Explore the vast range of titles available.

The extent and intensity of electoral and voter fraud that took place during the U.S. Gilded Age is properly infamous. This paper explores a form of voter intimidation that has garnered comparatively little scholarly attention: economic coercion. Absent secrecy at the polls and security at work, bosses forced workingmen to choose between their job or their vote. Economic voter intimidation provoked both a real and rhetorical crisis in the 1870s and 1880s. In real terms, it disrupted hundreds of elections and damaged thousands of workers’ livelihoods. It became a nationwide crisis after 1873, however, because for the first time, employers were coercing white workingmen on a widespread basis. Reports of employers coercing their employees at the polls throughout the nation confirmed the worst fears of many labor leaders and politicians: white wage-workers were insecure possessors of the franchise whose precariousness might threaten democracy itself. Mining previously overlooked accounts of economic voter intimidation in contested congressional election case records, congressional investigations, corporate records, and newspapers, this article argues that employers’ politicized layoff threats and observation of workers at the polls undermined the political equality of even those men whose whiteness had seemingly secured their privilege.

This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did not perceive it as a threat to democracy. White Americans' fear that wage labor rendered them as economically precarious, and thus politically dependent, as they believed African Americans were, provoked a prolonged crisis. Concern over the threat that economic voter intimidation posed to white men's citizenship shaped the ongoing debates over the nature of manhood suffrage, the role of the federal government in protecting African American men's political rights, and the future of industrial capitalism. Politicians, ordinary workingmen, and labor, reform, and socialist advocates saw employer coercion as a threat to both American democracy and industrial capitalism because it seemed to undermine the independence—and therefore manliness and whiteness—of industrial workers. Between 1888-1892, these reformers transformed the way that Americans voted in nearly every state by enacting ballot secrecy laws to break the chain of information between employers, their employees, and their employees' ballots. The combination of ballot secrecy and a cultural backlash against economic voter intimidation spurred by employers' excesses during the fraught 1896 presidential election drove the practice out of the mainstream in American political culture by the turn of the century.

Remarkably, one emerges from the book disappointed but never deterred by the setbacks and discrimination faced by women for whom \"risk taking . . . became part of the bargain\" (143). Jones sets aside the well-told stories of the political advances and retreats of Black men in that era to emphasize the arena in which Black women were most successful at gaining advances in equality-the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act and revival of widespread voter suppression in the past decade suggest that the \"distinct mix of threat and danger\" that confronts Black women may have changed a great deal during the past two hundred years, but it remains powerful (93).