Is Our Civic Life Really in Decline? (October 1999 | Volume: 50, Issue: 6)

Is Our Civic Life Really in Decline?

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Authors: Michael Schudson

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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October 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 6

If you look at the decline in voter turnout since 1960 or the steady decrease in young people’s interest in electoral politics, it is easy to get the idea that America’s democratic experiment stands on increasingly shaky ground. Voter turnout fell from 63 percent in 1960 to 49 percent in 1996. In national surveys 58 percent of college freshmen in 1966 said they considered it important to keep abreast of political affairs; by 1996, only 29 percent felt that way. Has our era broken trust with a great heritage? In fact, history has a more complicated, more surprising, and in the end more hopeful story to tell.

Imagine yourself a voter in the world of colonial Virginia, where George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson learned their politics. As a matter of law, you must be a white male owning at least a modest amount of property. Your journey to vote may take several hours, since there is probably only one polling place in the district. As you approach the courthouse, which is more likely to be a common tavern than a fine example of Georgian architecture, you see the sheriff supervising the election. Beside him stand two candidates for the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s legislative assembly. Both of them are members of prominent local families. Ahead of you the most prominent members of the community, the leading landowner and clergyman, approach the sheriff and announce their votes in loud, clear voices. When your turn comes, you do the same. Then you step over to the candidate for whom you have voted, and he treats you to a glass of rum punch.

That was Election Day, colonial style. Voting was an act of assent, restating and reaffirming the social hierarchy of the community. No one but a local notable would think of standing for office, voting was conducted entirely in public view, and voters were ritually rewarded by the gentlemen they favored.

Colonial voting was different from voting today not because our Founding Fathers were inept at achieving a world that protected the individuality, rationality, and privacy of voters in a voting booth but because they hadn’t thought of such a thing. They held to very different ideals of what civic participation was all about. The history of American voting is only in part the story we have long prided ourselves on, the progressive extension of the franchise to once excluded groups. It is also a tale of radically changing ideals of what voting means and what a good citizen should be.

It is easy to find among the Founders great praise for the education of citizens and the diffusion of ideas. In colonial America, as in Britain, education was mainly for gentlemen, not for the general populace. Property was much more widely distributed in the colonies than in Britain, and there was a looser understanding of who counted as a gentleman, but still, colonial education aimed to instill religious virtue, not