The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

by Olivier Zunz

Tocqueville saw the election of Davy Crockett to the House of Representatives as yet another example of the disastrous effects of the social state that existed on the frontier, which left voters incapable of judging the qualities he regarded as necessary for leadership. Tocqueville noted that with universal suffrage, the people of Memphis had entrusted such a responsibility to “a man with no education, who can barely read, who owns no property, and who has no permanent address but lives in the woods and spends his life hunting, selling game in order to live.”