The big vote
Subtitle: gender, consumer culture, and the politics of exclusion, 1890s-1920s
By: Liette Gidlow.
Series: Reconfiguring American political history
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 260
Subjects: Political participation -- United States; Voting -- United States; Women in politics -- United States
Description: "In The Big Vote, historian Liette Gidlow shows that the Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns - overlooked by historians until now - were in fact part of an important transformation of political culture in the early twentieth century. Weakened political parties, ascendant consumer culture, labor unrest, Jim Crow, widespread anti-immigration sentiment, and the new woman suffrage combined to raise serious questions about the meanings of good citizenship. Gidlow recasts our understandings of the significance of the woman suffrage amendment and shows that it was important because it not only enfranchised women but also ushered in a new era of near-universal suffrage. Faced with the apparent equality of citizens before the ballot box, middle-class and elite whites in the Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns and elsewhere advanced a searing critique of the ways that workers, minorities, and sometimes women behaved as citizens." "Documented with primary sources from political parties and civic groups, popular and ethnic periodicals, and electoral returns, The Big Vote looks closely at the national Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns and at the internal dynamics of campaigns in the case-study cities of New York, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Birmingham, Alabama. In the end, the Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns shed light not only on the problem of voter turnout in the 1920s but on some of the problems which hamper the practice of full democracy even today."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : making dominance; title: "Civic slackers" and "poll dodgers" : nonvoting and the construction of discursive dominance; title: "A whole fleet of campaigns" : the get-out-the-vote campaigns in overview; title: "Vote as you please, but vote!" : the leadership of the get-out-the-vote campaigns; title: "Good for at least 100 votes" : the get-out-the-vote campaigns at the local level; title: The expert citizen : civic education and the remaking of civic hierarchies; title: The methods of Wrigley and Barnum : the get-out-the-vote campaigns and the commodification of political culture; title: Conclusion : the new regime.