>What your're calling for is what the rest of the world would
>consider a party, but what in America is considered a club or a
>pressure group. Thanks to a number of reforms in the past century,
>political "parties" in the US are public institutions that anyone
>can join, not membership organizations.
***** Beyond the Informed Citizen by Michael Schudson
. . . Reformers (first, a group unaffectionately known as "Mugwumps," and later, a broader movement of reforms known as "Progressive") sought to make elections "educational" and to insulate the independent, rational citizen from the distorting enthusiasms of party. In the 1880s, political campaigns began to shift from parades to pamphlets, and so put a premium on literacy; in the early 1900s, non-partisan municipal elections, presidential primaries, and the initiative and referendum imposed more challenging cognitive tasks on prospective voters than ever before.
This is a long story (recounted at greater length in The Good Citizen, 1998) that I can only briefly describe here. Let me just take as emblematic the reform known as the "Australian ballot." This was the state-printed rather than party-printed ballot Americans still use today. It swept the country beginning in 1888; by 1892, most states employed it. In the past decade, Americans should have celebrated 100 years of the secret ballot, but unfortunately our public culture remains creationist and people believe free and fair elections, as they are conceived today, were born full-bodied out of the foreheads of Jefferson and Madison.
The Australian ballot shifted the center of political gravity from party to voter. The new ballot asked voters to make a choice among alternatives rather than to perform an act of affiliation with a group. It elevated the individual, educated, rational voter as the model citizen. It helped political participation become more cognitive and less visceral, more intellectually demanding and a lot less fun. The large voting public of the late-nineteenth century, with voter turnout in the North routinely at 70 to 80 percent became the vanishing public of the 1920s, with turn-out under 50 percent.
This was part of the dark side of Progressive reforms: they depressed voter turnout and civic participation. Some Progressive Era advocates of educational political campaigns and non-partisan newspapers and city-manager government and publicly-announced municipal budgets intended just this. They sought to disenfranchise immigrants and African-Americans. The great editor of The Nation and of the New York Evening Post, E. L. Godkin, an ardent civil service reformer, wanted to end immigration from southern Europe, to require a literacy test for voting, to provide extra votes for the wealthy. He opposed woman suffrage out of fear that the servant girls would outvote their mistresses. He believed that Anglo-Saxons were the backbone of our civilization and that foreigners lacked "the Anglo Saxon respect for forms and legal traditions." Americans, he held, placed too much stock in natural rights and not enough in the value of education and "the authority of training and culture."
There was great sympathy for Godkin when he declared that "there is no corner of our system in which the hastily made and ignorant foreign voter may not be found eating away the political structure, like a white ant, with a group of natives standing over him and encouraging him." Literacy tests for voting became law in seven Southern states between 1890 and 1908, but also in those years in Wyoming, Maine, California, Washington, Delaware, New Hampshire, Arizona and a bit later in New York and Oregon. But the Australian ballot made literacy a de facto requirement everywhere. . . .
Michael Schudson is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, and politics. His most recent work, from which this essay derives, is The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Free Press, 1998). The Good Citizen will appear in paperback from Harvard University Press in August, 1999.
<http://www.prairie.org/detours/ResPublica/features/Feature4.html> *****
Michael Schudson: <http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_schudson.html>
Michael Schudson, _The Good Citizen_: <http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SCHGOX.html>
The Transformation of Civic Life: A Conference on Michael Schudson's _The Good Citizen_: <http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>