So it's become the standard history of the 19th Amendment that the real reason for it was to dilute the votes of majority-male mass immigrants in the era. 1919 saw some of the worst racial violence in American history, and anti-immigrant sentiment was at an all time high. More men than women immigrated, so white men voted to give women the vote because it would buoy up traditional Americans versus those crazy Irishmen, Italians, and Germans. Though framed in moral terms, the actual motive was low.
I had thought, however, that better motives were in play out West, where women gained the vote in Wyoming territory early. I thought it was that there were many important jobs to do, the few women around had to join in doing them, and did them so well that it just seemed natural to extend the vote. After all, if a woman can be the mayor, why couldn't she vote for the mayor?
Unfortunately, my faith in human nature has betrayed me again. It turns out the real motive was to dilute the votes of freed blacks.
Recently I was listening to a rabbi who pointed out that, as a Jew, he was more interested in the action than the intention. This is distinct from the Christian view, promulgated in the Middle Ages by Peter Abelard, that intention is what really determines if an action is sinful or not.
You can see the advantage of the Jewish view here. If it was a just action, it doesn't matter why you did it. You are a just person if you do just things.
Abelard's view has advantages too, especially for those who sometimes do wrong things with good intentions. Still, it seems to make a sin out of what is ordinarily viewed by many as an act of supreme justice.
I have been taught that the Hebrew language of scripture uses several words for or related to "sin". Sin generally meant to miss or step outside the guidelines. Some words mean something more like the English word, "mistake". A person accidentally steps over the line. Some include the idea of intentionally stepping over the line, like "trespass". Taking a short cut. Some acts declare the guideline is in the wrong place or does not exist. Some acts arise from the actor's idea that the guidelines are themselves harmful and in conflict with other more important rules. And some are intended to lure others over the line.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I think intention does matter -- but mistakes are still a problem.
Maybe I am being unfair in describing this as "a low motive," anyway. It's easy to say from my remove, but I can understand how they wanted to shore up their barricades against changes whose outcomes they could not know.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, the violence of 1919 was real and much worse than anything we have today. Yet many of us are concerned (rightly, I think) about uncontrolled immigration that dispenses with our laws, and is careless of keeping to a scale that would encourage the assimilation that worked out for the 1919 wave. Even that took decades to work itself out, and pressures to assimilate were much greater.
Perhaps, to be fair, I should also concede that "controlling the Germans" would prove to be the major American project of the first half of the 20th century -- abroad as well as at home. To some degree, both the 19th and the 18th Amendments were about that. One of them got repealed once the Germans were no longer the major threat. The other one did not, which must mean that there was more to it than that.
Still, I regret the loss of my illusion that Wyoming was motivated principally by good Western fair play and respect for fellow-travelers on the Frontier. In fact there are a few illusions I regret having lost over the years.
We all have mixed motives for every act. Discovering one bad motive does not make it the dominant one. Diluting votes may have sealed the deal - I do not grant this just because people campaigned on that, but I allow for it as a possibility - but was that the overwhelming motive of every male voter? That seems unlikely.
ReplyDeleteIt is now the fashion to deny that decent people ever had decent motives.
Lots of skeletons in American history. None of them apparently touched by Leftist academy. I wonder why.
ReplyDeleteBleeding Kansas. Missouri Extermination Order. utah War 1857. Lots of things that Democrats, Southern or not, before US Civil War 1, would not want to be told in the history books.
Operation Paperclip, more recent phenomenon. Americans criticize the Japanese for altering their history books to hide the more shameful and Imperial war history of the previous government's indoctrination of the young, in school books for kids. Meanwhile Americans don't even know what MacArthur did with Japanese bio warfare scientists and war crimes, or what Trum and the Deep State did with German war criminal scientists...