Revolution from Above

Amid the hue & cry of Congressional debate, a political revolution of at least minor importance was about to be enacted this week. Ready for final passage was the soldiers' vote bill. And though Southern Senators might weep and States' rights theorists tear their hair, the bill suspended poll taxes for the duration of the war, as far as soldiers and sailors are concerned.

Already in the hopper was another bill, by Florida's stanch New Deal Senator Claude Pepper, to outlaw poll taxes altogether.

Poll taxes were originally a great forward-looking democratic experiment, a liberalization of laws giving the vote only to property owners. But after the Civil War, the Solid South turned them to a new purpose: keeping Negroes and white trash away from the polls.

No man could be sure what effect this week's action by Congress might eventually have on Southern politics. By holding down the vote, the poll tax has made it easy for small machines (like Senator Harry Byrd's Virginia "courthouse crowd") to run an entire State. It has also helped preserve the South's one-party system, where final results are determined in the Democratic primary, not the general election.

For soldiers and sailors, supposed to be beneficiaries of the vote bill, Congress actually did little. Almost two months of bickering by Congress have probably made it too late to set up the machinery this year. Most soldiers will not be able to use the ballot until 1944's Presidential election--and by that time many may be too close to the enemy to think of voting.

Some of the long-winded Congressional debate was on the issue of State's rights. But mostly the fight was purely and simply over poll taxes, with conservative Southerners attacking. Mississippi's John E. ("Silent John") Rankin called the bill: "A monstrosity. ... It is part of a long-range communistic program to change our form of government and our way of life." Cried Alabama's Sam Hobbs: "The worst thing since Reconstruction."

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