The Lodge Bill or Federal Elections Bill of 1890 was a bill drafted by Representative Henry Cabot Lodge (R) of Massachusetts, and sponsored in the Senate by George Frisbie Hoar; it was endorsed by President Benjamin Harrison. The bill would have allowed the federal government to ensure that elections were fair. It was created primarily to guarantee blacks, predominantly Republican at the time, the right to vote in the south. The Fifteenth Amendment already formally guaranteed that right, but white Southern Democrats had found loopholes to effectively prevent blacks from voting. The bill was successfully filibustered in the Senate, without much action by the President of the Senate, Vice President Levi P. Morton, while Silver Republicans in the West traded it away for Southern support of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.[1]
[edit] See also
- ^ Wendy Hazard, "Thomas Brackett Reed, Civil Rights, and the Fight for Fair Elections," Maine History, March 2004, Vol. 42 Issue 1, pp 1–23
