Why Americans don't vote? They're tired of 'lesser evils'

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As life in America becomes ever more difficult, sentiment for a labor party is growing. The United States is almost the only major country where workers do not have their own party. Many workers point to the betrayals of the Democrats, who claim to represent "all the people."

Two social historians, Frances Fox Pivens and Richard A. Cloward, present another compelling argument for forming an American labor party. In a recently published book, "Why Americans Don't Vote," they probe the low turnout of Americans in presidential elections and come to some surprising conclusions.

If voting in elections is the hallmark of democracy, Piven and Cloward tell us, the United States is not the most democratic nation. In other nations, far more citizens take part in the democratic process of electing governments.

In 1983, in Belgium, 95 percent of the voters cast ballots in a national election. In France, 86 percent voted; in Portugal, 84 percent. The United States was next to the bottom of the list, with only 53 percent of the electorate voting for a president.

Piven and Cloward reveal where the other 47 percent of American voters have gone, who they are, and why and how they have been disenfranchised.

Early in the 19th century, they tell us, white workers in America were going to the polls when only men of property could vote in Europe. This was the so-called "Golden Era" of American democracy. It must be noted, of course, that during this "Golden Era" women and Blacks were excluded from voting.

It was a time, the authors point out, when "the marching bands, the rallies, the hoarsely shouted slogans and excitement" marked the extraordinary popular enthusiasm generated by election campaigns-and 90 percent or more of the voters turned out.

Behind this intensity of feeling were the issues that affected many people personally-ethnicity, religion, and sectionalism. Irish-Catholics competed with native Protestants. New England manufacturers collided with southern plantation owners. Workers found a place in the Republican and Democratic parties so long as issues were not posed in working-class terms.

Politics based on deceit Later, as waves of immigrants settled in the big cities, machine bosses would sometimes present a Democratic election campaign as "one of capital against labor, of money against popular rights, and of political power against the struggling interests of the masses."

The city bosses were not serious, of course. It was only bait to sign up class-conscious workers to vote for the bosses's candidates. These "machine" politicians built their political power on the more solid foundation of patronage and graft.

This system worked so long as the small farmer and the worker did not press the Republicans and Democrats too hard. Then economic progress produced a steel industry and a railroad network. This, in turn, created a classic proletariat.

By the 1870s class warfare was raging, with no quarter given by the industrial predators. Great strikes in 1871, 1886, and 1894 were among the bloodiest and costliest the nation had seen. The embattled workers now found the Democrats and Republicans united as one against them.

Meanwhile, back on the farm in the West and the South, farmers found that the Republicans and Democrats were controlled by the railroad barons and the bankers, who raised freight rates and interest rates.

Both the workers and farmers began forming their own political parties. Massachusetts shoemakers formed an independent party in 1869. A number of trade-union assemblies united in the National Labor Union in 1872. Labor joined with farmers in the GreenbackLabor party in 1876.

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The Greenbacks captured 14 Congressional seats in 1878. Other challenges to the two major parties followed. The United Labor Party almost elected Henry George, the single-tax-advocate mayor of New York in 1886.

Farmers and workers unite The next big push for independent political action came when the Farmers Alliance in the 1890s embarked on an electoral crusade against "centralized capital, allied to irresponsible corporate power." The Knights of Labor joined the farmers in campaigning for "government ownership of transportation and communication, equitable taxation, and abolition of monopolies."

The high point of this crusade was reached when the poor white and Black farmers in the South joined labor and the western farmers to form the Peoples Party in 1894. This Populist movement, based more on farmers than on industrial workers, was the first major challenge to the rule of capital.

Unfortunately, this promising movement was co-opted by the Democratic Party in 1896. The Populists threw their support to William Jennings Bryan, the presidential candidate who called for backing the currency with silver as well as gold. Bryan's stirring oratory about "mankind crucified on a cross of gold," stirred the Populists and scared the ruling class.

But the threat was more illusion than real. The Democratic Party watered down or ignored much of the Populist program. The alliance between southern farmers and northern factory workers was tenuous at best.

But there was enough anger and unrest in the country to alarm men of property. Republicans and conservative Democrats raised millions to wage the first mass media electoral assault on the American people. They destroyed the Populist Conservatives in both parties won, but they had felt the hot breath of rebellion. The infection, they decided, lay in the urban masses. The historian Francis Parkman spoke of "the diseases of the body politic" in the cities.

"Here the dangerous classes," Parkman said, "are most numerous and strong, and the effects of flinging the suffrage to the mob are most disastrous." It was necessary to bar their access to the ballot box.

Southern plantation owners echoed •5a=à