Education and Voting Rights: Understanding the Consequences of the Failed Effort to Establish National Aid for Education, 1870-1906

• In Event: Discourses of Education and Citizenship in Historical Policy Contexts

Abstract

This paper analyzes the rise of literacy tests for voting in the 1890s as a consequence of the failed effort to establish a federal system of national aid for education in the 1870s and 1880s. Previous scholarship on literacy qualifications for suffrage written primarily by political historians has considered this development in the context of other restrictions on the political and civil rights of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South (i.e. Perman, 2001; Foner, 2005). Historians of education, meanwhile, have primarily considered the significance of literacy tests and other restrictions on voting rights in relation to the subsequent decline in levels of funding for African American education in the South (Bond, 1934; Anderson, 1988; Margo, 1990). Less well appreciated is the fact that literacy qualifications for suffrage began appearing in the West as well as the South at exactly the same time and that the practice eventually spread to other states and regions as well. Drawing on a database including the education and suffrage provisions of all state constitutions and constitutional revisions over a 150-year period, this study analyzes the language and politics of the new literacy qualifications for suffrage in the respective states and considers them in the context of the national political discourse over federal aid to education immediately preceding their adoption.
In the 1870s and 80s, Congress came very close to establishing a truly national system of education in the United States--closer than it has ever come before or since. The campaign to establish such a system was formidable, involving lobbying and endorsements by multiple national organizations, including the WCTU, the Knights of Labor, and the National Education Association. One feature that remained central to the more than 20 bills considered during the 20-year campaign, was the principle that funds would be distributed to the respective states based on the proportion of its population that was illiterate, rather than simply on the size of general population or the number of school-age youth. The intention was that funds would go where they were most needed--thus Alabama would receive more funds per capita than Connecticut. The discourse used to justify this redistribution of wealth heavily emphasized the link between literacy and voting, the evils of illiteracy, and the danger posed by the universal male suffrage promised by the 15th amendment in a context in which rates of illiteracy in some states were as high as 50%.
The paper argues that in a perverse inversion of the logic of that discourse, the ultimate failure of the campaign for federal aid to education in the 1870s and 1880s made subsequent state-by-state restrictions on voting rights and education politically and culturally feasible. Failure also clearly returned authority to determine access to suffrage and education back to the states, with a predictable divergence in results that national and state policy-makers and state and federal courts are still wrestling with today.

Author

• Nancy Beadie, University of Washington