Declare Independence

ED: If you go into any campaign office today, you’ll see an army of college students making phone calls and stuffing envelopes. But we shouldn’t think of this as just a modern phenomenon.

JOHN GRINSPAN: Yeah it’s funny, we associate young people with the baby boomers or the modern era, but young people have always played a role in politics because American democracy has always needed boots on the ground. It’s always needed labor, and free labor and energetic labor, especially. So often, young people play a key role because they’re willing to do the hard dirty work of getting people to go out and vote.

ED: This is John Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Since the mid 19th century, most white men have been able to vote in the United States. And political parties have valued young men, in particular, for their energy and for their impressionability.

JOHN GRINSPAN: Abe Lincoln said you go out and recruit the shrewd wild boys just under age, that you want them before they can participate. Because you don’t really want them making up their mind in an election, you want them committed Democrats or Republicans for a decade before.

ED: And generally the best predictor of how a young men would vote would be how his father voted, right?

JOHN GRINSPAN: Absolutely. Partisanship is tied up with family identity, with region, with race, with class. Most people inherit their party identities. And then once they’ve voted for that first time, 95% vote for the same party in presidential elections over decades. So if a father convinces his son to vote a certain way, or if a sister convinces her brother to vote a certain way, they’re often locked into that partisanship for life.

ED: But in the 19th century, it was just family expectations that convinced young men to remain true to a party, politics was public. And political parties tended to throw the biggest social parties in town.

JOHN GRINSPAN: A rally in a small town might be the largest gathering a person ever sees. It would usually happen at 11:00 PM or midnight, and it would involve large groups of young men organized into political clubs, maybe 100 people in a club, with lit torches marching down the street. There would be no refreshments ranging from whiskey and beer to roast ox or roast hog. There would be people speechifying on the sidelines, what they called “boy orators” of the time who were as young as 12, but maybe in their early ’20s on soapboxes, giving speeches about the issues or about the parties. And the spectators would often be older people who are kind of watching young people engage in politics.

ED: Young people benefited from being politically active, but their views didn’t have much influence on the policies of the parties they joined.

JOHN GRINSPAN: The parties don’t care all that much about their beliefs on the issues. You know, the elites who are running these parties and making the nominations, they want a political party run by 60-year-olds but manned on the ground and fueled by 21-year-olds. This is still a hierarchical culture where young people are expected to follow the lead off enough adults, or older people.

ED: That obedience however, didn’t last. After the Civil War, young people began to question party leadership and the direction of their country.

JOHN GRINSPAN: There’s always new generations of young people coming, and they are increasingly hostile to a political system that seems stuck in the Civil War era. They look at this generation that kind of made their names and fought their battles during the Civil War who dominate the political system, and also dominate much of the economic system as stuck in the past. And this is an era when there’s a real excitement for finding dinosaur bones, and they start to compare these parties to fossils. And there’s a great quote where they say, “Young people have no more interest in the issues in their parents than they do in the wars of extinct monsters whose bones are gathered in museums.” There’s this sense that the political system has stuck, and it’s not paying attention to the needs and demands of young people in the 1870s or 1880s. It’s arguing about 1861 over and over and over again.

ED: And they’re still electing veterans at the beginning of the 20th century, right? McKinley, I guess, is the last one. I don’t know.

JOHN GRINSPAN: Yeah. Yeah, and veterans are running on what they did during the Battle of Antietam in the 1890s, you know? And if you’re a 21-year-old voter in the 1890s, you weren’t alive during Antietam. It doesn’t mean as much to you.

ED: Right. So what happens to the parties when young people begin to not pay as much attention?

JOHN GRINSPAN: Well, they freak out. Especially the Republican Party in the North, which has seen itself as the party of the young as kind of a defining identity when young people start to dabble with voting for the Democrats or making up their mind in each election. First, they scold young people and tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about. And then they try to insist that they’re the party of the independents, and all good independents vote Republican. So they try to use the rhetoric of independents without actually following through on it.

But over the last decade or two of the 19th century, there starts to be a real movement for genuine political independence, that new generations of young people who don’t care about their father’s issues or their mother’s issues are making up their minds as elections come. As looking at both parties and choosing which candidate, which party they’d like to support. And this is really revolutionary, even more so than the emergence of third parties. The idea of being a genuine independent really changes American politics. And it comes from a young generation that’s hostile to these kind of ossified, stuck old parties.

ED: The idea becomes that if you’re a man enough you’ll make up your own mind, rather as before, if you were man enough you would declare your loyalty to a party no matter what.

JON GRINSPAN: Absolutely. And it is tied to masculinity again, that independents are seen as wishy-washy and effeminate, and not real men for most of the 19th century. And then at some point in the 1890s, the really strong, stable person looks at both parties and chooses based on their unconscious, as opposed to following how their father voted or how their grandfather voted.

ED: Now this must have been especially tricky for African-American voters for who in the Republican Party was really their only refuge. How would they negotiate this?

JON GRINSPAN: Yeah, African-Americans are in a real bind. I mean, in addition to the fact that there are large numbers of people in the South trying to completely disenfranchise them, and in the North to, the party that has historically supported black people, the Republican Party, isn’t often giving them much in exchange. One great quote I love from Reverend in Philadelphia who says, the Philadelphia’s African-American community, “It’s time you were getting more for your political surfaces. With all your speaking, organizing, parading in the streets, ballyhooing, holding mass meetings, voting, and sometimes fighting, what do you get?” That’s a fundamental question, what do you get for being a good Republican for 30 years?

ED: And what do you get if you’re a woman in all this? The decades marched by and still women were not allowed to vote. Do they become disenchanted or does this opening of independentism create a space for them?

JON GRINSPAN: It absolutely does. One of the really interesting things is the way women drive the push for independent voting and the way being distant from the two parties, being denied the right to vote actually allows women an in to be really consequential and influential going into the 20th century in the progressive era. Most men are trapped within this political system. And they have biases for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party and their same old fights going back to when they were children. Because women were denied the right to vote, they tend to think more broadly about political reform and change. And so, they might be rethinking social services for poor people or how to protect child laborers or these kind of bigger issues that the parties just have not managed to address.

And also, as there’s a movement for women’s suffrage kind of building over the 1890s and 1900s, they really cleverly play the independent approach to see which party will be more supportive to them. They learn that they can’t rely on any one party ever. And so, intellection, intellection, state by state, they mean manage to court both parties and say, “Well, who’s going to support us more?”

ED: Interesting. Despite all the courting by the parties, people begin turning away from voting after 1900. I think that’s something that really surprises people who sort of believe that American history keeps getting better and better is that sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, people decided this two party system is not really doing much for me. Were young people a part of that transformation?

JON GRINSPAN: I’d say young people are the driving force behind it there’s large political changes going on, but one of the key ones is that as people, especially young people, break from this really die-hard partisanship, they don’t see as much reason to go turn out and vote. And so independent voting is much better for making up one’s mind each election and thinking through the issues. But in terms of that big mass participation and those public events and those high turnouts, partisanship was really working well. And as they say break up this kind of partisan culture and support independents, and also as they break up the idea that politics should be public and begins to support the idea that it’s a private matter of individual conscience, not necessary to be discussed at the dinner table, but to be decided behind a voting curtain. Turn outs start to fall, and there’s less of a kind of sense of a National Public campaign each election that it’s too excitable, too silly, often too working class, too driven by what they called nonsense at the time, and too drunk.

Those people who feel that the political system isn’t reflecting the best values for America deliberately make an effort to change political behavior. More than the issues, more than any ideological question, they say they want to changed how Americans engage democracy. And so, over the 1880s and over the 1890s, they really construct a new way of engaging in politics that is much more private than public, much more independent than partisan, and much more restrained than passionate.

ED: More reading than talking.

JON GRINSPAN: They actually say more thinking, less shouting. But at the same time, it means shutting down those big demonstrations, shutting down the barbecues, shuttering the saloons, not buying fireworks for your marchers. And it really does end up almost killing this kind of folk culture that Americans had created over the 19th century. So that by the early 20th century, these big mass parades and engagements really don’t exist in politics the way they used to.

ED: So what parallels do you see today between sort of the resurgence of young people in the political sphere in this earlier era?

JON GRINSPAN: Well, there are a few things. And obviously, it’s a very different time and things are very different. The first is that political engagement today is fairly good, or at least improving over how it had been much of the 20th century for young people. That we tend to kind of tut tut and shake our fingers, but millennials are voting at higher rates than baby boomers or Gen Xers did. And so, it’s easy to blame the young, but I do think there’s good news there. I think in terms of the mobilization around gun violence and the students at Parkland, one of the things that I found interesting looking at young people in the Gilded Age is that a generation of young people who thought their political system wasn’t working for them and were kind of raised to believe that it was corrupt and vulgar was actually much more motivated to make change than a generation raised to think that their political system was wholly imperfect and untouchable.

So maybe there’s an argument to be made that these 17-year-olds who have basically believed that democracy has been broken to some degree their whole life, they might be more engaged and more willing to go after sacred cows or rethink things than a generation in the 20th century who had like a sunnier sense of American democracy.

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ED: Jon Grinspan is the curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He’s the author of “The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the 19th century.”

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