Hi! Thanks for the interesting question.
I will try to provide you with links that directly answers your
questions and also gives a background of this field. I will also
provide direct quotations, whenever possible, from the articles so as
to save you time but I highly recommend that you read them in their
complete form. Some documents are in PDF formats so you will need the
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yet here is a link so you could download The Adobe Acrobat Reader
(http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html).
In terms of technology, the mechanical-lever machine and the punch
card system were high-tech during the late 19th century.
“Of the half-dozen or more ways that Americans vote, the
mechanical-lever machine is the unlikeliest to be still prospering in
the 21st century. No longer manufactured, it also may be the most
vulnerable to breakdown.”
”Introduced in 1892 in Lockport, N.Y., it was used by 18.6% of
registered voters in elections in 1998 — mainly in the Northeast — and
probably nearly as many this year, according to Election Data
Services.”
“The most common voting method is the punch-card system, from a
technology originally developed for the 1890 census. It was used by
34.3% of voters in 1998 elections, the most recent year for which data
is available.”
“Voting technology: Stuck in the past”
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/crh699.htm
Media, which almost always decide any election, already brought the
power of what technology can do to help candidates win elections. In
the 19th century advances in printing technology became a playhouse
for electoral candidates.
“Public speaking and stump oratory dominated the campaign
Communication
of the l9th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. Even
the
use of mass media was closely tied to public speaking. Abraham Lincoln
spent $132.30 to reprint 7,500 copies of one of his Congressional
speeches to distribute on behalf of Zachary Taylor during the
presidential campaign of 1848. In his 1856 Senate campaign, now
remembered for his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln spent
several thousand dollars on travel to give speeches and to reprint
copies of those speeches.”
“Communication scholars studying the history of public address always
marvel at the hundreds of speeches delivered by William Jennings Bryan
in 1896, but more attention should perhaps be given to the McKinley
campaign which signaled the beginnings of the "new politics." McKinley
employed the consulting skills of Mark Hanna, who relied upon weekly
press releases, colorful campaign posters, and 1,400 trained speakers
dispatched on McKinley's behalf. The Republican National Committee
produced over 300 million pieces of literature, representing more than
20 documents per eligible voter in a campaign which cost more than $6
million. That same campaign also saw transportation technology emerge
as a communication tool as political orators boarded trains to
facilitate the speechmaking process, and the whistle-stop speech at
each train station became an expected feature of presidential
campaigns from 1896 to 1952. More recent transportation technology has
substituted the airport press conference in five media markets each
day during the campaign.”
“Communication and Technology: The Future of American Democracy”
Stephen A. Smith
University of Arkansas
http://www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/ss/1984.html
In this wonderful article about the effects of mass immigration in US
politics through the years, the writer shows how immigrants were used
in elections and how the US leaders at that time took advantage
getting ballots from new voters.
“At the end of the 19th century, American politics was emphatically
organized around party politics. In the late 1800s, parties dominated
all aspects of electoral life, including candidate nominations,
campaign strategies and tactics, voting, and the allegiances of
voters. Voting in the 1880s meant casting a public, party-line ballot
at the polls. Candidates were nominated in private party meetings—the
proverbial "smoke-filled rooms"—and most voters happily cast a
straight ticket for one party or the other.”
“Immigrants entered politics through the enthusiastic embrace of
political parties. The two major parties, highly competitive in
national politics, often desperately needed new voters, whom they
mobilized through a series of inclusive tactics. The primary means of
contact was person-to-person, and voter turnouts were astoundingly
high by today's standards—more than 80 percent in presidential
elections and 70 percent in off-year congressional elections.”
“From Melting Pot to Centrifuge”
Immigrants and American Politics
by Steven E. Schier
http://www.brook.edu/press/REVIEW/winter2002/schier.htm
In an issue of HarpWeek we get a more detailed issue of what is going
on as regards to the issue of immigrants in the politically turbulent
times of the late 19th century.
“The decade from 1845 to 1854 saw the greatest proportionate influx of
immigrants in American history. By 1860 more than one out of every
eight Americans were foreign-born, with the most numerous being Irish,
German, and English immigrants. When the wave of immigration began,
the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant nation whose
citizens were affiliated primarily with Protestantism's evangelical
wing. Most American Protestants held deep-seated prejudices against
Roman Catholicism, which was the religion of most of the Irish and a
large segment of the German immigrants. It was assumed that the
Catholic immigrants' first loyalty would be to Rome, not their adopted
country, and that Catholicism would undermine America's political and
religious liberties.”
“Several anti-immigrant groups formed to promote the severe
restriction of immigration (at the time, America's borders were open
to all) and the substantial lengthening of the naturalization process
of becoming citizens. The most important of the anti-immigrant, or
nativist, organizations was the Order of the Star Spangled Banner,
founded in 1849. Within a few years it had grown into a formidable
political party called the American party. It became popularly known
as the ‘Know-Nothing’ party because when asked about the organization,
members were to reply, ‘I know nothing.’”
“In the turbulent political circumstances of the mid-1850s, the
American party sometimes served as a way station between the crumbling
Whig party and the emerging Republican party for those who considered
slavery and Catholicism to be twin-evils that threatened the nation.
In the 1854 and 1855 elections, the American party made a strong
showing, electing over 100 Congressmen, eight governors, several
mayors of major cities, and thousands of state and local officials.
The party soon collapsed, however, as slavery became the major issue
in American politics and as the new Republican party captured the
loyalty of most slavery opponents.”
“Reconstruction”
http://elections.harpweek.com/6Issues/issues-2.htm
In terms of women’s activism in those days, this fascinating article
from the archives of the National Park Service provides a glimpse of
how women fought at that time.
“1848 is the year in which it is generally agreed that the formal
American women’s rights movement began. For several decades prior to
that, American women had been gradually enlarging their public roles,
and in the process
voicing longstanding discontent with the lot of their sex. Ever since
the Revolution, women’s educational opportunities had slowly been
improving. 'Academies' for young girls of the elite classes and common
public schools for the rest of the population proliferated, until
women’s literacy rates achieved parity with men’s. Teaching became an
increasingly female occupation, further spurring this development.”
“The emergence of a new reform movement of women dedicated exclusively
and explicitly to securing equality between the sexes was a response
to the principles behind both sides of this abolitionist split:
women’s activism and emphasis on political methods. In 1848 women
anti-slavery activists convened America’s first women’s rights
convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Veteran reformer Lucretia Mott,
up from Philadelphia to visit, gave the event the necessary gravity.
But the driving force at Seneca Falls was a younger woman, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, who went on to become the chief 19th-century philosopher
of women’s emancipation.”
“In the early 1870s, woman suffragists developed an innovative
constitutional argument that they hoped would win them the right to
vote. Based on the first part of the Fourteenth Amendment, they argued
that, as persons, women born or naturalized in the United States were
citizens; and that the right of the franchise was obviously chief
among those “rights and privileges” which were guaranteed to them.
This was a deeply democratic interpretation, inasmuch as it assumed
that the right to vote was not bestowed by government but inherent in
the status of citizen. Based on this interpretation, hundreds of women
all over the country engaged in direct action voting: instead of
waiting for an
act of government to recognize their rights, they went to the polls
and claimed them. At 6 AM sharp, on November 5, 1872, Susan B.
Anthony, along with 50 of her friends and relatives, went to the polls
in Rochester, New York, and cast her ballot. “I have been and gone and
done it!” she wrote jubilantly.7 Three weeks later she was arrested by
federal marshals on the grounds that she had illegally voted, in
violation of the third clause of the Fourteenth Amendment designed to
disenfranchise leaders of the former Confederacy. Anthony’s arrest was
one of the only times that the federal government actually used the
powers granted to it in the Fourteenth Amendment over the right to
vote.”
“Anthony was found guilty, and her case was entered into the annals of
the women’s rights movement as one of the most egregious uses of
government power to squelch women’s activism. But she was unable to
appeal her judgment to a higher court and thus set no constitutional
precedent.”
“The Significance of Women’s Rights for American History”
by Ellen Carol DuBois, Professor, U.S. History, University of
California at Los Angeles
http://www.nps.gov/wori/Appendix%20C.pdf
The following website provides a repository of documents used during
the fight for women’s suffrage in the 19th century.
Teaching With Documents Lesson Plan:
Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment
http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/woman_suffrage/woman_suffrage.html
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Easterangel-ga |
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