The 1890s produced a series of political changes that, taken togetherm resulted in a significantly different system.  One set of changes took place in the South, where Mississippi Democrats led the way in disfranchising and segregating African Americans.  This was partly the result of the Populist movement, which had openly appealed to African-American voters, thereby opening the possibility of giving blacks real political power.  On the national stage, the Republican Party had been the champion of African-American rights on the national stage, appointing blacks to a few federal posts and campaigning for the black vote.  However, the Republican Party in the South had begun purging itself of its black members in the years after Reconstruction.  As Garfield's election had proven, the national party did not need Southern votes anyway, so the Party in the Southern states reconstructed itself as a "lily-white" organization that existed for purposes of patronage only.  Thus, for all intents and purposes, the Republicans ceased to exists as a real opposition party in the South, leaving the Democratic Party as the white man's party with all the real political power.
	Still, Democrats had kept black voters on the rolls where different factions could manipulate votes in favor of their own interests.  The appearance of the Populist Party, however, presented the possibility that blacks could vote for someone other than a Democrat, and it was only through massive vote fraud that Southern Democrats managed to beat down the Populist vote in the 1896 election.  The Popuist scare provided the final proof to most Southern Democrats that they could no longer afford to keep blacks in the electorate, hastening the trend (already underway in some states) of disfranchising Southern blacks. All of this was part of an ongoing shift in the South towards writing white supremacy into law.  Although Reconstruction ended in 1877, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 had provided, at least in theory, some measure of protection for African Americans by making it illegal to disciminate on the basis of race in public places.  However, state and local law, or sometimes simply local custom, had produced a segregated system of racially separate school systems, cemeteries, hospitals, churches, and other organizations.  Segregation existed throughout the South, enforced by violence and intimidation.      Then, in the Civil Rights cases of 1883, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.  The Court said the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to states and not to individuals.  This state governments were obligated to treat all citizens as equal before the law, but private businesses need not offer equal access to their facilities.  This ruling in fact gave the "green light" to Southerners to proceed with legal segregation.  In 1887 the Florida legislature ordered separate accomodations on railroad trains. Mississippi passed a similar law the next year as did Louisiana in 1890, and four more states in 1891.  Law and social custom began to specify greater racial separation in other ways, too.
The Second Mississippi Plan and the Atlanta Compromise Booker T. Washington W. E. B. DuBois	Mississippi whites took a more brazen step in 1890, holding a state constitutional convention to eliminate African Americans' participation in politics.  The new provisions did not mention the word race.  Instead, they employed a poll tax, a literacy test, and assorted other requirements for voting.  Everyone understood, though, that these measures were designed to disfranchise black voters.  Men who failed the literacy test could vote if they understood a section of the state constitution or law when a local (white) official read it to them.  The typical result was that the only illiterates to vote were white.       Most of the South watched this so-called Second Mississippi Plan unfold with great interest.  No other state moved immediately to imitate Mississippi, but the defeat of a bill presented by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) in 1890, which would have helped black voters, indicated that the federal government was not prepared to intervene to protect black rights.      In 1895 a black educator signaled his apparent willingness to accept disfranchisement and segregation for the moment.  Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute, addressed a gathering of whites at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta.  In his speech, Washington seemed to accept inferior status for blacks, at least for the present:  "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.  It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top."  He also seemed to condone segregation:  "In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.  The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly."  Furthermore, he implied that equal rights had to be earned:  "It is important that rights and privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges."      The speech, dubbed the "Atlanta Compromise," won great acclaim for Washington.  Southern whites were pleased to hear a black educator urged his race to accept segregation and disfranchisement.  Northern whites were also receptive to the notion that the South would work out its thorny race relations by itself.  Until his death in 1915, Washington was the most prominent black leaders in the nation, at least among white Americans.       Among African Americans, Washington's message found a mixed reception.  Some accepted his approach as the best that could be secured.  Others criticised him for sacrificing black rights.  Henry M. Turner, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Atlanta, declared that Washington "will have to live a long timeto undo the harm he has done our race."  An even sharper critic was sociologist W. E. B. DuBois.  In 1903, when DuBois published his famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, he charged that Washington's strategy kept the black man down rather than freed him. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the black community into two wings--the "conservative" supporters of Washington and his "radical" critics.  In fact, Booker T. Washington never accepted desgregation and disfranchisement as permanent fixtures of Southern life.      Even as African Americans debated Washington's Atlanta speech, southern lawmakers were redefining the legal status of African Americans.  State after state followed Mississippi's lead and disfranchised black voters.  Louisiana, in 1898, added the infamous grandfather clause, which allowed white men who would otherwise be prevented from voting under the new stipulations would be permitted to vote if their grandfather had been able to vote before 1867 (when the Fourteenth Amendment extended suffrage to African Americans).  The rule reinstated poor or illiterate whites into the electorate but kept blacks out.  Specific methods varied, but each Southern state set up barriers to prevent blacks from voting.  Several Southern states added an additional barrier in the form of the white primary, which specified that political parties had the right to limit participation in the process by which they chose their candiates.  Southern Democrats, who had long proclaimed themselves to be the "white man's party," quickly restricted their primaries and conventions to whites only.  South Carolina took this step first in 1896, and other states soon followed.      Southern lawmakers also began to extend segregation by law (de jure).  They were given a major assist by the decision of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that involved a Louisiana law requiring segregated railroad cars.  When the court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, southern legislatures soon applied this reasoning to other areas of life, eventually requiring segregation of everything from prisons to telephone booths--and especially such public places as parks and restaurants.  Two years later, the Supreme Court also gave its approval to the disfranchisment of African Americans in its ruling in Williams v. Mississippi (1898).  In that case, the court ruled that the Democratic Party, being a private organization, could exclude whomever it wanted from its primaries and conventions (thus following the logic of the Civil Rights Cases of 1883).  In this fashion, the highest court in the land, under the banner of the Tenth Amendment (states' rights amendment) to the Constitution, allowed the individual states to deprive Afirican Americans of their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.      Ironically, the outcome of segregation for some blacks turned out to be economically advantageous.  Forbidden from patronizing white establishments, such as hotels and restaurants, blacks began patronizing black-owned stores, restaurants, theaters, and hotels.  This helped create a small but prosperous black middle class in the South.  Children of this middle class would attend segregated colleges such as Morehouse College (Atlanta) or Howard University (Washington, D. C.), and return to their communities to serve as teachers, doctors, and businessmen.  The children of this middle class would eventually serve in the vanguard of the civil rights movement that, a generation later, would overturn these same segregation laws.
The Shrinking Electorate	African Americans were not the only ones to lose their right to vote.  In the big cities, where immigrants and workers formed the basis for machine power in many big cities, reformers aimed to undermine the machines, in part, by limiting who could vote.  They achieved this in a number of ways, but the most effective was the introduction of the Australian, or secret, ballot.  In the past, voters were handed a pre-printed ballot which they then deposited into the ballot box.  Machine operatives both handed out the ballots and recorded how people voted for purposes of reward (or punishment).  With the introduction of the secret ballot, however, the machine could not longer control the voting process (at least not so easily).  Voters would read the ballot and mark their choices in secret.  This presented a problem for many voters who were illiterate, or who could not read or write English.  (There were no laws at the time mandating that ballots be printed in any other language but English, and no assistance was permitted in helping a voter read a ballot.)  But the impact of the secret ballot and other reforms went deeper than literacy.  With machines out of power and reformers in power, the issues changed.  Political parties became less important, and many voters no longer felt as interested or involved in the political process.  Consequently, levels of voter participartion began to drop throughout the opening years of the twentieth century, falling as low as thirty or forty percent in many areas.  Who, then, was voting?  White, middle-class men increasingly formed the bulk of the active electorate after 1900, and especially so after 1910.  This homogenous group could (and would) finally deliver on promises of larger reform because they could control the process.  They no longer had to worry about radicals like Populists or labor unions taking part in reform.  The result was a new reform movement, the Progressive movement, which will be the subject of the next unit.  Before closing, however, it is worth mentioning that the success of reform in the twentienth century came at the expense of the most ardent exponents of reform in the nineteenth century:  farmers and workers
Sources	Excerpted, with minor omissions and additions, from:  Chapter 20, "Economic Crash and Political Upheaval," in Berkin, et al., Making America:  A History of the United States, Vol. II from 1865, 3rd edition (Boston and New York, 2003).

© Kahne Parsons 2007-08