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13 lo An American Dilemma
Court of the State held in 1 866 that suffrage had been extended to Negroes by a refer-
endum at the general election on November 6, 1849; since the result of the election
was in dispute from 1849 until 1866, it is probable that no Negroes voted during that
period.*
^ Marian D. Irish, “The Southern One-Party System and National Politics,” The
Journal of Politics (February, 1942), p. 80.
*^To quote two representative liberal Southern authors; Willis D. Weatherford:
“Who among us has not seen how the presence of the Negro has moulded our
political history since emancipation? We have been slow to pass laws for compulsory
school attendance, lest we tie ourselves to the task of classical education of the Negro.
We are slow enough about extending the suffrage, lest the colored man should become
too influential. No major political issue has faced the South in the last hundred years
that has not been decided largely in the light of the presence of the Negro.”**
T. J. Woofter, Jr.:
“It is . . . apparent that in excluding the Negro the South is, in a way, politically
dominated by the Negro question. Before all others it looms as the bulwark of the one-
party system. It was a determining factor in the prohibition vote. It affected the South*s
stand on woman suffrage and it ramifies into hundreds of questions of public policy,
it influences the South’s position on child labor, it is a stumbling block in the admin-
istration of compulsory school laws, standing as an ever-present shadow across the door
of political councils.”®
The conservative Southerner is not so likely to write books on the Negro problem
as is his liberal compatriot. The present writer recalls, however, from his talks with
many Southerners of conservative leanings that they too usually complained about how
the Negro problem has entered into all public questions of the region and hindered
their consideration upon their own merits. But they consider this situation without
remedy or, rather, hold that even a gradual enfranchisement of the Negro could only
accentuate this “plight of the South.”
® Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927),
pp. 298-306.
"^Donald Young, American Minority Peofles (1932), p. 212; compare ibid,y pp.
201 ff. especially p. 207.
® Some Northern states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maine, Delaware,
Wyoming, California—actually have literacy requirements for registration in their
constitutions or election laws.^ In addition, in some Northern states, paupers are
disfranchised; some criminals are prohibited from voting. In Utah, anyone who advo-
cates polygamy, or belongs to an organization that advocates it, may not vote.*
When these requirements are enforced, they are done so regardless of race or
national origin; Northern states that have literacy requirements also provide adult
education schools to teach illiterates how to read and write.
® Frank U. Quillin, The Color Line in Ohio (1913), p. 9.
• Idem.
‘’Willis D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, Race Relations (1934), p. 298.
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