#200： The Virgin Vote - Masculinity & Politics in the 19th Century
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss why politics was an essential part of male identity in the 19th century, and why a man s first vote was an important rite of passage into manhood during this time.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well we're in the
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middle of a presidential campaign here in the u.s and once again commentators politicians
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reporters they're bemoaning the apathy and disengagement of young americans but there
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was a time in american history when young people were the most passionate participants in american
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democracy and no it wasn't the 1960s it was the 1860s my guest today on the podcast has just
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published a book about 19th century politics and the energy that young voters brought to the process
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and how young people particularly young men in the 19th century look to politics for a sense of
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manhood and adult identity during a time of economic and social upheaval his name is john grinspan and
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his book is the virgin vote how young americans made democracy social politics personal and voting
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popular in the 19th century and on today's episode john and i discuss why politics was an essential
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part of male identity in the 19th century and how a man's first vote was an important rite of passage
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into manhood during this time and we also get into the atmosphere of campaigns in the 19th century
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america and if you think this current election cycle is unprecedented in its violence nastiness
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and general circus-like environment wait until you hear about the booze-laden torch-lit midnight
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campaign barbecues and the shankings and brawls that happened at the polls during the 19th century some
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pretty crazy stuff after the show make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is slash virgin vote
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we will find links to resources things we mentioned so you can delve deeper into this topic
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john grinspan welcome to the show thanks for having me uh so you got a new book out about a part of
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american history that a lot of people don't know about it's called the virgin vote how young americans
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made democracy social politics personal and voting popular in 19th century and um it's one of the
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most fascinating books i've read this year um so far because it gets into a part of american history
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that i love is the 19th century up until about the early 20th century and it's about politics which
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is pertinent because we're in an election year and i guess my first question is is you know a lot of
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people have been saying about this current presidential election it's that it's unprecedented
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and it's violence it's nastiness you know and it's general circus-like atmosphere as someone who has
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studied and written a book on the politics of the past is this true um have we devolved from a time
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when elections were sober and upright and you know very greek column-esque um i mean what were elections
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like during the 19th century yeah i think um people say that about this election and this is certainly a
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weird one but that's only because we're used to the incredibly quiet boring political culture of 20th
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century america that if you go back and you look at 19th century america politics is the biggest
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loudest most important thing that's going on and political events and campaigns are the center not
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just of political culture deciding who governs a country but are the center of entertainment culture
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that that drive these big campaigns these midnight rallies with torches these bonfires that
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there's a good side and a bad side to this on the one hand they do a great job getting many many
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people involved many more than today turnout was you know often over 80 percent and many of those
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people are young unlike today but you know it also brings out a lot of stupidness and violence and
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people get stabbed and shot at every election in the 19th century and there there are riots and there
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are people who don't understand the issues they're voting for and vote the wrong ways and that kind of
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thing too so it's a very different world back then yeah i mean it was i mean you painted this picture
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and it just sounded like it was a i mean it was not like a big party like campaigns and election day
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was just a big party because not only were there torch lit you know marches in the street at night
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there was like the parties would put out these big barbecues that was a tradition where they'd roast a pig
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uh alcohol giving out alcohol was you know that was part of the election or campaign process
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yeah this i mean you have to remember these campaigns are doing two jobs at the same time on the one
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hand they're trying to win power basically and so these parties give out whatever they can to win
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i mean they often buy votes for two or five hours but it's cheaper just to get voters medium drunk you
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don't want to get them so drunk they forget to vote but you want to get them two drinks three drinks a
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couple glasses of whiskey a couple glasses of beer to get them to vote on your side and at the same time
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politics is american entertainment and american popular culture this is a a new country this is a very shaken
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up country there are a lot of people migrating from from europe and from different parts of america and
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there's no central culture that ties everything together except for the basically federal political
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campaign i mean america is a rural nation that doesn't have that much entertainment back then and
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so if it's september or october of an election year and the party's going to have a rally in town you go to
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that and you hang out all night and you drink and you shout and maybe maybe you throw some bricks at the
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other side maybe you don't but uh it's really the center of popular culture at the time right and
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you even talk about in the book when um there'd be europeans that would come over and see this i mean
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their response was like yeah plato is right like democracy just brings out the worst in people
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yes people are shocked and they're shocked by two things one they're shocked by how wild and crazy
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american politics is and a lot of them see it as a sign that democracy just doesn't work and the other is
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shocked by american young people because american culture is also in many ways more democratic on
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the ground and there's a lot less there's still hierarchies we would be surprised today by the
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distinctions but compared to europe back then there's a lot more kind of freedom of action of
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young people and so at every level of political campaigns in society you see children young adults
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youth 20-somethings are involved really actively the idea that children were to be seen and not heard
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it's kind of a fiction the young people are the loudest part of these political campaigns yeah
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and that's the main premise of your book is talking about how young people were really the the driving
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force of this democratic ethos or fire that hit america during the 19th century and as you said like
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voting was about 80 percent um voter turnout was and a lot of it was young people but as you just said
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um the this political activism or this involvement in politics began in young people even before they
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could vote so what were young people who were doing like seven or eight or even 17 what were they doing
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to get involved in the political process even though they weren't old enough to vote because at the time
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it was 21 years old right yes and obviously many americans the majority weren't allowed to vote but
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there's still ways that if you're a woman if you're african-american a place where african-americans
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can't vote and if you're underage you can still be really involved because politics is so social and
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that starts at a really young age as you said people people raise their children from birth to identify
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with the political party of their family and to really see it as the the institution they belong to
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almost almost the way we raise kids with sports teams today you know um they just as people are eagles fans
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or cowboys fans today people were wigs or democrats or republicans back then and it builds over time
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one of the reasons they get young people so involved and they get such great turnouts is because they
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belayer this interest in politics over many years kids are taught to go to celebrations and to rallies and
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they they chant slogans in school and then they kind of become errand boys and run errands for the
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political campaigns they give out ballots on election day or they bring liquor to the campaign
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headquarters and they just from a very young age they get involved in politics so that by the time
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they're 21 they are veterans they've been in politics for years and years and years whether
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they can vote or not and uh you know you talk about in the book that you'd even have young people
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as young as 17 doing speeches at political rallies rallying up the voters even though they couldn't vote
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like they were really supremely invested in this and to the point where they were persuading
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even adults who could vote yeah there was this tradition of boy orators and you have to remember
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america back then is a speechifying nation people love giving speeches and hearing speeches there's
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obviously no tv or radio and it's really seen as an art and so kids are raised to give speeches to each
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other and to adults and it's not uncommon in a collection campaign to go to a town square and see
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50 60 70 year old standing around listening to a 12 or a 15 year old give a speech on the political
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issues of the day they get they get this great training that connects into politics and also
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gives them something to do in a sense of agency and involvement there's nothing that as they say
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tickles the vanity of a young man besides more than giving a giving a big public speech with adults
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listening in the years after the civil war in the south during reconstruction young african americans
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who were born as slaves get really into speech making for the republican party and it's this
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it's an amazing culture that people who were born in slavery are within a few years
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making speeches and being listened to as candidates by adults and one of the arguments you make in the
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book you know one of the reasons kids got involved because there's this culture there and it was fun
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right you um could go to these campaign parties rallies eat some food meet with people uh because this is you
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know this was again like you said america was a rural country this time so this was like the one
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time people got together and you can actually meet other kids your age uh and have some fun in the
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process but you also argue that besides the fun young people in america and one of the reasons why they
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got so heavily involved in politics is that politics offered them something like a way to advance
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themselves personally can you explain a little bit what you mean by that i mean how was it that a
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how is it that politics could help fulfill personal ambitions of young people during the 19th century
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i think it goes back to the predictive predicament that young people find themselves in in the 19th
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century that this is a period when it's really hard especially to go from childhood to adulthood that
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the 19th century is this great shaken up period in american history at the beginning of this era
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there's five million people in america at the end there's 75 million it goes from agriculture to industry
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and from country to city and millions of immigrants are pouring in and the whole in a boom and bust all
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the time there are depressions that hit young people particularly hard it's really hard to find the path to
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maturity for these young people they have trouble finding jobs they have trouble finding mentors the
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marriage age is rising so they have trouble finding husbands or wives um they move around a lot so they
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feel very unstable there's a lot of uncertainty for 15 or 18 or 22 year olds for men and for women
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and they gravitate to the political system as the source of ambition and identity and involvement
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maybe they can't get a job but they can give a speech for the party or they can march or they can
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organize an event it's this this kind of artificial sense of adulthood when everything else in their
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life seems kind of blocked yeah that part in particular was really interesting um because we often have
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this mistaken idea or this idea that you know kids these days these 20 somethings right these
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millennials you know they don't know they don't know what they're doing with their lives they're
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still living at home with your parents like they just need to get on with their life and you know
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you read millennial blog posts which is like i don't know what to do with my life maybe i'll intern
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at a at a publisher and you know find my calling and we often think that people back then in the 19th
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century like they had it all figured out like they knew they had like a certain sense of steadiness
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about them but the picture you paint that like you just said like these young people in their 20 you
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know late teens early 20s they were filled with as much existential angst as 20 somethings today
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yeah absolutely you really see the parallels when you read their diaries and their journals and a lot
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of them kept diaries and journals the literacy rate is very high so we have all these great documents
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from young men and young women who just moan in their diaries about how they can't figure out how to
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become adults the whole world their parents grew up in has crumbled you can't grow up the way that
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europeans had grown up or earlier americans or kind of rural stable people had had found their way into
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adulthood but they're none of the institutions of the 20th and 21st century there there isn't a good
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school system there aren't unions there isn't a clear way to get a job or find a find a spouse or
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settle down and so these young people really cast about and some of them do really well and you know
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the booms and busts they get the booms and it really benefits them and some of them
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you know they essentially the equivalent of graduating into a recession they really struggle
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to find themselves but what they all share is uncertainty no one knows how to become an adult
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the old way is kind of crumbled and the new way hasn't been established yet and i think we see echoes
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of that today that in many ways it seems as if in the 20th century there was a stable path into
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adulthood and i'm a millennial i think you count as a millennial too right right yeah barely yeah
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me too barely um but we we've seen this this shaking in the last couple of decades that makes
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it harder to become an adult and a lot of people a lot of people struggle with this and it's not
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unprecedented this this has happened before i'm curious you said you know there's journal
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and diary entries do you i don't know if you have one at hand is it like an excerpt from a journal
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from a young person yeah that you have that you could share with us yeah let me let me pull that
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up uh and i'm going to read it if it's too long no that's fine i'm going to read one part of it um
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so this is a diary from this guy ben foster who lives in maine he's about 16 years old he can't get
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an apprenticeship he can't get a bell or a girlfriend he's having trouble meeting women he's
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having trouble getting a job he really feels stuck and he keeps his great diary and he writes
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my life is probably a quarter or fifth gone and with what result leaving me ignorant poor fickle
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wavering without brilliancy talents wealth or influential friends a shuddering discontent that
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crawls over me when i reflect i am learning nothing earning nothing doing nothing i shrink to think of
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a time when i'm 21 and shall have no home to fall back upon in case of disappointment when i must do or
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die and he's really he seems particularly depressed or worried but he's really common there's so many
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anxious ambitious striving young people who the culture is pushing them to succeed more and more
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there's this kind of belief in progress that earlier generations didn't have have but there's no clear
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root to it so they they feel like they're failing individually and they're looking for something to
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help them feel more like they have that agency and like they have that progress even if they can't
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get a job or find a wife or whatever right so they couldn't find the path to adulthood in the
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marketplace because jobs were they were in a transition in the economy so it was tough much
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like we are today i guess some of the traditional like the family um part would maybe has fallen apart
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a little bit because people were becoming more mobile so i guess they they looked like politics was
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the outlet they could find a path to adulthood by taking an active part in politics yeah that's exactly
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right i think uh there's a slightly later quote i don't want to quote too much but from the same guy
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he's moaning he's whining and then he goes out to a political rally and he talks to people about
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politics at this upcoming election the 1848 election and he goes home and writes in his diary
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i can say that nothing in some years not intimately concerning myself have i felt so much intense
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interest and excitement as a pending presidential election i have talked and argued with men i have
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endeavored to advance a boy's opinion with a boy's modesty oh i wish that for one year on this one
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topic i was a man a voter so before when he's looking at his life he's saying oh i i can't imagine
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when i'm going to be 21 and i'm an adult i have no idea what i'm going to do he's terrified about it
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and then a couple diary entries later he's out at this rally and he's wishing that he's a man and a
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voter because politics seems like it offers him some kind of agency in his life that he doesn't see in
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in any other world right and you know dovetailing off that this idea of becoming a man and you argue
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in the book make the case that politics wasn't just tied up with adulthood but it was really tied up
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because men were the only ones that could vote at the time was tied up with notions of manhood and
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masculinity in the 19th century um so like this ben he felt he wasn't making a lot of progress in
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becoming a man um and i'm guessing i mean what what it besides just like the sense of agency i mean
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what did politics offer young men in terms of their conception of masculinity that they weren't
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getting from say their families or their church for example the idea of masculinity back then is rooted
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in this idea of being stable that the kind of the vision of men and if you read you see this a lot
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kind of advice on young books for young men on how to grow up and and in comics and in novels the
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idea for young men is that they should be stable and self-controlled that's what masculinity is all
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about it's not necessarily physical strength it's a father a boss somebody who is stable has both feet
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on the ground and it is uh has control over their instincts they're they're they're not violent
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they're not aggressive they're they're completely in control of themselves and this is very hard for
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an 18 year old to do in that economy one of the ways they can do that is have a stable connection to
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a political party they might not have other identities they might not have the job or the
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family but they can be a democrat or a republican they can be a voter and a citizen of the nation and
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that's like it's a great artificial way for them to feel that identity and stability that they
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associate with manhood and at the same time this political culture denies women that same sense so
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there are a lot of women who are deeply interested in politics but they're always unstable because they
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can never actually act they can never vote they can always be they can be very interested and they are
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and they can talk to their husbands and their children and their fathers about politics and they
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can play a role but because they can't vote they're always somewhat unstable they're never full
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citizens or adults in the eyes of the country in many ways and and so were these young men and
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getting involved in politics i mean was it just the act of getting involved in politics that
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give that gave them a sense of that they were becoming a man or did a lot of them have aspirations
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to be you know work their way up through the party ranks and actually you know become part of the
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political machine in a way and find status or um i don't know a sense of of identity um within the
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the actual political party i think for a lot of these young guys it's temporary that there are people
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who want to make their lives in politics and become bosses and make money and a career in it but a lot of
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them they just need politics for a couple years and we know that young young men in their late teens
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and early 20s are the most engaged in politics and they can do things like if you're ben foster if
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you're this unstable kid in maine one thing you can do is you can join a political club and then
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you're in this organization with uh 20 30 100 like-minded young people of the same party who
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are your age or a couple years older a couple years younger and you meet on weeknights or weekends and
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you drink and you smoke cigars and you put on uniforms you march down the middle of town square
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and you have a camaraderie it's it's like it's a little bit like something along the lines of a
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fraternity or a gang or some sense that here are other men and we are all part of this club together
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that's one way they get it another is through voting and that act of casting a ballot when they
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turn 21 is seen as a gateway to real manhood and adulthood so your book's called the virgin vote and
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that's what um they called it was referred to as the a man's first vote and the virgin vote
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um why was it such an important event in a young man's life yeah they use that phrase the virgin
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vote i i was seeing that in diaries for years and it just stuck in my in my head it just says so much
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about how they saw politics that a man's first vote is his virgin vote or his maiden vote and the idea
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is that he's losing his political virginity and he's supposed to be courted by a political party before
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that and once he votes for that party he's supposed to stay monogamous for life for that party so you
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cast your first vote your virgin vote not only does it make you a man but it makes you a democrat or a
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republican or a wig or what have you and you stick with that party for life and young people really
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treat young men really treat this as the event the rite of passage into adulthood they younger kids
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kind of look forward to it and talk about when they become voters virgin voters went on the days
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before their election a lot of times they try to grow out a beard or a mustache or some facial hair
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and they try to dress up and look adult and then once they've cast that vote they these guys talk
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about it for the rest of their life you read their diaries you read their memoirs when they're 80 years
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old you read their uh obituaries and it always mentions who they cast their first vote for that's
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fascinating and so you guys this is going back to the idea that um american society american culture was in
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flux and rites of passages that may have existed before were no longer there so young men you know
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used the political process the act of making a vote as that new rite of passage yeah i mean if you think
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about it culturally america is an overwhelmingly white place at this time and most of those white people
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come from the british isles or germany they've given up on those old european traditions for african
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americans have been separated from whatever traditions go back to africa most cultures have
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some rites of passage but america is this place in flux where those old hundreds year old traditional
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rites of passages are being forgotten and nobody remembers how you became a man in germany or
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whatever and so they need something new and the one thing they all share throughout the country is the
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political process so american democracy becomes popular culture and offers this rite of passage
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to a nation that's forgotten its old ways to become an adult so how did the balloting system in the
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19th century make a man's first vote all the more significant because i think a lot of people think
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now oh wow why is that so significant like you get the scantron right um and you just fill in the arrow
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and then you give it but um was there the way they did balloting back then did that add to the
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significance of the vote in any way it's a great question we've made the active voting so clean and safe
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and dull that it's hard to imagine what it was like in the 19th century the government didn't used to
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print ballots parties would print ballots and what would happen is the the men in the community would
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gather on election day in a town square or in a saloon or in a warehouse and there'd be somebody at
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the front with a ballot box accepting ballots and so these party activists would try to voice ballots
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on whoever they could for their party and they'd line up and they'd try to vote but the problem is
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once you got to the front of the line there's no registration system but there are challengers
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which are party operatives from both parties who are trying to challenge people's votes from the
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other side so if i'm a democrat then i might try to pick out who looks like a republican based on
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what i know about the people in my community his clothes his accent his race his background all of
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these things to try to figure out who's going to vote the way i don't want them to and i might
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challenge them on legal grounds i might try to intimidate them i might stab them they used to
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stab people with awls like the shoemakers like because you could kind of subtly poke somebody
00:24:04.140
with that and it would hurt them but and threaten them without becoming a big thing so because it's
00:24:09.940
so contested because there are fights on election days and everyone is gathered and there's music and
00:24:14.240
drunk people it makes this act of voting even more of an important rite of passage all the men in
00:24:20.120
your community will see you vote and they'll see you go up to the front of the line and cast your
00:24:24.080
ballot and all the women in your community will hear about it and know that you've done this thing
00:24:28.460
that supposedly makes you a man back then so it really because voting was so different and because it was
00:24:33.840
so contested it makes the act that much more important right and going back to they didn't have
00:24:39.360
you know official ids like a lot of people didn't even know their actual birthday and and so you had
00:24:45.520
like that's one of the reasons why they these young guys would start trying to grow mustaches and
00:24:49.860
beards because one of the ways that they were challenged was like well you're not old enough
00:24:53.080
to vote um and so they try to look older and so by the act of voting like it was a way of being able
00:24:59.380
for the community to say yeah you are a man like you are you look old enough to be a man we accept you
00:25:04.420
as a man yeah because who knows i mean this world is so shaken up that okay so you might be 21 but your
00:25:10.780
mother died of cholera so she can't tell anybody how old you are maybe you were born in pennsylvania
00:25:15.600
moved to oklahoma so no one remembers where you were born you might not even know how old you are
00:25:20.840
most people don't um so and you certainly can't prove it even if you do so you need to prove it
00:25:26.240
through you can grow a beard so i guess you can vote um you can get somebody to kind of vouch for you
00:25:32.500
if you've done a impressive manly deed in some communities you could get the vote so if you lived
00:25:38.100
in kind of a pioneer community in nebraska or colorado or california often you could vote
00:25:43.980
underage just because they thought well you got to california you're worth you can vote soldiers
00:25:49.020
could often vote at 18 or 17 just because they were a good soldier during the civil war but yeah
00:25:55.100
because nobody really knows how old you are because it's so hard to enforce it makes the act of voting
00:26:01.020
that much more important and that much more meaningful about adulthood and manliness as well as politics
00:26:06.320
right and then you also talk about um you know with the newly freed african-american slaves
00:26:11.680
um who were voting for the republican party um there's a lot of voter intimidation so like
00:26:17.080
black men in the community they get together as a group and make sure they had revolvers make sure
00:26:22.940
they had knives and they go together to vote um to avoid that intimidation and sometimes there you
00:26:28.480
know things came to came to a blow yeah and it reminds you or reminds me not to be too light about
00:26:35.200
all this political violence because it seems like it was so far away and we can you know it sounds
00:26:39.940
interesting and exciting and kind of exotic but you have to remember these elections turned into
00:26:45.160
race riots and massacres and these are the bloodiest elections in american history in the south in the
00:26:50.660
years after the civil war and there's a huge number of african-americans who are voting for the first time
00:26:56.040
and they're deciding elections ulysses s grant is elected in 1868 because he has black vote on his
00:27:01.900
side and so these become really contested places they're organizations like the union league which is a club of
00:27:07.840
of african-americans especially in mississippi and alabama who they all go to vote together and
00:27:13.380
bring revolvers whether obviously are kind of hidden and often they need them so yeah this this
00:27:19.300
political violence really affects who gets to vote and what voting means and it's true for for other
00:27:24.560
minorities too it's especially true for irish catholics in northern cities where there's a protestant
00:27:30.040
majority who really doesn't want catholics voting and so they often have to fight their ways to the
00:27:34.140
polls too right um and then you're going back to you know there's a lot of club formation during
00:27:39.440
this wasn't just unique to politics like you just young people at the time were just forming clubs
00:27:43.460
about everything um but you talk about within within the individual parties there's these sort of like
00:27:48.220
sub clubs of young party supporters and i think one you mentioned i thought was really fascinating was
00:27:53.160
the wide awakes oh yeah um and it was kind of like it's actually kind of scary when you like
00:27:57.760
you describe like what they i mean they would get in these like uniforms and they um look kind of
00:28:03.020
like knights almost and they would uh carry torches at night and like i guess the reason why they're
00:28:08.560
called wide awake is they'd go to people's houses in the middle of the night and like keep them you
00:28:12.580
know bang pots and pans or things yeah i mean when we think of abraham lincoln's election we think of
00:28:18.840
kind of upstanding honest abe and we imagine this this honest tall kind of earnest statesman abe lincoln's
00:28:26.440
election is organized by this movement called the wide awakes which comes out of connecticut the leader of the
00:28:32.180
whole national movement is 23 years old and what they do are they're young men who dress up in
00:28:37.000
really military uniforms black capes and black hats and they march in the street and they basically take
00:28:43.580
over the north there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of them from from maine to san francisco
00:28:49.360
and into some southern states and they're seen for northern republicans who support abe lincoln
00:28:55.060
they're seen as this godsend that the the north is going to finally stand up for their rights
00:28:59.040
if you're a southerner who doesn't like gabe lincoln this looks like the beginning of a political
00:29:04.060
war it looks like a paramilitary movement and so this this movement actually affects the the beginning
00:29:10.860
of the civil war because it seems so threatening these these young men in uniform marching at night
00:29:15.820
well that that doesn't seem so great if you're not on their side oh and that also because politics
00:29:22.500
is so competitive because the races are so neck and neck everybody steals everybody's ideas so
00:29:29.500
they're the wide awakes are created and almost immediately lincoln's opponents all have similar
00:29:33.640
organizations with different names so no party ever really has an edge for very long because as soon as
00:29:40.080
one group of 18 year olds try something their their opponents across town try the same thing or if
00:29:45.360
they're doing it in maine someone in south carolina comes up with something similar so because politics
00:29:50.500
is so close and so contested back then and lincoln only won that election with 39 of the popular vote
00:29:56.960
uh people really rip off each other's ideas yeah um somebody was thinking about you know the adults who
00:30:04.020
were actually running for these offices that these young people were campaigning for what did the
00:30:09.940
these adults think of these ardent young people i mean do they just sort of like do they i guess do
00:30:16.100
they they leverage them and they just sort of like at the same time disdain them
00:30:19.280
yeah i think that's exactly right um it's a hierarchical society still and adults think
00:30:25.740
they are better and wiser and smarter than young people but no matter how great they think they are
00:30:30.640
the parties need young people because elections are so close and because there's so few independents
00:30:36.640
because most people who pick a party their virgin vote stick with a party the only way to gain any
00:30:42.840
ground is to bring in new members and new members are young members so these parties realize pretty
00:30:48.940
quickly that they really need to bring in 21 year olds so they organize events to be entertaining for
00:30:54.220
young voters they reach out to the children and and uh youths because they know that if they win over
00:31:00.360
a 15 year old maybe in six years that 15 year old will vote for their party and they focus a ton of
00:31:06.080
time and money on entertaining and reaching out to and recruiting young men and young women because
00:31:12.140
they know young women have an influence on the young men in their lives so while governing in in
00:31:17.700
washington or in state capitals is done by these 60 year old guys campaigning is done by 18 20 22 year
00:31:25.220
olds and the parties know that and they know it's their best shot at victory yeah i mean i guess at the
00:31:30.060
same time though they're just kind of like oh you know they because it seems like a lot of the like
00:31:34.000
the politicians you describe in the book they kept the distance from actual campaigning
00:31:38.120
um because they would they didn't want to sully themselves so they left it to
00:31:41.960
these these young men to do it for them yeah i think there's there's two there's two attitudes
00:31:47.680
towards young voters then and now honestly and we see this throughout american history on the one hand
00:31:52.760
there are some people who look down at young people and see them as self-involved or flighty and not
00:31:57.460
not committed and not knowledgeable and kind of disdain young people and then there are those who think
00:32:02.300
that young people are purer smarter somehow going to uplift the democracy and solve all the problems
00:32:07.900
and obviously both are exaggerations um but yeah you see people go back and forth some people see
00:32:13.700
young voters as the way to destroy the other party or clean up politics when it's very very dirty
00:32:19.840
in the late 19th century and others say they'll accept young people's votes but they're not going to
00:32:26.000
listen to them in terms of party platforms or nominations or anything like that
00:32:30.040
um so in the book you a lot of a lot of the focus is on um men obviously because like they're the ones
00:32:36.620
who could vote but you argue that women um also used the political culture of the 19th century
00:32:42.300
to advance personal goals or personal ambitions so how were they able to do that when they weren't
00:32:48.640
allowed to vote for women's women's politics back then they have to be social they the democracy is
00:32:56.660
social and women's influence has to depend on on connections to men because they obviously can't
00:33:01.860
vote themselves and that works both ways on the one hand they're women with really deeply held
00:33:06.480
political beliefs and what they can do is they can pressure their their fiancee to go vote for their
00:33:11.880
their political belief they can they can push their their siblings and their the men in their lives to
00:33:17.460
vote and they do and then there are women who use politics as a tool just as men are using politics
00:33:22.400
so it's a great way to court if you want to if you want to meet some young guy you go out to a
00:33:28.260
political rally if you want to get the attention of someone who's in a political club well if you
00:33:32.920
talk about with him about the party he supports that's a great way to engage with him and politics
00:33:38.360
kind of gives these victorian women cover to court in a way they otherwise wouldn't be able to they
00:33:44.100
can go up where else in 19th century america could a victorian lady go out at midnight and hang out
00:33:49.980
with a bunch of drunk people and maybe get drunk herself and you know wave a torch and everything
00:33:54.500
is this it offers some kind of cover for that and women get more directly involved they they organize
00:34:00.600
women's clubs and they they march dress as goddesses or dress as the different states so there are a lot
00:34:06.360
of ways women can play a role socially even though they're denied the right to vote so this uh the
00:34:12.620
period you cover was about i guess 1840 till about the early like 19 i mean 1905 and it seems like
00:34:19.780
there's this just precipitous drop can you i mean that was something that amazed me what can you
00:34:24.340
describe the drop in i guess voter turnout from like the peak it was there in the late 19th century
00:34:30.020
to like the early 20th century yeah it really crashes throughout the second half of the 19th century
00:34:36.260
roughly 80 percent of eligible voters will turn out in an election in a presidential election
00:34:41.180
sometimes it's lower sometimes it's higher but there's this really sustained period of really
00:34:45.980
high level of involvement and then something happens in 1900 and those numbers tumble in
00:34:51.460
almost every presidential election until by the 1920s fewer than half of eligible voters are going to the
00:34:57.860
poll there's this political culture that exists in the 19th century that just dies within a generation
00:35:04.160
in the 20th century and we've known this as historians for a while but i think the answer to why this
00:35:10.140
happens is lies with young people if there's a new generation of young people who don't engage in
00:35:16.120
politics and look to politics in the same ways as their parents or their grandparents had and they
00:35:20.980
don't join so the people who cast their virgin vote in 1876 will keep turning out for the rest of
00:35:27.520
their lives but the people who could vote for teddy roosevelt or taft don't care as much and they
00:35:33.320
don't bother to and so i mean what changed um in american culture where young people just they
00:35:39.440
weren't looking to politics anymore for personal fulfillment or a sense of identity i'd say there's
00:35:45.820
a change with young people and there's a change with politics with young people life is easier for
00:35:50.760
a lot of these people in the 20th century than in the 19th they're more institutions that kind of
00:35:55.620
stabilize their world they have a full school system until they're 18 they have unions they have
00:36:01.040
cities where they know more people they have all these other options they have an entertainment
00:36:05.560
culture they're teenagers in the 20th century and they have movies and radio and dance halls and cars
00:36:11.720
and all these other entertainment forms uh so in many ways they don't have the same need for politics
00:36:17.440
and political clubs that they did before i mean their lives are they they still have their challenges
00:36:22.860
and life is still difficult for many of them i don't want to be too exaggerate with this but
00:36:27.380
yeah the i mean the death rate goes down young people are living longer and they're healthier
00:36:32.000
and they just they have less need so there are fewer of them turning to politics at the same time the
00:36:37.980
political parties there's a real revolution in who runs the parties in that in the 19th century
00:36:43.300
campaigning is run by kind of working class men who you know they might run a saloon or a butcher shop
00:36:49.420
and they organize campaigning there's a switch in the end of this period where these kind of
00:36:55.860
upper middle class reformers take over politics and the one thing they really don't like is these
00:37:00.580
crowds of drunk you know uh working class men in the street so one thing they try to do is they
00:37:05.260
try to shut down this public campaigning that uh attracts so many young people and uh yeah i mean
00:37:11.440
that i think that's really the cultural change where there's more outlets i guess in america became
00:37:15.280
more of a peer culture um young people began looking to their peers instead of i guess some of the
00:37:20.600
political parties or the political process they kind of looking up to older people into sort of
00:37:26.740
ushering them into adulthood um as these outlets like you know talk about you talk about sports you
00:37:31.800
talk about the amusement park you talk about you high schools where you have the same kids who are
00:37:37.640
your age they start turning the dent to them to their identity and sense of fulfillment instead of
00:37:42.940
older people uh to give that to them i think that's really important that we forget how
00:37:47.940
how mixed life used to be in terms of age groups and that if you went into a saloon in 19th century
00:37:53.360
america there'd be 15 year olds and there'd be 12 year olds and there'd be 30 year olds and there'd
00:37:57.800
be 80 year olds so society mixed more in in churches and political organizations and work they just spent
00:38:05.340
more time with other age groups in the 20th century the age groups separate out a lot more so
00:38:10.740
political parties still have youth organizations but there's an age limit on them no one over 21 joins the
00:38:16.680
youth organizations anymore so these young people who want to meet adults who can benefit their career
00:38:21.720
or give them a sense of manhood or whatever they don't meet these people anymore they're they're
00:38:25.720
isolated with their own age group and there's not there's not really the same selling point if you
00:38:30.360
can't if politics is removed from kind of personal ambition why should young people care right and
00:38:36.260
then going back to the the change in the political process i mean with the you make the case that the
00:38:40.680
introduction of the australian ballot ballot where it was you know a state-sponsored ballot like the kind of we
00:38:46.020
have today took away some of the significance of the virgin vote or that first-time vote that
00:38:51.780
young people in the 19th century have and that we really don't have anymore yeah i mean voting machines
00:38:57.140
are kind of a physical example of what happens when there's a ballot box everyone stands around the
00:39:01.960
ballot box if i have to put the ballot in the box and there's you know conflicts over that when it's a
00:39:06.540
voting machine and you go off by yourself behind a curtain you vote with this electric device or mechanical
00:39:11.080
device it's it's a really different culture it says politics isn't social politics is private
00:39:16.520
and that's one of the big changes the this kind of public political culture goes away and politics
00:39:21.580
becomes something you're not supposed to talk about at the dinner table that really saps the interest
00:39:26.620
it doesn't really benefit young people and they're kind of cut off from it in a way after that
00:39:30.920
right and that's not to say i mean like there were benefits there were reasons why they made these
00:39:34.980
reforms um you know avoid corruption um voter voter fraud but yeah in the process you lose something
00:39:41.800
with it within like with any reform you make um yeah you lose something yeah there's a trade-off
00:39:47.480
between big loud popular democracy and smaller quieter cleaner democracy and there's a huge amount
00:39:54.460
of corruption and a huge amount of problems with 19th century democracy this is not in any way a golden
00:39:59.880
age and i certainly wouldn't want to have to vote back then but there's a trade-off and as they
00:40:04.360
clean it up they lose some of the popularity but do you say with this current election i mean i guess
00:40:09.520
maybe the rise of social media and people sort of spout their political opinions on social media are we
00:40:15.120
seeing the the re-emergence of you know bringing back that sociability into politics again well yeah
00:40:22.160
for good and for bad i i see some of that i mean one of the things that powered 19th century politics
00:40:28.020
are newspapers and the thousands of newspapers in the country and people cut out articles and they
00:40:34.000
reprint them almost the way we do with links and sharing things today so there's this idea that
00:40:39.400
there's a social conversation about an election which we have again today as opposed to the 20th
00:40:44.360
century when there are a couple media outlets who control it and um i'm curious you know a lot of
00:40:50.640
people get this idea because i have like john l sullivan i like this retro vibe on the art of
00:40:54.220
manliness that i'm like nostalgicizing the past and uh and that i want to bring back and i go back to
00:40:59.360
the 19th century or something but i don't um but i'm always curious like there's always things you
00:41:04.200
could probably learn from the past i'm curious if there's anything we can learn from this very
00:41:08.260
uh this period of an american history where uh political activity was high that maybe we could
00:41:13.860
bring back in some way or another yeah i completely agree we don't want to bring back
00:41:20.000
i don't want to i don't want to get shanked when i go to the ballot you know make a vote right
00:41:25.400
yeah i i completely agree um and we want everybody being allowed to vote but there are some things
00:41:31.080
they are really good at and they're really good at engaging people particularly young people and i
00:41:35.860
think they do that through two ways we could think about today one is that the way they view politics
00:41:41.940
they view the political as personal voting isn't voting isn't just about issues it's not just about
00:41:48.420
civic duty it's not just kind of about the big the better good the greater good it's about young
00:41:54.480
people personal engagement with politics voting means so much to them as individuals
00:41:59.700
and they use it in their lives you see they're not just voting because of the issues but they're
00:42:04.560
voting because they need politics in their lives so they make the political personal that way
00:42:08.720
the other thing is this idea that democracy is social that you don't just vote because of your
00:42:13.340
own individual views but you vote because of the world you've grown up in and the society you've
00:42:18.860
grown up in and we've we see this today political scientists have shown that people who grow up
00:42:23.220
around voters are more likely to vote people who grew up in households or people talk politics
00:42:27.300
are more likely to vote uh you don't just decide on your own whether you're going to be engaged or
00:42:32.320
not or how you're going to be engaged you really it's really promoted by by your role models in the
00:42:37.700
world around you and i think that's something we could think about again i think there's a tendency
00:42:42.300
to kind of shake your finger at young people and say oh they don't vote why don't they care but
00:42:46.280
every young person who's not voting is the result of the adults in their life not introducing them to
00:42:52.180
politics okay well john grinspan this has been a really fascinating discussion because like i said
00:42:56.540
this was uh really one of the most fascinating books i've read so far this year just so interesting
00:43:00.880
um thank you to read this part of american history well john grinspan thank you so much for your time
00:43:06.280
this has been an absolute pleasure oh yeah thanks for having me my guest there is john grinspan he's
00:43:11.220
the author of the book the virgin vote how young americans made democracy social politics personal and
00:43:15.860
voting popular in the 19th century and it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere and be sure
00:43:21.540
to check out the show notes at aom.is slash virgin vote for links to resources we mentioned so you can
00:43:27.700
delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:43:39.060
for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:43:42.320
artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy this podcast and i've got something out of it i'd really appreciate
00:43:46.680
it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher help spread the word about the show as always i
00:43:50.960
appreciate your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly