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The Supreme Court and Elections ... Into the Political Thicket
Charles L. Zelden
Voting is simple in the United States, right? The process of voting (organizing, running and tabulating the results of a popular election) is, in fact, a highly contested act whose forms, meanings, and practical boundaries are open to widely differing interpretations. From questions of who can vote to the tricky problem of accurately counting the votes, popular democracy is still a work in progress in the United States. Add in the complexities of politics and the picture becomes even more complicated.
Taking a chronological approach to the topic, The Supreme Court and Elections explores the ways that the Court has struggled with these questions. From the earliest days of the Union when the Supreme Court refused to address the topic, to the early struggles with the Fourteenth Amendment’s impact on the question of who can vote, to the rise and fall of race-based disenfranchisement, to our recent issues of proper districting, campaign finance reform and the struggle to find a workable voting technology, the essay and documents in this reference illuminate the multifaceted nature of voting and election laws. At the same time, this title provides in-depth analysis of the impact of the Court in shaping this ongoing history.
Topics addressed in The Supreme Court and Elections include the following:
- The Nature of Election Law/Voting
- Rights and the Impact of the Court
- Impact of the Civil Rights Amendments
- Voting in the late 19th And early 20th centuries
- Disenfranchisement and the Court
- Redistricting cases
- Majority-Minority districts
- Campaign finance reform
- Bush v. Gore and beyond
This title also interweaves select sections of primary source documents in an easy-to-follow format:
- The U.S. Constitution
- The Voting Rights Act (1965) and the later Amendment (1982)
- Excerpts from Federal Voting Statutes
- Supreme Court cases
- President Lyndon Baines Johnson excerpts
- Contemporaneous news articles
- Court Briefs
Focusing on the practical problems of U.S. voting and its complex development within the framework of the political branches of the government, students and researchers will benefit from the clear picture painted by the author of the current elective structure. Essay and document based, The Supreme Court and Elections is the definitive reference on the application of U.S. law on Americans right to vote and the resulting participatory democracy.
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Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Hidden Crisis in American Democracy
Charles Zelden
The infamous 2000 presidential election produced hanging chads, butterfly ballots, endless recounts, raucous allegations, and a constitutional crisis-until a controversial Supreme Court decision allowed George W. Bush to become president despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore. Charles L. Zelden presents the definitive history of this vexing and acrimonious affair, offering the most complete, up-to-date, and accurate analysis of a remarkable episode in American politics. Zelden probes deeper than any other scholar has sought to do—showing that both the election controversy of 2000 and Bush v. Gore signaled major flaws in our electoral system that remain with us today, exposing a hidden crisis in American democracy.
Zelden, who lives and teaches in Broward County (one of the key recount sites), distills the voluminous literature on Bush v. Gore in his sharply insightful and balanced account of the election crisis and the litigation that followed. Tracing the back-and-forth between concessions and retractions, Gore and Bush attorneys, and state and federal courts, he underscores the extraordinary clock-ticking tension between statutory deadlines governing the electoral process and the desire to have every vote counted and counted accurately.
Zelden offers a nonpartisan analysis of the legal opinions in the case, particularly the Supreme Court's ruling; he explores the judicial philosophy underlying the reasoning of each justice. His book invites readers to consider the case independent of their personal views of the candidates and reorients our view of the crisis to emphasize the failures of the system rather than the election of a president by apparent judicial decree. He sets all of these events, issues, and legal rulings within their proper historical context, making complex issues easy to understand and also reviewing events of the succeeding seven years in light of the decision.
As Zelden shows, the true tragedy of 2000 was the failure of every person and every institution involved—especially the Supreme Court—to take this crisis as an opportunity to diagnose the problems of our broken electoral system and to urge its repair. We may prefer to put this decision behind us, but we ignore it—and its lessons—at our peril. -
Particular Friendships: A Convent Memoir
Kate Waites
Particular Friendships: A Convent Memoir offers a rare glimpse inside the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in the late 1960s. The young narrator arrives with gentle visions spawned by The Sound of Music, only to encounter the harshness of life in this secretive society. Her wit, compassion, and musicality foment a rebellion against rules forbidding expressions of joy and intimacy, as she struggles between allegiance to the heart and her vow of blind obedience to flawed and abusive superiors. Recently filed lawsuits against the Church suggest that the timing could not be better for an ex-nuns memoir. Part mystery, part coming of age story, this narrative seeks neither to damn nor to exonerate but to uncover the truth.
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The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All White Primary
Charles Zelden
The history of voting rights in America is a checkerboard marked by dogged progress against persistent prejudice toward an expanding inclusiveness. The Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright is a crucial chapter in that broader story and marked a major turning point for the modern civil rights movement. Charles Zelden's concise and thoughtful retelling of this episode reveals why.
Denied membership in the Texas Democratic Party by popular consensus, party rules, and (from 1923 to 1927) state statutes, Texas blacks were routinely turned away from voting in the Democratic primary in the first decades of the twentieth century. Given that Texas was a one-party state and that the primary effectively determined who held office, this meant the total exclusion of Texas blacks from the political process. This practice went unchecked until 1940, when Lonnie Smith, a black dentist from Houston, fought his exclusion by election judge S. E. Allwright in the 1940 Democratic Primary. Defeated in the lower courts, Smith finally found justice in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 that the Democratic Party and its primary were not "private and voluntary" and, thus, were duly bound by constitutional protections governing the electoral process and the rights of all citizens.
While the initial impetus of the case may have been the wish of one man to exercise his right to vote, the real meaning of Smith's challenge to the Texas all white primary lies at the heart of the entire civil rights revolution. One of the first significant victories for the NAACP's newly formed Legal Defense Fund against Jim Crow segregation, it provided the conceptual foundation which underlay Thurgood Marshall's successful arguments in Brown v. Board of Education. It was also viewed by Marshall, looking back on a long and storied career, as one of his most important personal victories.
As Zelden shows, the Smith decision attacked the intractable heart of segregation, as it redrew the boundary between public and private action in constitutional law and laid the groundwork for many civil rights cases to come. It also redefined the Court's involvement in what had been a hands-off area of "political questions" and foreshadowed its participation in voter reapportionment cases.
A landmark case in the evolution of Southern race relations and politics and for voting rights in general, Smith also provides a telling example of how the clash between national concerns and local priorities often acts as a lightning rod for resolving controversial issues. Zelden's lucid account of the controversies and conflicts surrounding Smith should refine and reinvigorate our understanding of a crucial moment in American history. -
For Race and Country: The Life and Career of Colonel Charles Young
David Kilroy
Charles Young served as the highest-ranking African American officer in the U.S. Army until 1917. During his career, he served on the western frontier, in the Philippines, and in Mexico, and as military attache to both Haiti and Liberia. Young was also an accomplished linguist, a musician and composer, a published author, and an active member of the black intelligentsia. A history of Young's life transcends the fields of military, diplomatic, and African American history. For those interested in the history of the United States between Reconstruction and World War I, his life offers a guided tour through one of the most important epochs in the American experience. Charles Young's career was shaped by race. The army regarded him as an anomaly and sought to limit his visibility. He, on the other hand, used his profile to promote the cause of racial equality. As a soldier, he was diligent in his observance of duty. As a citizen, he was committed to the cause of black civil rights. For Charles Young, success was more than a personal dream, it was an obligation to his people. Young's ultimate goal was to attain the rank of general. Thus, his forced retirement on medical grounds in 1917 was a crushing blow, and, for him and his supporters, bore testament to the racism that permeated the armed forces and America.
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Voting Rights on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents
Charles Zelden
An open franchise is vital to the survival of democracy. Yet for the past two centuries women, immigrants, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, poor people, and others have all faced organized efforts to obstruct their participation in the political process. The problem is still with us today.
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Justice Lies in the District: The U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1902–1960
Charles Zelden
In 1902 a new federal district court was established to serve a broad segment of the Texas Gulf Coast region, including Houston. In the use of its discretion to choose between "private" and "public" law, this court for many years served the interests of the region's economic and political elite and helped stabilize a fast-changing economy that was undergoing wild swings of boom and bust. After 1945, however, the court reluctantly began to address growing demands for public law enforcement of national policies, including civil rights, and by 1960, public law issues had come to dominate the court's dockets. In this groundbreaking study of a representative lower federal court, Charles L. Zelden provides insight into the functioning of district courts and their impact on the larger legal, economic, and political systems. Combining the perspectives of legal history with those of economic, business, urban, political, and social history, and drawing on largely untapped manuscript court records, he offers a unique view of the ways in which the federal courts have shaped the nation's public and private life. The well-crafted narrative looks at the full range of the court's decisions, clearly explaining complex legal issues. It sketches in as well the personalities and political positions of the judges. Zelden demonstrates that a judge's personal and class background largely determined his judicial philosophy and set his agenda on the bench. Zelden's work contributes an important dimension to the growing literature on the economic, social, and urban history of Texas and of America in the first half of this century. It elucidates the judicial role in consolidating a cultural ethos of economicgrowth, self-reliant individualism, and freedom from governmental restraint.
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