanent establishment of white supremacy" (p. 91). In achieving that goal, southern states eliminated many poor white voters even as they drove black voters from the polls.

1

Four generations of scholarship, from V. O. Key to C. Vann Woodward to J. Morgan Kousser to Stephen Kantrowitz, have made this story familiar to historians of the South. Perman's contribution is, by design, sweeping. He does three things that enable us to understand disfranchisement's gestalt and, at the same time, to see its parts. First, he situates the story in the context of progressive electoral reform at both ends of the period—the Australian ballot in 1889 and the direct primary around 1900—to demonstrate how the South took national democratic initiatives and twisted them into misshapen, antidemocratic forms. Second, while acknowledging the elimination of black voters as the campaigns' primary purpose, Perman groups southern states by the secondary motives that moved them to disfranchise, shedding light on intrastate politics. Third, he examines the mechanisms by which each of the ten states accomplished their tasks.

. . .