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October 12 - October 20, 2023
The fate of the Minneconjous at Wounded Knee was sealed by politicians a thousand or more miles from the rolling hills and cathedral clouds of the Great Plains. The soldiers who pulled the triggers in South Dakota simply delivered the sentence.
The mission to contain and domesticate the Indians overrode eastern racial distinctions. At the end of her life, when she told the story of South Dakota’s struggle against the Sioux, one dark-skinned former slave described herself as the first white woman in the Black Hills. The “whites” who were moving west were eastern Americans of all ancestries, united in a cause against the Indians whose way of life stood in the way of economic “progress.”
Still, many Americans gravitated toward the idea that the voting system must be cleaned up. Few were principled advocates of pure elections, though. Most wanted to purge elections of voters who supported the other party. In discussions of ballot reform, members of both parties criticized the corruption of the ballot, but each pointed to the transgressions of the other side. By 1890, with Democrats increasingly comfortable that they enjoyed the support of the majority of Americans, cries for ballot reform came primarily from Republicans, and they were increasingly shrill.
With opposition to their policies mounting, Republicans no longer pretended to want fair and clean elections. Now they made it clear they simply wanted to win.
Administration Republicans defended their bill by ratcheting up the rhetoric about the dangers of voter fraud. They warned that it was imperative to guarantee the purity of elections, because if citizens had any doubts on that score, they would revolt. At the very least, they would lose faith in government, and form posses to uphold the law. In language that seemed to incite the very action it purported to abhor, Lodge warned that fraud was a deadly peril because it led the defrauded voters to resort to violence.
