The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s-1920s

Abstract

Every election we are bombarded with non-partisan campaigns urging us to vote; I once saw these ubiquitous efforts as ineffective but innocuous. Since I read Liette Gidlow's able and thought-provoking book, The Big Vote, however, I look at them quite differently. Gidlow examines the Get Out the Vote (gotv) campaigns of the 1920s, demonstrating that the campaigns were ubiquitous and, as far as increasing voter turnout, ineffective. But Gidlow also argues that the gotv campaigns strengthened the political dominance of the campaign activists—white middle-class clubwomen and businessmen. Gidlow defines political dominance to mean, first, the ability to frame public debate. She contends that while Americans were shocked at the low voter turnout in 1920, gotv activists reframed the issue by arguing that the recalcitrant yet valuable voters were affluent whites rather than workers or people of color. This belief became the political wisdom of the era, despite scientific studies that had identified upper- and middle-class whites as those most likely to vote.