p. 14

44 BLACK POLITICAL POWER IN AMERICA

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vacuum, nor can it remain unrelated to political needs and aspirations. In
world affairs, a nation that holds the balance of power is rewarded con-
cretely with the protection of one or both of its neighboring enemies or
with some form of technical, financial, economic, or military assistance.
Power can be measured, and the effects of its application can be quantified.
Consequently, when the concept of the balance of power is applied to
the black vote, an ancillary question must thus be raised: what have negroes
gotten in political rewards for holding the balance of power? The answer is:
virtually nothing, considering their proportion in the population and the
crucial proportion their votes made between victory and defeat. It is, there-
fore, not completely accurate to conceptualize the negro vote as holding
the balance of power---at least not in today's world of negro political
weakness.
Black politicians and writers have understandably south to aggrandize
black electoral power. Writers and politicians reasoned that if they could
convince the white political bosses of the vote's size, its fragile political
loyalties, and its capacity for retribution, the black community would be
awarded more patronage and assigned a larger percentage of poly-making
and job-dispensing positions.
Instead, just the opposite has been true of the black vote. It has always
been: 1) smaller than the comparable proportion of the negro population
as well as of the total vote; 2)unerringly loyal to one party; and 3) too
unsophisticated to punish or defeat prechosen white carry-overs who have
long ceased to serve black interest. Only when these political misfits were
openly antagonistic to the black community has the vote addressed itself
to their retirement.
The black vote as a national balance of power was first comprehensively
described by Henry Lee Moon, in his book Balance of Power: The Negro
Vote, published in 1948, just before that year's Presidential election.** In
this penetrating and scholarly analysis of the negro vote as a newly matured
political force, Moon traces the vote's emergence from its chained non-
existence in the post-Reconstruction period to its curried omnipresence in
the 1948 Presidential election. Because Moon was the first political writer
to set down with precision the historical and political factors responsible
for the negro vote as a balance of power in national elections, both his
theory and its supporting array of facts deserve a separate critique.
According to Moon, the "maximum negro voting strength" as of 1948
was 7,250,000 negroes---all negroes over twenty-one years of age as counted
by the U.S. Census. With a total U.S. population of 91,600,000 citizens

[Margin] * During his editorship of negro newspapers in Chicago, New York City, and Wash-
ington, D.C., this author was equally guilty.
** Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday & Co.

The Negro Vote: Ceteris Paribus 45

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over twenty-one years of age, negroes comprised a maximum potential of
only 7 per cent of a projected national vote. 1948
The number of potential votes, however, is usually smaller than the
number of registered voters or of those who finally vote on election day. In
1940, as Moon indicates, there was a total vote turnout of only 49,815,000,
or 54 per cent of Americans eligible to vote. In 1942, an off year, the per-
centage dropped to 32 per cent, or 29,441,000 votes. In 1944, a Presidential-
election year, the size rose sharply to 52 per cent, then dropped again in
1946 to 38 per cent, or 35,000,000 votes.
As of 1948, two-thirds of the potential negro voters still lived in the
South. By Moon's count, there were 750,000 qualified negro voters in the
Southern state. He anticipated that more than one million negroes would
be qualified to vote, indicating a possible total of 3,500,000 negro voters
in 1948.
In contrast to their Southern brothers, black people were able to register
in the major Northern cities with little difficulty. They slowly became
serious repositories of political strength in the states of New York, Pennsyl-
vania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri. This
apparently explains why Moon hailed the importance of the negro vote in
the 1944 elections:

...without it, Franklin D. Roosevelt could hardly have been elected---it can,
with wise and independent leadership, be even more important in the 1948
elections.
...This vote is more decisive in presidential elections than that of the Solid
South. In sixteen states with a total of 278 votes in the electoral college, the
Negro, in a close election, may hold the balance of power; that is, in an election
in which the Negro vote is about evenly divided.*

Moon then explains why he believes Roosevelt's 1944 victory was pri-
marily the result of the negro's insurance-of-power vote:

In the 1944 elections there were twenty-eight states [?] of 5 per
cent or less of the popular vote would have reversed the electoral votes by
these states. In twelve of these, with a total of 228 electoral college votes, the
potential Negro vote exceeds the number required to shift the states from the
column to the other. Two of these marginal states---Ohio with 25 votes and
Indiana with 13---vent Republican. The ten remaining states---New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Delaware, Maryland, West
Virginia and Kentucky---gave to Mr. Roosevelt 190 electoral college votes essen-
tial to his victory. The closeness of the popular vote in the marginal states ac-
cented the decisive potential of the Negro's ballot.**

Concerning the role of the black vote in Congressional elections, Moon
believed that an alert, well-organized Negro electorate can be an effective

*Moon, p.10.
** Moon, p.198.