2007, ISBN: 0801886376

[EAN: 9780801886379], Nieuw boek, [SC: 14.16], [PU: Johns Hopkins University Press], POLITICAL SCIENCE / AMERICAN GOVERNMENT GENERAL, nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after … More...

[EAN: 9780801886379], Nieuw boek, [SC: 14.16], [PU: Johns Hopkins University Press], POLITICAL SCIENCE / AMERICAN GOVERNMENT GENERAL, nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - Perhaps curiously, though in cases intentionally (as in the Jim Crow South), Progressive reforms had the effect of lowering voter turnout. Also curiously--given the intensity of the women's suffrage movement--the entry of women into the political arena after August, 1920, did not in and of itself activate women as a group as participants. With women qualified to vote, turnout as a percentage of those enfranchised still remained disappointingly low.Gidlow explores the ensuing crusade to 'get out the vote,' originally the work of the new League of Women Voters, and in it finds a cross-hatching of assumptions, tactics, and styles that come together in the concept of 'commodifying politics.' Her study focuses on (1) the rise of middle-class nonpartisanship, (2) the notion of discriminating citizenship, and (3) the wholesale trend toward mimicking the marketplace in order to make political 'sales' (political entrepreneurship).Adding a chapter to the story of 'antipartyism' in American political history, she notes that members of the postwar American middle class--self-conscious consumers, firm believers in education, rational choice, and the value of 'expert advice'--turned away from parties and the frauds, smoky rooms, ward heelers, etc., white-collar families associated with them. Campaigning as good citizens to get voters to the polls, the League and its allies revealingly tried harder with the 'right sort' of people--the same sort of people who were smart shoppers. Mobilizing them involved department-store solicitation; billboard, magazine, newspaper, and radio advertising; and training seminars familiar to the business world. Conflating nonpartisanship, citizenship, and entrepreneurship, the middle class believed itself the best suited to make political decisions because best prepared for other kinds of decisions--like what to buy.Interestingly, all the hard work had no real effect on voter turnout. But the League had as much concern with smart voting as aggregate figures. Consumers had the choice of not buying, and times were good. Interesting as well, the ideal hierarchy that the League preached surrendered to men the privilege of being more 'expert' than women. Nonetheless giving many women their first taste of political activity, experience, and education, the League and its movement involved women in this manner of politics as importantly as women acted as consumers (as partners with men, as consultants on a large purchase), with the level of responsibility apparently on the increase. If middle-class women deferred, they in any event had no doubt that they were members of the middle class. Perhaps they only seemed to defer--in a way later captured in a film entitled 'It's a Woman's World.''[Gidlow] deals thoroughly and imaginatively with a neglected but important episode in American political history: the 'Get-Out-the-Vote' movement in the University States during the 1920s.' --Michael McGerr, Indiana University'An exciting new direction in political history . . . [Gidlow reads the campaitgns the way that a cultural historian might, but with the discipline and knowledge of the field that comes from . . . political history.' --Paula Baker, Ohio State University, Books<

ISBN: 9780801886379

Low voter turnout is a serious problem in American politics today, but it is not a new one. Its roots lay in the 1920s when, for the first time in nearly a century, a majority of eligible… More...

Low voter turnout is a serious problem in American politics today, but it is not a new one. Its roots lay in the 1920s when, for the first time in nearly a century, a majority of eligible Americans did not bother to cast ballots in a presidential election. Stunned by this civic failure so soon after a world war to "make the world safe for democracy," reforming women and business men launched massive campaigns to "Get Out the Vote." By 1928, they had enlisted the enthusiastic support of more than a thousand groups in Forty-six states. 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 all raised 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 not only because it enfranchised women but because it 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, ethnics, and sometimes women behaved as citizens. Through techniques ranging from civic education to modern advertising, they worked in the realm of culture to undo the equality that constitutional amendments had seemed to achieve. Through their efforts, by the late 1920s, "civic" had become practically synonymous with "middle class" and "white." Richly 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, 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 that hamper the practice of full democracy even today. Books > History > North American History > United States List_Books, [PU: Johns Hopkins University Press]<

2007, ISBN: 0801886376

[EAN: 9780801886379], Neubuch, [PU: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr], new edition edition. 260 pages. 9.00x6.00x0.75 inches. In Stock., Books

2007, ISBN: 0801886376

[EAN: 9780801886379], Neubuch, [PU: Johns Hopkins University Press], Books

2007, ISBN: 0801886376

[EAN: 9780801886379], Neubuch, [PU: Johns Hopkins University Press], PRINT ON DEMAND Book; New; Fast Shipping from the UK., Books