Us & Them: In The Beginning, There Was Very Little Mention Of The Right to Vote

Many people expected the 2024 presidential election would be unpredictable.  But no one anticipated the recent sequence of events – Joe Biden’s debate performance, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s move to the top of the Democratic ticket. 

On this Us & Them episode, host Trey Kay looks at where all this is leading to… the ballot box. History often helps provide context, so Kay talks with two historians about our right to vote and access to the ballot box. We look back at just what the Constitution and America’s Founding Fathers intended for our elections. As we dive into the history of voting rights, we learn that concept wasn’t really at the heart of things during the birth of the nation. Actually, in the beginning, voting was a privilege for only a few people in the very new nation that would become the United States.  

This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the CRC Foundation.

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Professor Alex Keyssar teaches history and social policy at the Harvard School of Government. Many years ago, he wrote the book on the right to vote in America (The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States). Then he wrote another one, on why we still have the Electoral College (Why We Still Have the Electoral College?). 

“I was first eligible to vote and first voted in 1968,” adding he, like many young people at the time, “was completely disillusioned, with mainstream politics,” including with then Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He had supported Eugene McCarthy and then Bobby Kennedy as anti-Vietnam War candidates, but ended up casting his first presidential ballot for comedian Dick Gregory.

Keyssar says he was frustrated with politics because it didn’t seem like working people had much say over how America was run. And once he became a historian, the feeling bothered him so much that he decided to write a book about it. 

“The first step… was to try to determine the laws that determine voting. Right. Well, you know, what we’re in the mythology about the United States, of course, was that we became a democracy very early. We eliminated class barriers to voting in the early 19th century, unlike Europe. And thus we had a full fledged functioning democracy, you know, by fairly early in the 19th century. That’s, that’s the root of our current democratic success. And I started writing that first chapter, and I had written 30 pages, and I was only up to 1807.”

Keyssar said that this felt like a very awkward first chapter, which was shaping up to be around 200 pages. Then a bell went off in his head and he realized why he was having difficulty. 

“Nobody had written a history of the right to vote in the United States. It’s our most cherished right. We talk about it a lot. No history of it had been written since 1917 or 1920. And that was a pretty thin book. There was another book published in the 1950s, but it only covered the period from 1790 to 1850. Everything was just presumed.”

In the modern era, the history of voting rights is closely tied to the struggle for civil rights. Professor Carol Anderson is the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy. She teaches African American studies and history at Emory University. She also wrote the critically-acclaimed book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. 

Professor Anderson told Us & Them host Trey Kay about the first time she voted in the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan ran against then incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Trey Kay: Why did you decide to vote?

Carol Anderson: Oh, I could not not vote.  My first political memory was the assassination of JFK. I witnessed the civil rights movement. You know, seeing those images coming through as a child. And I remember King’s assassination. And I remember being a kid and, and turning to my older brother, my older brother could fix anything, right?

And I turned to him and I wanted him to fix King, to make King get up. Off of that balcony. And my brother was like, no, Carol, he’s dead. And so it was that it was that my father was a community organizer. So everything in my history, everything about the way that I grew up, the value systems that were coursing through my home meant that I could not not vote. It was a duty. It was an obligation. It was a responsibility. It is how you made your mark as an American citizen.

Sitting around the table. We talked about sports and we talked about politics. Those were the two big issues sitting around the dinner table. And so it was part of the zeitgeist. It was part of the ethos in the house. And that the struggle for equality was truly a struggle and you, you couldn’t sit on the sidelines. You had to engage. It was imperative that you engaged. You never cede your power and the vote is part of your power. And so you don’t give it away. You don’t just let it sit there being unused while somebody is wielding theirs against you.

Related Us & Them episodes:

Locked Out of Voting

Let Us ‘Bind Up The Nation’s Wounds