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Alexander Keyssar is a professor of history and public policy at Duke University. He has written widely about American history and contemporary affairs for numerous popular and academic publications. He is the author of Out of Work:The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), which won three scholarly prizes and was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.His most recent book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2000) has received much attention and is reviewed by Tim Stafford in the current issue of Books & Culture. In October, Books & Culture editor John Wilson and Eastern Nazarene College historian Donald Yerxa attended a lecture at Boston University hosted by the New England chapter of The Historical Society during which Professor Keyssar presented his thesis on the contested history of American democracy. Yerxa reached Keyssar at his Duke University office and conducted the following telephone interview for B&C on Monday afternoon, November 13th.

Before we get to matters related to election 2000, I'd like to have you speak to the argument of your recent book, The Right to Vote. First, what is the standard narrative of the history of suffrage in America?

It is a narrative of steady and irresistible expansion of the franchise. It is a story of continuous progress. At the nation's founding, the franchise was sharply restricted, but thereafter one group of citizens after another acquired the right to vote. First property requirements were eliminated; then tax-paying requirements; then African-Americans were enfranchised; then women were enfranchised; then African-Americans again; and finally 18-year-olds.

How do you challenge that narrative in your book?

I challenge it in two ways, in some sense micro and macro. There were numerous instances in American history of specific rollbacks of the franchise, of specific groups who were enfranchised losing the right to vote. One somewhat anomalous but very interesting case was that of women in New Jersey, who had the right to vote until 1807, and then they lost it. Many Africans in Northern states in the first half of the nineteenth century were enfranchised and then lost the right to vote. In macro terms, I argue that the entire period from the 1850s to World War I or shortly thereafter was a period in which the dominant trend was toward contraction of the suffrage rather than expansion.

You stress two factors that shaped the trajectory of suffrage in America: war and class tension. Could you explain that a bit?

What I discovered was that war seems to be the primary factor that contributes to the expansion of suffrage. That is not to say that there are no other factors; it is multi-causal. But every major expansion of the right to vote in American history occurred during or just after a war. Leaders and elites usually like to have armies drawn from the lower orders, and it was difficult to recruit an army that was disfranchised.

There were also powerful rhetorical claims after a war or at the tail end of a war on the part of people who had performed service that they thought had earned them the right to vote. We see this with men who were unpropertied during the Revolution and the War of 1812. It affected the enfranchisement of blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. The dynamic of war in its own particular way affected the timing of the enfranchisement of women just after World War I.

And we see it also in World War II and the Cold War, but there were some different dynamics there, with the Cold War in particular. The Cold War played a role in black enfranchisement in the South. And were it not for the Vietnam War, as I say in the book, the voting age might still be twenty-one.

On the other side, among the many factors that have led to periodic contractions of suffrage or the retarding of progress, it appears to me that class tension is the primary one. The distinction between men who owned property and those who did not was critical at the outset. And I think that a reluctance on the part of the upper and upper middle classes to enfranchise an industrial working class or a quasi-peasantry was central to the dynamics of the history of suffrage.

Is that functionally the same case now? We have virtual universal suffrage, but we don't have full participation in the democratic process.

There is a remarkable and I think non-coincidental link here, in that we not only do not have full participation, but participation is class-skewed. Turnout for elections correlates very closely with income and education. The first data that I have seen from this past election suggest that this pattern continues, and I think that is not a coincidence.