Remembering How the Youth Movement Got the Vote

Many people have forgotten that it took a bi-partisan campaign to successfully lower the voting age to 18.

The decade of the 1960s was one of the most tumultuous and unsettling in American history. Assassinations, urban riots and college campuses erupting in violent protest roiled the nation. Political turmoil and recriminations divided the citizenry, to the point where many wondered if a total collapse of society and our civic institutions was not only possible, but likely.

At the same time, young political activists were working to ensure civil rights and voting rights in the South, while others were engineering the development and growth of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Many were devoting their energies to reforming their own educational experience, and still others were helping generate the environmental and feminist movements that took hold in the 1970s.

Oversimplifying the phenomenon considerably but effectively, Bill Clinton is reputed to have once said something along the lines of “If you liked what happened in the 1960s, it’s likely you are a Democrat; if not, it’s likely you are a Republican.”

Regardless of whether or not the former President’s assessment is  mostly or only partly true, it is important and timely to recall that there was at least one political issue that gained momentum in the late 60’s which was bi-partisan from the beginning, and that was the drive to lower the voting age to 18.

Among elected leaders, the 18 year old vote was supported by Republicans Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and John Anderson, among others. Democratic backers included Ted Kennedy, Mike Mansfield and Birch Bayh. Organizations ranging from the NAACP to the YMCA, Young Democrats and College Republicans, the AFL-CIO, Americans for Democratic Action, and the National Education Association coalesced to secure favorable consideration of the proposal, in Congress and in the states.

Eventually, a provision granting the franchise to 18 year olds was added to the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 1970. However, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had overstepped its authority in doing so (as it related to state and local elections). Faced with the prospect of the states being forced to conduct two separate elections simultaneously in 1972---one for Federal offices and the other for state and local governments---Congress responded in March, 1971 by passing the 26^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Then, amazing and incredible as it might seem given the polarization and paralysis that characterize today’s political culture, on July 1, 1971 Ohio became the required thirty eighth state to ratify the amendment. After years of grassroots organizing and relentless direct lobbying, it took only a hundred days between Congressional approval and final ratification for the youth franchise to become a part of America’s foundational document.

President Obama, in a Proclamation issued Friday, July 1, took note of this important chapter in American political history. And over the holiday weekend some of us who were involved in the 18 year old vote movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be together in Chicago celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the ratification of the Amendment. At the same time, we will be agonizing over the fact that the political system that we had hoped to improve through an infusion of youthful energy and idealism has only become more calcified and more dysfunctional in the four decades since.

Ultimately, however, we will be hoping that another era’s young voters will be in the vanguard of efforts to make our system work better, more expeditiously and with a greater emphasis on civility and equity than what we see around us today.