Debating the Limits of a Citizen(-Only) Polity: Anti-Alien Apportionment Conflicts in a Nativist Age, 1917-1929

Brendan Shanahan, Yale University

In 1917, Nebraska was a particularly pro-(white/male) immigrant rights state. Noncitizen men continued to vote there by the thousands. Nebraska women, by contrast, were denied full suffrage rights until the ratification of the federal Nineteenth Amendment. But all residents – citizens and noncitizens alike – were counted as part of the population for the purposes of calculating state legislative districts. In the span of three years, however, the situation would be reversed: noncitizen voting rights would be rescinded, American women would win suffrage rights, and noncitizens would be excluded from state legislative apportionment provisions. Nebraska’s nativist turn towards citizen-only political rights was especially abrupt. But its contents were not unique. Indeed, Nebraska was but one of several states to debate anti-alien apportionment clauses at state constitutional conventions in the World War I era. Similar disputes over the role of noncitizens in the polity (however indirect) became so heated that Congress was not reapportioned – at all – in the 1920s (in defiance of the federal constitution’s decennial reapportionment requirement). My paper explores how nativist policymakers and organizations battled immigrants and their allies over the meaning and weight of (exclusive) “rights of citizenship” as citizen-only rights in the polity during World War I and the 1920s. It especially compares anti-alien apportionment disputes at three state constitutional conventions (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Nebraska) alongside similar federal battles in the 1920s, contextualizing them amid (better-known, often overlapping) conflicts over suffrage rights in the World War I era and 1920s. It further reflects on how this history informs similar nativist (state and federal) apportionment proposals – and efforts to contest them – in our current era. Brendan Shanahan is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale University Center for the Study of Representative Institutions and lecturer in the History Department.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 157. Citizenship, Naturalization, and Democracy: Learning from the Late-19th and Early-20th Century United States