Liette Gidlow

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Liette Gidlow | Delegitimizing Democracy: "Civic Slackers," the Cultural Turn, and the Possibilities of Politics | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Delegitimizing Democracy: "Civic Slackers," the Cultural Turn, and the Possibilities of Politics

I swear to the Lord

I still can't see

Why Democracy means

Everybody but me.

—Langston Hughes

"Poo-pooh! I never vote!" the man sniffed, reclining on pillows, casually puffing a cigar. (See figure 1.) He might look like an upstanding citizen—middle aged, upper-middle-class, maybe even wealthy, wearing a banker's pinstripes, the very picture of masculine respectability—but in the wake of the Great War to "make the world safe for democracy," postwar labor unrest, race riots, and the Red Scare, this man's civic apathy made him, in the artist's phrase, "The Most Dangerous Man in America."¹

Figure 1.A gentleman lounges at home instead of voting in Gale's 1924 cartoon, "The Most Dangerous Man in America." Get-Out-the-Vote groups routinely depicted nonvoters as white men who were middle-class or wealthy, although such men had the highest rate of voter turnout. Copyright,1924, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission.

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