Registering to Vote

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Ben Shahn. Our Friend [campaign poster]. 1944.

Ben Shahn made lithograph posters for the the CIO to encourage voting in 1946.

Those who do not wish you to vote, if you are not a person of property to-day, are Republicans. [click here to read those thoughts from the crazy congressman from Iowa] So it has been since the beginning of Hoover's and his party's creation of the Great Depression. You don't want the poor, homeless, jobless, colored, crippled, the too young, or the too old to vote; for they may vote for social justice, and an America for all Americans; which means a vote for the Democracy and its party — the Democratic.

See this story of a 96 year old woman from Tennessee, born in Georgia. A new law to stop supposed 'voter fraud', which cannot be found, has been instituted in Tennessee, as in many Republican controlled state governments. Since she had been married, and her marriage name wasn't the name on her birth certificate, she has been denied the state identification card, which is now necessary to vote. Job done — old, poor, black woman barred from voting. Multiply this by millions, and see the Republicans 'win' elections through this plan of voter suppression.

This is why Republicans do not want the voice of labor to compete with the voice of capital.
This is why Republicans do not want the voice of a generation that doesn't look like them to vote.
Another of Ben Shahn's 1946 Congress of Industrial Organizations posters.