Politics & Government
![Sam Koppelman - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07ZTWBR8Q.jpg)
Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A History, a Crisis, a Plan
A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before it's too late-from the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this fight
Voting is our most important right as Americans-"the right that protects all the others," as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act-but it's also the one most violently contested throughout U.S. history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump's effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy. The vote seems to be in unprecedented peril.
But the peril is not at all unprecedented. America is a fragile democracy, Eric Holder argues, whose citizens have only had unfettered access to the ballot since the 1960s. He takes readers through three dramatic stories of how the vote was won: first by white men, through violence and insurrection; then by white women, through protests and mass imprisonments; and finally by African Americans, in the face of lynchings and terrorism. Next, he dives into how the vote has been stripped away since Shelby-a case in which Holder was one of the parties. He ends with visionary chapters on how we can reverse this tide of voter suppression and become a true democracy where every voice is heard and every vote is counted.
Full of surprising history, intensive analysis, and actionable plans for the future, this is a powerful primer on our most urgent political struggle from one of the country's leading advocates.
Voting is our most important right as Americans-"the right that protects all the others," as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act-but it's also the one most violently contested throughout U.S. history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump's effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy. The vote seems to be in unprecedented peril.
But the peril is not at all unprecedented. America is a fragile democracy, Eric Holder argues, whose citizens have only had unfettered access to the ballot since the 1960s. He takes readers through three dramatic stories of how the vote was won: first by white men, through violence and insurrection; then by white women, through protests and mass imprisonments; and finally by African Americans, in the face of lynchings and terrorism. Next, he dives into how the vote has been stripped away since Shelby-a case in which Holder was one of the parties. He ends with visionary chapters on how we can reverse this tide of voter suppression and become a true democracy where every voice is heard and every vote is counted.
Full of surprising history, intensive analysis, and actionable plans for the future, this is a powerful primer on our most urgent political struggle from one of the country's leading advocates.
Editorial Reviews
"In this analytical call-to-action, former U.S. attorney general Holder charts the history of voter discrimination. [Holder notes] that since the Supreme Court ‘gutted' the Voting Rights Act in 2013, more than two dozen states ‘have instituted draconian anti-voting laws that clearly and intentionally have a disproportionate impact on communities of color.' . . . Lucid history lessons and concrete solutions make this an essential primer on a hot-button political issue."-Publishers Weekly
"The former attorney general lays out the extraordinary challenges minority voters face with Republican efforts at voter suppression. As Holder notes, we are in the midst of ‘a crisis unlike any we've faced since the signing of the Voting Rights Act [of 1965]: American democracy is on the brink of collapse.' . . . Holder writes critically, but he also offers a positive program for change that insists that only by popular actions, such as voter drives and demands for electoral fairness on the part of elected officials, will that change come. . . . A powerful defense of democracy coupled with a thoughtful survey of the struggle for civil rights."-Kirkus Reviews
"The former attorney general lays out the extraordinary challenges minority voters face with Republican efforts at voter suppression. As Holder notes, we are in the midst of ‘a crisis unlike any we've faced since the signing of the Voting Rights Act [of 1965]: American democracy is on the brink of collapse.' . . . Holder writes critically, but he also offers a positive program for change that insists that only by popular actions, such as voter drives and demands for electoral fairness on the part of elected officials, will that change come. . . . A powerful defense of democracy coupled with a thoughtful survey of the struggle for civil rights."-Kirkus Reviews
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Rebellion
How White Men Won the Vote
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
-William Faulkner
Every generation likes to say the challenges they're facing are unprecedented-but when it comes to attacks on our right to vote, the reason we need to be vigilant isn't that this threat is novel. It's that it isn't.
For most of America's history, democracy hasn't been the rule. It's been the exception.
That was true before the first shots were fired in Lexington and Concord. Back then, each of the thirteen colonies had its own rules for voting. What they had in common, though, was that their elections didn't reflect the will of the people.
There were exceptions, but for the most part, if you were Native American, you couldn't vote. If you were African American, you couldn't vote. If you were a woman, you couldn't vote. And even if you were a white man, you couldn't vote, unless you owned enough property or paid enough in taxes.
In this way, when America was founded, voting wasn't a right. It was a privilege, one our founders believed should be reserved only for citizens with white skin, both X and Y chromosomes, and enough land, cash, or bodies-yes, bodies-to their name.
Exactly how much property you needed to own varied from colony to colony. In New Hampshire, they measured property based on its value in cash: If you weren't worth 50 pounds, you were out of luck. In Virginia, whether you could vote came down to how much land you owned: If you had 100 acres, you were good. If you only had 25, they needed to be well manicured. And if you had any fewer, you'd better not show up on Election Day, lest you be told you were too broke to vote.
In some colonies, like Connecticut, property qualifications were, as Governor Oliver Wolcott wrote, "essentially nugatory," meaning they weren't enforced at all. But in most, they were binding. And in some, if you were Catholic or Jewish it didn't even matter how much property you had; unless you were Protestant, you had no business casting a ballot.
But while restrictions on the right to vote are as old as America, so too is the desire among Americans to be the masters of our own fate. That belief in the power of the people is what inspired the colonies to declare their independence from an empire. And in the centuries that have followed, generation after generation of suffragists have devoted their lives to making the dream of self-determination a reality for all.
As you read the following chapters, you will recognize, as I do every time I reflect on the history of our country, that the expansion of the franchise was anything but inevitable. It was, instead, the work of Americans from all backgrounds-rich and poor, Black and white, men and women-none of whom were perfect, some of whom you've heard of, others of whom have been forgotten, all of whom shared a conviction that they should have a say in how they were governed, even if they had to risk their lives to win it.
***
Thomas Wilson Dorr was one of those Americans, but he wasn't exactly the kind of guy you'd expect to become a leader in the fight for voting rights. He was a rich kid who went to Phillips Exeter Academy for high school and became a Harvard freshman at fourteen years old. A portrait of a populist he was not.
But Dorr didn't want to be the kind of aristocrat who, as one nearby newspaper satirized, "gets up leisurely, breakfasts comfortably, reads the papers regularly, dresses fashionably, lounges fastidiously, eats a tart gravely, talks insipidly, dines considerably, drinks superfluously, kills time indifferently, sups elegantly, goes to bed stupidly, and lives uselessly."
He much preferred to spend his time with people who had it worse than he did-people like Seth Luther, a self-proclaimed "journeyman carpenter" from Providence, Rhode Island, who helped convince Dorr that their home state was in need of a revolution.
For more than a century, Rhode Island had laws in place that limited the right to vote to residents who owned property valued at upward of $134. For Luther, whose father was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, this felt arbitrary, and not only that-it also felt like a slap in the face of those who risked their lives for independence from Britain. "This law is contrary to the Declaration of Independence," he declared in his 1833 "Address on the Right of Free Suffrage," adding that it was "strange that a self-evident truth should require proof." He then left those who disagreed with him with an insult fit for a rap battle: "May all Traitors, Tyrants, Tories, and Aristocrats never find anything but onions to wipe their...
Rebellion
How White Men Won the Vote
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
-William Faulkner
Every generation likes to say the challenges they're facing are unprecedented-but when it comes to attacks on our right to vote, the reason we need to be vigilant isn't that this threat is novel. It's that it isn't.
For most of America's history, democracy hasn't been the rule. It's been the exception.
That was true before the first shots were fired in Lexington and Concord. Back then, each of the thirteen colonies had its own rules for voting. What they had in common, though, was that their elections didn't reflect the will of the people.
There were exceptions, but for the most part, if you were Native American, you couldn't vote. If you were African American, you couldn't vote. If you were a woman, you couldn't vote. And even if you were a white man, you couldn't vote, unless you owned enough property or paid enough in taxes.
In this way, when America was founded, voting wasn't a right. It was a privilege, one our founders believed should be reserved only for citizens with white skin, both X and Y chromosomes, and enough land, cash, or bodies-yes, bodies-to their name.
Exactly how much property you needed to own varied from colony to colony. In New Hampshire, they measured property based on its value in cash: If you weren't worth 50 pounds, you were out of luck. In Virginia, whether you could vote came down to how much land you owned: If you had 100 acres, you were good. If you only had 25, they needed to be well manicured. And if you had any fewer, you'd better not show up on Election Day, lest you be told you were too broke to vote.
In some colonies, like Connecticut, property qualifications were, as Governor Oliver Wolcott wrote, "essentially nugatory," meaning they weren't enforced at all. But in most, they were binding. And in some, if you were Catholic or Jewish it didn't even matter how much property you had; unless you were Protestant, you had no business casting a ballot.
But while restrictions on the right to vote are as old as America, so too is the desire among Americans to be the masters of our own fate. That belief in the power of the people is what inspired the colonies to declare their independence from an empire. And in the centuries that have followed, generation after generation of suffragists have devoted their lives to making the dream of self-determination a reality for all.
As you read the following chapters, you will recognize, as I do every time I reflect on the history of our country, that the expansion of the franchise was anything but inevitable. It was, instead, the work of Americans from all backgrounds-rich and poor, Black and white, men and women-none of whom were perfect, some of whom you've heard of, others of whom have been forgotten, all of whom shared a conviction that they should have a say in how they were governed, even if they had to risk their lives to win it.
***
Thomas Wilson Dorr was one of those Americans, but he wasn't exactly the kind of guy you'd expect to become a leader in the fight for voting rights. He was a rich kid who went to Phillips Exeter Academy for high school and became a Harvard freshman at fourteen years old. A portrait of a populist he was not.
But Dorr didn't want to be the kind of aristocrat who, as one nearby newspaper satirized, "gets up leisurely, breakfasts comfortably, reads the papers regularly, dresses fashionably, lounges fastidiously, eats a tart gravely, talks insipidly, dines considerably, drinks superfluously, kills time indifferently, sups elegantly, goes to bed stupidly, and lives uselessly."
He much preferred to spend his time with people who had it worse than he did-people like Seth Luther, a self-proclaimed "journeyman carpenter" from Providence, Rhode Island, who helped convince Dorr that their home state was in need of a revolution.
For more than a century, Rhode Island had laws in place that limited the right to vote to residents who owned property valued at upward of $134. For Luther, whose father was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, this felt arbitrary, and not only that-it also felt like a slap in the face of those who risked their lives for independence from Britain. "This law is contrary to the Declaration of Independence," he declared in his 1833 "Address on the Right of Free Suffrage," adding that it was "strange that a self-evident truth should require proof." He then left those who disagreed with him with an insult fit for a rap battle: "May all Traitors, Tyrants, Tories, and Aristocrats never find anything but onions to wipe their...
