From the Gallup Vault (1941): Lining Up Against Poll Taxes

Southerns states with poll taxes wanted to keep them.

- Click here for the article.

In February 1941, Gallup found more than six in 10 Americans in favor of abolishing the poll taxes still prevalent in the American South. A majority of adults in the five southern states that had no poll tax at that time also wanted to abolish them. However, across the eight southern states where poll taxes were still in force -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia -- the majority of residents wanted to keep them.

Poll taxes, which charged voters $1 to $2 ($7 to $15 today) to register to vote, emerged in the South after the Civil War as a way to prevent the poor, and particularly African Americans, from participating in elections. In combination with literacy tests, "whites-only Democratic Party primaries," and onerous rules about when and how to pay the poll tax, these laws resulted in a sharp drop-off in voter registration among the target groups.

Gallup's April 2, 1941, news release presented the unvarnished views of several southern poll respondents about the poll tax. A 76-year-old Arkansas farmer who favored abolishing the tax said, "You can't find a man in this whole country that voted for the poll tax in the first place -- it was just put on and run over the people." Another Arkansas farmer said, "It's gotten so rotten the way they purchase those poll taxes that the whole poll tax system ought to be done away with."

But respondents in favor of retaining the poll tax expressed very different perspectives. A 40-year-old farm wife in Mississippi plainly said, "Poll taxes help pay for the schools and keep the Negroes from voting." An insurance agent from Virginia expressed a more civic-minded view, saying, "We ought to keep the poll tax because when you pay a tax you're more interested in the results of an election." And then there was the "poor white farmer in the deep South" who said, "Better keep the poll tax because if we don't have it some people will just vote 'cause somebody gives 'em a bottle of whiskey or a dollar bill."

A blast from the past: Texas Poll Tax Payment, Proposition 1 (1902)

I love BallotPedia. This was the only constitutional amendment on the ballot that year. It passed 65% to 35%.

- Click here for the link from Ballotpedia.

For the terminology of the joint resolution passed by the 27th session of the legislature, click here.

This was the wording on the ballot:

Amending Article 6, Section 2, of the Constitution of the State of Texas, requiring all persons subject to a poll tax to have paid a poll tax and to hold a receipt for same before they otter to vote at any election in this State, and fixing the time of payment of said tax.

A couple pages down you'll find the concurrent resolution designating the bluebonnet as the state flower.

Here's a description of the politics of that time from the Texas State Law Library:

By 1901 the movement to make payment of the poll tax a voting requirement had become so strong that the legislature proposed the amendment, and it was adopted in 1902 by an overwhelming majority. No single factor can account for the success of the poll tax voting requirement movement; the issue had been constantly pressed upon the public consciousness for years, and over that period various circumstances and developments eventually led segments of the population to favor it. At least three important elements were involved. First, there was the desire to "purify" the ballot, which was one of the reasons most often advanced by supporters of the 1902 amendment who felt vote-buying and other fraudulent election practices could be reduced by adding to the cost of voting and by more carefully regulating election administration. Second, many saw the poll tax as a means to legally disfranchise the Negro. (See Strong, "The Rise of Negro Voting in Texas," 42 American Political Science Review 510 (1948).) Third, the successes of the Populist movement in the late 19th century threatened the entrenched Democratic Party and led to a desire to disfranchise the poor farmers and laborers who formed the backbone of the radical Populist Party.

It was all about keeping the Democratic Party in power.

- Click here for a look at the source of the above text.

We Had to Mull it Over

From the Austin American Statesman:

House Joint Resolution 39, which has cleared the Texas House, would symbolically ratify the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution barring a poll tax for any voter in a federal election.

Elections: The Age of Helms

A great recent article in Salon outlines Jesse Helms' influence on politics. He gave the Southern oligarchy a quasi-populist face which allowed it to preserve its privileges:

Where Jesse Helms came from was the Third World, the American South between World War I and the civil rights revolution. In the generation before Helms was born the son of a police chief in 1921, the Southern oligarchy had been terrified by Populism. The greatest threat to the white elite was the revolt of white workers and farmers. To forestall that possibility, the Southern state governments, in the decade before World War I, used literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures to eliminate not only all blacks but half of the white Southern population from the electorate. In the election of 1936, voter turnout in Georgia was 16.1 percent, 13 percent in Mississippi, and only 10.7 percent in South Carolina. (It was higher, 42.7 percent, in Helms' North Carolina, where populists had abolished the poll tax.)

Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.

To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry.

Now after Helm's Republican Party has transformed the last three decades of politics, according to the author, the United States today, looks much like the South then:

So here's the real horror story. In every respect except white supremacy, contemporary America looks more and more like the South between the world wars that Jesse Helms wanted to preserve. We have growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and an elite economic strategy like that of the traditional South that focuses on importing cheap labor, outsourcing manufacturing and exporting commodities (we supply industrial Asia with timber and soybeans). Private-sector unions are all but dead, as in the South. The political parties, as organizations, are weak, as in the South. More and more elected officials are self-funded millionaires or billionaires. Contemporary American politics, like Southern politics past and present, pits elite business-class conservatives against feeble, housebroken elite progressives who are not real threats to entrenched privilege. When, inevitably, the occasional populist protest figure like Perot, Dobbs or Huckabee appears, the affluent progressives quickly close ranks with the corporate conservatives.

Jesse Helms is dead -- but his sinister influence lives on. If you seek his monument, look around.