"Let Us Vote!": Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment

by Jennifer Frost

Overview

The fascinating tale of how a bipartisan coalition worked successfully to lower the voting age

“Let Us Vote!” tells the story of the multifaceted endeavor to achieve youth voting rights in the United States. Over a thirty-year period starting during World War II, Americans, old and young, Democrat and Republican, in politics and culture, built a movement for the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen in 1971. This was the last time that the United States significantly expanded voting rights.

Jennifer Frost deftly illustrates how the political and social movements of the time brought together bipartisan groups to work tirelessly in pursuit of a lower voting age. In turn, she illuminates the process of achieving political change, with the convergence of “top-down” initiatives and “bottom-up” mobilization, coalition-building, and strategic flexibility. As she traces the progress toward achieving youth suffrage throughout the ’60s, Frost reveals how this movement built upon the social justice initiatives of the decade and was deeply indebted to the fight for African American civil and voting rights.

2021 marks the fiftieth anniversary of this important constitutional amendment and comes at a time when scrutiny of both voting age and voting rights has been renewed. As the national conversation around climate crisis, gun violence, and police brutality creates a new call for a lower voting age, “Let Us Vote!” provides an essential investigation of how this massive political change occurred, and how it could be brought about again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479811342
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Frost is Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and author of “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservativism, and Producer of Controversy: Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism, and the Cold War.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations ix

Introduction: "We're old enough so let us vote" 1

Part I "It's Been a Long Time Gettin' Here": 1942-1962

1 Franchise of Freedom 13

2 Youth's Own Future 31

3 Make Democracy Live 45

4 Change Is in the Air 62

Part II "A Change is Comin' and It's Very Near": 1963-1967

5 Agenda for a Generation 81

6 Consent of the Governed 97

7 Challenge of Citizenship 112

8 This Is Democracy? 128

Part III "It's Time that We all Made a Contribution": 1968-1969

9 Turning Point '68 149

10 We Can Vote Them Out 167

11 It's About Time 186

12 Where It's At! 204

Part IV "Come on and Let us Vote - It's a Solution": 1970-1971

13 The Hour Is Striking 225

14 Enfranchised? 244

15 A Step Forward 260

16 On Account of Age 279

Conclusion: "Talking 'bout you and me changin' things peacefully" 299

Acknowledgments 309

Appendix: Youth Suffrage in States and Territories, 1943-1971 313

Note on Sources 315

Notes 319

Index 359

About the Author 373

Editorial Reviews

"Frost is unsparing with historical detail…She argues persuasively that the campaign for youth enfranchisement was made possible by and entangled with the bottom-up and top-down campaigns for ensuring African Americans’ civil and voting rights."

Choice

"Jennifer Frost has produced a major contribution to our understanding of the 1960s, the history of voting rights, and constitutional change. Her recognition that the movement for the 18-year-old vote must be seen from the top down and bottom up makes for a comprehensive and illuminating history of a strangely neglected topic. In pushing back against the long pattern of neglect of this history, this book is really important."

Robert Cohen

"Skillfully guides the reader to different places and moments where efforts to lower the voting age gained traction. Frost successfully integrates a broad array of voices and histories, especially through her attention to the efforts of organizations like the NAACP to attack disfranchisement more broadly. This is an original history and an engaging read that will appeal to an audience beyond historians of the United States."

Kathryn Schumaker

"Jennifer Frost’s thorough, valuable Let Us Vote! celebrates the amendment’s semicentennial by chronicling the long struggle to pass it—alongside considerations of the role of the youth vote in contemporary politics."

Foreword Reviews

11/01/2021

Frost (history, Univ. of Auckland; "An Interracial Movement of the Poor": Community Organizing and the New Left) explores the struggle for youth voting rights in the United States. Her comprehensive study of youth suffrage's major players starts in 1942, when U.S. Rep. Jennings Randolph introduced (unsuccessful) legislation to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. In January 1971, Randolph introduced similar legislation for the 11th time, and in March 1971, Congress finally passed a constitutional amendment which was ratified by 38 states that July. Frost argues that youth suffrage was initially tied to the World War II draft. Liberals, the National Education Association, and civil rights movement leaders were the driving forces, but there was always strong bipartisan support for lowering the voting age, she writes, and the eventual 26th Amendment was almost anticlimactic. News of its ratification was eclipsed by the Supreme Court's Pentagon Papers decision, and turnout among youth voters was lower than expected in the 1972 presidential election (and would remain low until 2008's election, Frost writes). VERDICT This book can be read as a case study of the laborious U.S. legislative process, set against the changing political landscape of the 1960s. Readers interested in U.S. politics will appreciate Frost's research.—Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

Library Journal