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The best authority now on the history of suffrage in the US is Alexander Keyssar. In The
Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000),
he writes that the first "grandfather clause" appeared in 1890, in legislation in South
Carolina, imposing a literacy requirement (this based on anti-immigrant legislation in
Massachusetts in 1857) on all voters, except...you know who had the right grandfathers.
See one of his sources, J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage and
the Establishment of the One-Party South (New Haven, 1974). It took then 25 years for the
US Supreme Court to deal with this sort of entitlement as a violation of the Fifteenth
Amendment, for the first time in the Oklahoma case and an associated Maryland case, in
Guinn vs. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915). So goes the legal and judicial history.
 
The discursive history must be different. Mencken, who should have caught the usage among
his beloved booboisie, does not note "grandfathered" in my edition. I'll bet it's in
folklore studies. But let's get back to he.
 
John Womack  
 
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