The big vote

"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.