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Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Hardcover)
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Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Hardcover)
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Should the majority always rule? If not, how should the rights of
minorities be protected? In Moral Minorities and the Making of
American Democracy, historian Kyle G. Volk unearths the origins of
modern ideas and practices of minority-rights politics. Focusing on
controversies spurred by the explosion of grassroots moral reform
in the early nineteenth century, he shows how a motley but powerful
array of self-understood minorities reshaped American democracy as
they battled laws regulating Sabbath observance, alcohol, and
interracial contact. Proponents justified these measures with the
"democratic" axiom of majority rule. In response, immigrants, black
northerners, abolitionists, liquor dealers, Catholics, Jews,
Seventh-day Baptists, and others articulated a different vision of
democracy requiring the protection of minority rights. These moral
minorities prompted a generation of Americans to reassess whether
"majority rule" was truly the essence of democracy, and they
ensured that majority tyranny would no longer be just the fear of
elites and slaveholders. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century,
minority rights became the concern of a wide range of Americans
attempting to live in an increasingly diverse nation.
Volk reveals that driving this vast ideological reckoning was the
emergence of America's tradition of popular minority-rights
politics. To challenge hostile laws and policies, moral minorities
worked outside of political parties and at the grassroots. They
mobilized elite and ordinary people to form networks of dissent and
some of America's first associations dedicated to the protection of
minority rights. They lobbied officials and used constitutions and
the common law to initiate "test cases" before local and appellate
courts. Indeed, the moral minorities of the mid-nineteenth century
pioneered fundamental methods of political participation and legal
advocacy that subsequent generations of civil-rights and
civil-liberties activists would adopt and that are widely used
today.
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