Michael Waldman argues that the country's 250th anniversary celebration must remind Americans that the nation's story is a long struggle to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and that the issues consuming the country today were central to the changes brought by the Revolution. From the start, the right to vote required a fight to vote. In 1776, only white men who owned property had the franchise, a legacy from the British. Pennsylvania's radical new charter gave the right to vote to all men, even those without property, and historians believe to many Black men, with Benjamin Franklin as the principal author.
Waldman notes that the property requirement ended during Andrew Jackson's presidency, when angry white working-class men won the first voting rights victory. Black men won the right to vote in part by serving in the U.S. Army in massive numbers, with one in five Union soldiers being Black by the end of the Civil War. Women won the vote through the 19th Amendment, having pioneered protest tactics such as peaceful marches and hunger strikes. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 created a multiracial democracy in the United States for the first time. Waldman warns that people in power are yet again trying to roll back the right to vote.