Although many conceive of citizenship and voting rights as inextricably intertwined, at the turn of the twentieth century voting rights were neither restricted to citizens nor guaranteed to them. Citizens were routinely denied suffrage on account of race (Jim Crow voting restrictions), class (poll taxes), as well as gender (laws that only enfranchised men).Footnote ¹ Concurrently, citizenship was not a requirement for voting in many states where resident immigrants who had filed their declarations of intent to become citizens (or “first papers”) could vote.Footnote ² The nation's conceptions of voting and citizenship have changed so dramatically that early twentieth-century voting laws appear absurd to modern audiences. Those engaged in debates about woman suffrage participated in this continuous redefining of citizenship and voting rights.

The Supreme Court noted the disconnect between citizenship and voting rights in Minor v. Happersett (1875). When voting registrar Reese Happersett prevented Virginia Minor from registering to vote, she sued him. The court identified the main question as “whether all citizens are necessarily voters,” and then concluded: “Certainly, if the courts can consider any question settled, this is one. For nearly ninety years the people have acted upon the idea that the Constitution, when it conferred citizenship, did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage.” In its decision, the court explicitly mentioned noncitizen suffrage:

Voting by resident immigrants dates back to the colonial era, and by the nineteenth century it was remarkably widespread.Footnote ⁴ Wisconsin legislated voting on “first papers” in 1848, and midwestern states in competition with Wisconsin for migrants followed suit.Footnote ⁵ The practice spread to the South and West after the Civil War, and by the 1870s, twenty-two states or territories allowed it.Footnote ⁶ Immigrant declarant voting was often crucial to supporting machine politics, and it became intricately tied to referendums on woman suffrage in Texas and Arkansas. Suffragists in these two campaigns used nativist strategies targeting immigrant declarant voting, strategies learned in earlier state campaigns like South Dakota's, where suffrage amendments and resident immigrant voting restrictions had passed together—which was not a coincidence.

Voting rights movements, including the woman suffrage movement, should be seen as moments when multiple groups’ voting rights were in flux, as was the question of who counted as members of society or as full citizens.Footnote ⁷ According to Dawn Langan Teele, both political competition and the mobilization of women were crucial to suffrage victories. “The conditions under which reform was likeliest was when politics was highly competitive and when a political group with enough power to change the laws believed it could capture the majority of women's votes,” Teele argues.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, competition led some politicians to form alliances with suffragists in order to retain or increase their political power. However, the combination of competitive politics and a party with enough power to change voting laws was just as likely to result in disfranchising efforts. Some politicians embraced white woman suffrage in an effort to increase the voting power of their base while simultaneously arguing for disfranchising resident immigrants in an effort to decrease the voting power of their opposition's base. The same circumstances and activism that persuaded politicians to enfranchise one group (white women) could just as easily persuade those in power to disfranchise another (resident immigrants).

Suffragists on the national and state levels argued for the disfranchisement of resident immigrants, deeming them disloyal, unable to meet the obligations of citizenship, and unworthy of its rights.Footnote ⁹ Campaigns to enfranchise white women and disfranchise immigrant declarants were intertwined in South Dakota, Texas, and Arkansas. These campaigns help elucidate the changing meaning of citizenship, as well as how national suffragists altered their advice based on lessons learned in particular state campaigns.

Many histories of woman suffrage in the United States address immigrant voters and nativism within the movement. However, rarely do they make clear that immigrant declarants—not just naturalized citizens—exercised the vote in many states, and that suffragists campaigned to disfranchise them specifically.Footnote ¹⁰ Eleanor Flexner, Ellen Fitzpatrick, and Aileen Kraditor discuss suffragists’ efforts to limit immigrant voting without mentioning campaigns to disfranchise resident immigrants.Footnote ¹¹ Kraditor references “the proposal to take the vote away from some Americans—Negroes in the South and naturalized citizens in the North,” either ignoring resident immigrant suffrage, or unaware of it.Footnote ¹² Perhaps this failure to clearly differentiate between resident immigrant voting and naturalized immigrant voting is due to a lack of focus on the Midwest and the South, where resident immigrant voting was common, or perhaps it is because suffragists themselves rarely distinguished between naturalized and resident immigrant voters.Footnote ¹³ Nonetheless, suffragists’ efforts to disfranchise resident immigrants was a key part of their strategy in multiple states, at the direction of Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

By the end of World War I, many Americans referred to voting as a right—at least as a right of white citizens, both male and female.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, nativism gained ground in the United States against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910 and American involvement in WWI in 1917.Footnote ¹⁵ During WWI, suffragists used the increasingly accepted idea of voting as a right—and specifically as a right of people who had fulfilled their obligation to the state—to argue for woman suffrage. They maintained that white, American-born women had met their wartime obligations as citizens, while resident immigrants had not.Footnote ¹⁶

Business owners backed resident immigrant voting to incentivize migration to their states. Politicians supported it either to capitalize on the votes of immigrants already present in their jurisdiction or to encourage future immigration.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, while no southern state allowed immigrant declarant voting before the Civil War, Republicans added it to the Reconstruction constitutions of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas.Footnote ¹⁸ Republicans were thought to have included it in the 1869 Texas constitution to “catch the vote of the German immigrants” (who had largely voted against secession).Footnote ¹⁹ Nationally, the practice had declined in popularity by 1900, when only eleven states still allowed it, and four of those states ended the practice before 1917.

Resident immigrant voting gave suffragists the opportunity to make both justice and expediency arguments.Footnote ²⁰ Immigrant disfranchisement allowed suffragists to contrast their own lack of rights as primarily native-born, white, female citizens with the fact that male resident immigrants—exempt from the obligations of citizens, including military service—could vote. This argument was strengthened by women publicly meeting the obligations of citizenship during WWI, while even German immigrants retained voting rights that women lacked. Concomitantly, politicians interested in using resident immigrant disfranchisement to weaken their opposition could be fairly certain that newly enfranchised white women would vote to do just that.

Complicating the issue of resident immigrant suffrage was the fact that the United States determined a married woman's citizenship status based on her husband's status alone. The 1855 Naturalization Act forced immigrant women to automatically assume the citizenship of their American husbands.Footnote ²¹ After the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship in 1867, immigrant women received their husband's birthright citizenship. In 1907, Congress acted to automatically denaturalize any American woman who married a man lacking American citizenship.Footnote ²² Women's desires did not affect their automatic change of citizenship upon marriage. If an American woman with birthright citizenship married a noncitizen man, she lost her birthright citizenship for life. If her husband became a naturalized citizen, she would gain his naturalized citizenship. To prove citizenship, women would present “a marriage certificate and their husband's birth certificate or naturalization papers.”Footnote ²³ The 1907 Expatriation Act officially made women dependent citizens, though it had been operating unofficially for years. While most vestiges of coverture were diminishing, Candice Lewis Bredbenner argues that Congress's efforts to enforce derivative citizenship on married women “appeared to be a statutory reassertion of the single-identity theory of marriage.”Footnote ²⁴ However, Congress was acting in line with another prevailing trend: nativism. The Expatriation Act of 1907 was part of a set of laws aimed at curbing immigrants’ rights and increasing federal authority over the issue. After the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1915, suffragists began working for women's independent citizenship, which they believed was crucial for woman suffrage.Footnote ²⁵ Independent citizenship was one of the League of Women Voters’ original goals at its founding.Footnote ²⁶ The Women's Joint Congressional Committee worked for “removal of citizenship discrimination against American women who married aliens,” which was partially achieved in the Cable Act of 1922.Footnote ²⁷ Women's dependent citizenship meant that few women were enfranchised by laws enfranchising immigrant declarants. Married women could not file “first papers,” and their citizenship did not change until their husbands completed the naturalization process.

In 1889, North and South Dakota were the final states to not require citizenship of voters in their constitutions. South Dakota had four unsuccessful woman suffrage campaigns in 1890, 1894, 1898, and 1914. Some of NAWSA's “twentieth-century generals,” like Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt, participated in the 1890 South Dakota campaign, where they “made a number of discoveries about elections, voters, and organizing, which they applied to future battles.”Footnote ²⁸ When the 1890 referendum—which Eleanor Flexner called “the South Dakota fiasco”—was lost, historian Sarah Egge contends that NAWSA “suffragists sharpened their nativist inclinations and deepened their belief that they must separate woman suffrage from temperance.”Footnote ²⁹ These two conclusions were intertwined as immigrant voters with cultural affinities for alcohol were presumed to have voted against both prohibition and woman suffrage.Footnote ³⁰

NAWSA refused to aid South Dakota in its 1898 referendum “because it believed that temperance and ‘backward’ immigrant voters would mean certain defeat.”Footnote ³¹ Catt, by now president of NAWSA, closely watched the 1898 referendum in which the woman suffrage amendment was defeated by only 3,285 votes, a far cry from the 22,710-vote margin in the failed 1890 campaign but still not victory. The result solidified Catt's own nativism, “and so she steered NAWSA toward nativism as a powerful rhetorical weapon.”Footnote ³² This would have consequences for the suffrage movement on the national level and in future state campaigns under Catt's direction.

In March 1917, the South Dakota legislature passed yet another suffrage amendment, three years after the last failed referendum. Governor Peter Norbeck added a citizenship clause to the bill that, if enacted, would require all voters to be citizens. Suffragist propaganda for the amendment capitalized on nativism, while emphasizing women's war work as proof of their fitness for citizenship and suffrage. They contrasted patriotic female citizens with “enemy alien” voters, even blaming German immigrants for the failed 1914 referenda, “publishing a map that showed the counties in which voters had defeated woman suffrage, with their percentage of German population.”Footnote ³³ The campaign was successful, and the amendment passed with 64 percent of the vote. Egge argues that the “results also revealed how deeply South Dakotans embraced nativism. It sharply influenced their conceptions of citizenship, constricting it to those who were deemed loyal.”Footnote ³⁴ As women voters were presumed to support the same politicians and policies that immigrants were assumed to have voted against, resident immigrant disfranchisement made sense to pro-suffrage politicians and voters.

The success of South Dakota's fifth, exhausting suffrage campaign drew a mixed response from Catt: “The Lord be praised that South Dakota is out of the way,” she said.Footnote ³⁵ However, campaigning against resident immigrant suffrage while arguing that American-born white women had met the obligations of citizenship during WWI appeared to be a successful strategy. NAWSA blamed multiple failed suffrage campaigns on resident immigrant voters, and in particular on German immigrants hostile to both woman suffrage and prohibition.Footnote ³⁶ By 1919, only four states continued to allow noncitizen voting: Indiana, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas. That year, the Texas and Arkansas legislatures, both of which had already enfranchised women in primary elections, passed amendments to end noncitizen voting requiring public referenda.Footnote ³⁷

Texas Democrats had implemented the all-white primary in 1902, establishing primary elections and restricting primary voters to white men, though enforcement of the all-white primary was left to local officials. The white primary and the poll tax, which was legislated in 1903, were the only two Jim Crow legal restrictions on Texas elections. In south Texas, political bosses saw that the white primary did not limit the votes of Mexican immigrants, whose poll taxes they regularly paid, often by debiting workers’ paychecks.Footnote ³⁸ While usually associated with cities in the northeast, machine politics was common in south Texas, where political bosses or patrones depended on resident immigrant voting.Footnote ³⁹ The bosses performed political favors for powerful ranchers, who delivered the votes of the immigrant workers economically dependent on them; immigrant workers received some kindness or employment in exchange for their votes.Footnote ⁴⁰ Bosses routinely paid the poll taxes of their supporters, even after the legislature made it illegal in 1912. They were also known to encourage ineligible immigrants to vote, to tamper with ballots, and to find workarounds to allow the illiterate or those only literate in Spanish to vote.Footnote ⁴¹

German resident immigrant voting proved controversial during WWI. In Texas, where the two largest immigrant groups were Mexicans and Germans, the legislature considered resident immigrant disfranchisement in January 1917, even though a similar state amendment had failed at referendum in 1915 with only 31.9 percent of the vote.Footnote ⁴² However, the backlash to immigrant declarant voting only increased one month later, when President Woodrow Wilson released the text of the Zimmerman telegram in which Germany sought an alliance with Mexico that would result in a Mexican invasion of the southern U.S. border.Footnote ⁴³ Suffragists in Texas and the nation argued that woman suffrage would “clean up” politics and counter the machines.Footnote ⁴⁴

After Democrats throughout the South effectively eliminated Black voting with violence, intimidation, literacy tests, white primaries, and poll taxes, their hold on political power was almost total, and as such, they had no incentive to enfranchise white women.Footnote ⁴⁵ Historian Elna Green argues that many disfranchisers went on to play prominent roles in the anti-suffrage movement, as they viewed woman suffrage as a threat to white supremacy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Texas was a one-party state, the conservative south Texas bosses and their allies vied for control of the state Democratic Party with progressive and prohibitionist Democrats. Both the legal exercise of voting rights by resident immigrants and election fraud angered progressive Democrats, including white woman suffragists. They sought to purify elections, in part by eliminating the votes of Black and Brown Texans. Progressive Democrats, often supportive of prohibition and occasionally of woman suffrage, considered immigrant voters to be racially inferior, uneducated, and too easily bought.Footnote ⁴⁷ They fought to disfranchise resident immigrants and to disempower the political machines that relied upon their votes.

Texas suffragists capitalized on this split between conservative and progressive Democrats. They played an important role in the impeachment and removal of conservative Governor James E. Ferguson in 1917, and negotiated primary suffrage for themselves in order to prevent the impeached governor from being reelected in 1918.Footnote ⁴⁸ Ferguson “enjoyed strong support among opponents of prohibition, including the state's substantial populations of German, Czech, and Mexican immigrants,” both declarant and naturalized. Progressive reformers argued that “he would get the wet vote—especially the manipulated Hispanic portion of it along the Mexican border, where political bosses ruled”—and they saw enfranchising white female citizens as a way to counter these votes.Footnote ⁴⁹ The competitive political environment created an opportunity for suffragists to leverage their votes in exchange for primary woman suffrage.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Texas legislature also passed a law ending resident immigrant primary suffrage, ensuring that the 1918 primary woman suffrage law would not enfranchise resident immigrant women. The 1918 Texas primary was the first Texas election in which white citizen women could vote, and the first in which resident immigrant men could not.Footnote ⁵¹ Primary suffrage side-stepped anti-suffrage arguments that woman suffrage would increase Black voting: presumably, the same white primary that limited Black male voting would restrict Black female voting too.Footnote ⁵² White southern politicians would block woman suffrage if it either was believed to substantially increased Black voting or actually did. White suffragists reassured politicians that “woman suffrage and black suffrage were unrelated.”Footnote ⁵³ Primary suffrage was a safe way for politicians to test this argument.

That same year, the Texas Democrats unanimously adopted a suffrage plank, endorsing state and federal suffrage amendments. The platform, written by University of Texas Professor Alexander Caswell Ellis, a progressive Democrat, also advocated a citizenship requirement for voting, as Ellis put it, “Thus making our Texas ballot 100 percent Democratic and 100 percent American.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Cynthia Orozco argues that Anglos in Texas “made little distinction … between Mexico Texanos and Mexicans,” despite the reality of a substantial number of independent voters of Mexican origin. Orozco concludes that Anglos in Texas “racialized ‘Mexicans’ as ‘other,’ nonwhite, and non-American,” while they “appropriated the term ‘American’ for themselves, associating ‘Americanness’ with ‘whiteness.’”Footnote ⁵⁵ In light of this, Professor Ellis's use of the phrase “100% American”—a phrase later associated with the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s—accrues a racialized meaning.Footnote ⁵⁶

WWI concluded in November of 1918, but nativist sentiment lingered; attacks on the limited political power of resident immigrants gained traction. In 1919, the Texas legislature passed the Thomason law, restricting voters who could receive assistance to those over the age of sixty, the physically disabled, or those who had been citizens for at least twenty-one years. It mandated that assistance be given in English only. Election officials could assist illiterate native-born whites, but were prohibited from assisting immigrants who struggled to read English.Footnote ⁵⁷ Historian Evan Anders argues that the persistence of machine rule in south Texas after the restrictions only exacerbated the “association of Mexican-Americans with widespread corruption and reinforced the ethnic prejudices of the Anglo voters of the state.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In 1919, progressive Democrats passed two state constitutional amendments subject to referenda: a prohibition amendment that would go into effect sooner than the federal amendment and a state woman suffrage amendment including a citizenship clause that would disfranchise resident immigrants. The intent was to reduce the power of conservative bosses in south Texas by eliminating a large bloc of their voters while enfranchising a large bloc of their opponents’ supporters. Ironically, the leaders of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA) in 1919 strategically (and only privately) opposed the state suffrage amendment, which would require an exhausting statewide campaign and referendum. Texas suffragists had a reasonable expectation of being fully enfranchised soon through other means; they had achieved primary suffrage, which they could use to pressure state legislators to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment then working its way through Congress. Further, the prohibition amendment on the same ballot would strengthen the connection that most voters saw between prohibition and woman suffrage—something NAWSA and TESA tried to avoid, believing that it had doomed previous suffrage campaigns like South Dakota's. Finally, suffragists believed the state suffrage amendment was unnecessarily risky as anti-suffragists could use its defeat to argue against ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which became the Nineteenth Amendment. All of this explains why the state amendment passed the Texas legislature unanimously: both pro- and anti-suffrage politicians believed that a suffrage referendum could work to their advantage.

NAWSA President Catt wrote to TESA President Minnie Fisher Cunningham on hearing that the state amendment had passed against TESA's wishes. Knowing that Cunningham was likely not going to be able to get the election postponed as she had hoped, Catt offered another strategy, one she learned from South Dakota:

Catt believed that the citizenship clause could be the key to winning woman suffrage in Texas. Unbeknownst to her, the legislature submitted the suffrage amendment alongside a citizenship amendment, and the two were intertwined: if the woman suffrage amendment passed, noncitizen suffrage would cease. If the woman suffrage amendment failed, noncitizen suffrage would continue.Footnote ⁶⁰ Cunningham followed Catt's advice and made the citizenship clause the focus of TESA's 1919 campaign. TESA propaganda focused on “alien enemies” voting while “loyal American women” remained disfranchised. Catt specifically mentioned German immigrants in her writing, yet Texan suffragists focused on Mexican immigrants, likely because of the racialization and othering of Mexican-origin peoples, especially in Texas.Footnote ⁶¹

The election date was set for May 24, 1919, leaving twelve weeks to campaign.Footnote ⁶² Cunningham emphasized the citizenship clause: “Our amendment is designed not only to enfranchise the loyal American women of this state, but to disfranchise the alien enemies in our midst, and the aliens have such an advantage over us in that they can vote on the Amendment while we, the women, cannot.”Footnote ⁶³ Cunningham argued that this handicap required women to “lay aside our natural differences in asking and call loudly for help from the American men of this state.”Footnote ⁶⁴ She hoped that prejudice against immigrants could allay prejudice against white women publicly making claims for political rights. “Are you an American Citizen?” read one TESA flyer, concluding, “If you believe in America and American citizenship, vote and work for the adoption of Suffrage Amendment on May 24.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Cunningham believed that this claim would resonate with voters concerned about allegedly disloyal resident immigrants voting during WWI, especially as Texas absolutely disfranchised servicemen for the length of their service until 1954.Footnote ⁶⁶ While other states tentatively built absentee voter processes allowing servicemen in training camps or deployed overseas to vote during WWI, Texas continued disfranchising those meeting the highest obligations of citizenship.Footnote ⁶⁷ Texas suffragists contrasted resident immigrant voting and serviceman disfranchisement. One of Cunningham's circulars argued that it “was found during the war to be a serious menace when the alien enemy was exempt from military service but could vote, while Americans went into the Army and were, therefore disfranchised. It is no less serious, these reconstruction days.”Footnote ⁶⁸ While Governor William Hobby argued that women deserved the vote for their war service, Cunningham declared that resident immigrants deserved disfranchisement for their lack of war service, despite the fact that immigrant labor had kept the nation and the military fed.

Cunningham recruited veterans.Footnote ⁶⁹ At her request, Major Richard F. Burgess sent Cunningham an official statement for her use arguing that “the millions of American women who served their country with equal fidelity at home, should remove the last doubt in the mind of anyone that the extension of the equal right of suffrage is a long-deferred act of simple justice.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Realizing that few discharged servicemen would return in time to vote, suffragists used their own war work to encourage men in Texas to support suffrage in the absence of those servicemen still abroad.Footnote ⁷¹ TESA's Jane McCallum wrote to newspaper editors:

McCallum advised local suffragists to get pro-suffrage letters from soldiers printed in their local newspapers on Mother's Day in 1919.Footnote ⁷³

Both Catt and Cunningham believed that arguing against resident immigrant suffrage in the hyperpatriotic WWI era with its increasingly ugly nativist streak was a winning strategy. It fit the prevailing attitudes of progressives in the state and nation, while also playing on racial biases against Mexicans. Responding to the effort to disfranchise a substantial portion of their base of power, conservative bosses James Wells and Archie Parr focused their efforts against the suffrage amendment, which could be far more damaging to boss rule than prohibition alone.Footnote ⁷⁴ Wells's wife, Pauline, led the Texas Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (TAOWS), a branch of the national organization that she established in Houston in March 1916. TAOWS distributed more than 100,000 pieces of anti-suffrage literature during the 1919 campaign.Footnote ⁷⁵

With women disfranchised, TESA resorted to encouraging women to “let your husband know how you feel about it so that he will help you to get the vote.”Footnote ⁷⁶ While the prohibition amendment passed, the suffrage amendment failed by 25,120 votes, or 45.9 percent of the vote.Footnote ⁷⁷ Resident immigrant suffrage remained, but citizen women retained primary suffrage.

TESA's propaganda blamed the failure of the state suffrage amendment on multiple factors, including “the fact that woman suffrage was bound up with the exclusion of the large alien vote in the state, and could not be voted for on its merit.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Cunningham wrote to one legislator that he should not have been surprised that the amendment failed as it was, “handicapped with an alien exclusion rider and by some oversight of our friends and machinations of our enemies, rushed to the vote while approximately 200,000 American men were out of the electorate in the United States Army. There are in this state nearly 150,000 men of voting age (United States Census 1910) foreign born.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Cunningham primarily blamed the amendment's defeat on German immigrants in central Texas, where the amendment was voted down in large numbers, but her biographers Judith McArthur and Harold L. Smith conclude, “she knew reality to be more complex.”Footnote ⁸⁰

When the strategy to link woman suffrage with the citizen voting clause failed, suffragists also blamed resident immigrants, recently naturalized voters, and Black Texans. Professor Ellis's assessment of the election helped suffragists frame their loss.Footnote ⁸¹ This justification was crucial, as anti-suffragists argued that the failed referendum meant that Texas should not ratify the. Anthony Amendment during a special session only one month later. In an argument reminiscent of that made by South Dakota suffragists, Ellis used the 1919 state election returns to argue that the defeat was primarily due to German immigrant voters in Central Texas, whom he claimed were aided in some places by Mexican immigrant and Black voters.Footnote ⁸² TESA issued flyers using nativist and racist arguments to explain the amendment's defeat, and urging pro-suffrage Democrats to “not violate their platform and personal pledges at [the] behest of a majority made by Negro and Republican votes.” Cunningham and Ellis acted to maintain the support of progressive Democrats, who were scared by the failed referendum. Citing numbers gathered by Ellis, the flyer argued, “twenty German counties gave 41,836 anti-suffrage, pro-alien votes,” and “twenty Negro counties gave 27,195 anti-suffrage, pro-alien votes,” clearly pitting racial and immigrant others against white woman suffrage.Footnote ⁸³

Even when counties with substantial Mexican resident immigrants voted for woman suffrage, white suffragists used nativist and racist assumptions to explain away their support. In south Texas, the amendment narrowly passed in seven out of the twelve most southeastern counties, which suffragists believed were unwinnable because of their racialized perceptions of all peoples of Mexican descent as controlled by the patrones.Footnote ⁸⁴ Anglo populations were growing in south Texas, and resident immigrants voted in fewer numbers in 1919 than in previous years due to harsher naturalization, voting laws, and increased migration out of south Texas in response to anti-Mexican violence. Ellis explained the success of the amendment in south Texas by arguing that the new literacy law was working.Footnote ⁸⁵

Catt sympathized, writing to Cunningham, “I should say you had the most ticklish job and the most crucial problem of any of the states at this moment.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The ratification battle lasted six eventful days, but in the end, Cunningham and TESA were successful. Progressive and moderate Democrats ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on June 28, 1919, over the opposition of conservative Democrats who called it an example of federal intrusion on states’ rights.

The Texas case reveals that when one group's access to the ballot was in flux, all groups’ voting rights were subject to alteration. In a competitive political environment, nativist and racist rhetoric was a powerful weapon helping politicians disfranchise groups who threatened to remove them from power. In 1921, in their first state election as full voters, white Texas women helped pass a state constitutional amendment finally disfranchising immigrant declarants. This citizenship amendment also allowed spouses to pay each other's poll taxes, effectively making it easier for white women to vote. Both measures were seen as strengthening the power of reform Democrats. Motivated by the Black women who sued for the right to register to vote under the primary suffrage law, the few who were actually allowed to register, and others who had voted in general elections after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, the Texas legislature strengthened the white primary in 1923 by legislating it instead of leaving it to the Democratic Party to enforce.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, legislating the white primary proved to be its Achilles’ heel. By overstepping its bounds, the state of Texas opened itself to the constitutional challenge that eventually brought down the white primary in 1944.

Similar events played out in Arkansas, another state with immigrant declarant voting and the only other state with primary woman suffrage. Arkansas's immigrant population included German and eastern European immigrants whose Catholicism was feared or hated by Protestant citizens.Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1917, the Arkansas legislature debated a primary woman suffrage bill that was originally written in Texas, where its passage was delayed by the impeachment of Governor Ferguson. Arkansas Representative Henry Stevens argued that primary suffrage would increase Black voting, but that the reality of the white primary mitigated that attack. The vote was so close it was likely decided by two anti-suffrage representatives being unable to vote while on suspension for bribery. According to historian A. Elizabeth Taylor, the “commendable record of [Arkansan] women during the First World War helped to refute the traditional complaint that women should not vote because they could not serve in the armed forces.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Arkansas passed the bill, and more than 40,000 women voted in the 1918 primary. The state Democratic Party then added a full woman suffrage plank to its platform that year. As Taylor surmised, “the primary bill had the effect of converting many anti-suffrage congressmen.” In January 1919, the Arkansas legislature passed a state suffrage amendment that would go to referendum in 1920.Footnote ⁹⁰

Before that referendum took place, the legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment seventy-four to fifteen in July 1919, making Arkansas the second of four southern states to ratify. In August 1920, Tennessee ratified, making the Nineteenth Amendment officially part of the U.S. Constitution. This left Arkansas in the unusual position of holding a referendum on a state woman suffrage amendment after the federal woman suffrage amendment was enacted. Like Texas, the Arkansas suffrage amendment contained a citizenship clause. If enacted, resident immigrant suffrage would end. If it failed, resident immigrant suffrage would remain under state law, but woman suffrage would also remain due to federal law. Due to the quirk of timing, women could vote in the Arkansas referendum.

The Arkansas constitution contained the “silent vote” clause, meaning that the amendment needed a majority of all votes cast in the election, not just a simple majority of those who voted on the amendment itself. If a voter did not vote on constitutional amendments when casting a ballot, they effectively voted against the amendments. A similar clause nearly defeated the Oklahoma state suffrage amendment in November 1918. Oklahoma allowed servicemen to vote when stationed on bases throughout the state. The Oklahoma Election Board chairman intentionally sent ballots without amendments printed on them to those bases. Every single ballot cast by the 4,197 Oklahoman servicemen on those bases effectively counted as a vote against the suffrage amendment, regardless of the voter's intent of the servicemen, because the amendment did not appear on their ballots.Footnote ⁹¹

In the Arkansas referendum in November 1920, the amendment to disfranchise resident immigrants and enfranchise women on the state level passed 87,237 to 49,757 but failed to overcome the silent vote. The speaker declared the amendment lost and the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 1920. However, after a curious turn of events, the court reversed its original opinion on Apr. 12, 1926, eliminating the silent clause and declaring that the amendment had passed. The attorney general confirmed that he considered it “legally adopted and is now in full force and effect.” Political scientist Leon Aylsworth wrote in 1931 that because of the court's reversal, “For the first time in over a hundred years, a national election was held in 1928 in which no alien in any state had the right to cast a vote for a candidate for any office—national, state, or local.”Footnote ⁹² The era of resident immigrant voting officially ended with the enactment of Arkansas's state suffrage amendment.Footnote ⁹³

Acknowledging the efforts of suffragists to disfranchise immigrant declarants offers a view of white woman suffrage as part of a nativist effort to restrict immigration and immigrant rights in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Not content with eliminating immigrant declarant voting in 1921, Texans like Representative John C. Box joined other restrictionists in attempting to have Mexicans labeled as racially ineligible for citizenship, which would also have barred them from immigrating under the 1924 Immigration Act.Footnote ⁹⁴ Woman suffrage and the votes of white women who supported these measures should be included in our understanding of the restrictionist and nativist movements.

The same competitive political conditions that encouraged politicians to enfranchise primarily white, citizen women led those same politicians to disfranchise resident immigrants. WWI allowed women to demand suffrage based on fulfilling their obligations as citizens through war work, while arguing that resident immigrants failed to meet these obligations and were therefore unworthy of voting rights. National suffragists embraced this nativist strategy. Americans’ conception of voting as a right of citizens changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. This process of change continued well after 1920, accelerated by the modern civil rights movements and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and continues today. While courts define the right to vote largely as the right to equal protection with other voters, most Americans continue to equate citizenship with voting and indeed to define voting as the most fundamental right of citizens.Footnote ⁹⁵