Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to be talking about a topic that quite naturally comes out of the midterm elections of last week. What we want to talk about is something that was clearly distinctive in some ways and that has a long history, and that is the impact of the youth vote, of young people voting in this election. It certainly appears that not only did a good number of young people come out and vote, but even more strikingly, they appeared to have skewed democratic to a great degree. So, apparently, nationally, 63% of young voters supported Democrats compared to 35% for Republicans. So they had an impact, and what’s interesting and what we want to talk about today is over time, throughout American history, what have people made of the youth vote, how have people talked about it, how have young people themselves talked about it, argued about it, what has been their conception of why they deserve the vote. So, in one way or another, what we’re talking about today is who has a voice, and why should they have that voice, and what does that mean.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What does it mean is a very important piece of this. I will point out that while, again, the numbers are not clear yet, but while across the board, it appears that 63% of young voters supported the Democrats, they only went for the Republicans by 35% as you said. If you look at key districts and key states, the numbers are as high as 70%, in Pennsylvania, for example, being a key ingredient to stopping what looked like it was going to be, to many people, a red wave. Although I will say it didn’t look to you and me like it was going to be a red wave, but it did to a lot of people.

So there are a lot of ways you can break down that youth vote, and the reason that I’m really interested in this and the things we’re going to talk about today is because this really matters. The way that people identify as youngsters as an old says in their early voting years tends to stay with them for the rest of their lives. When you look at the youth vote now, it says, “We’re looking at a change that’s going to really matter going forward,” and the group that everyone is looking at right now is Gen Z, and Gen Z are the people who are 25 and younger.

Joanne Freeman:

I just want to add in based on what you were just saying about the fact that what young people do now with their votes is going to shape what they do for the rest of their lives. Of course, the other half of that is they will also understand and in a sense, get a lesson that what they do matters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What they do matters, and when we talk about a wave election, it seems almost to be a generational wave election, not a partisan wave election. I think you knew this, Joanne. I think I texted it to you that night. My assistant is a student at UMich, and he texted me after he’d been in line for an hour. He said, “I’ve been in line for an hour. It could go on for hours, but I’m not leaving.” At University of Michigan, the lines were so long. Not that that’s a good thing. You don’t want lines too long.

Joanne Freeman:

I was about to say.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The lines were so long, people waited six hours.

Joanne Freeman:

The last voter I think, right? It was at 2:00 in the morning and waited six hours to vote.

Heather Cox Richardson:

2:05.

Joanne Freeman:

So, on the one hand, I said at some point, I think on Twitter, I salute her for waiting that long. Obviously, you should not have to wait six hours to vote, but that tells you something.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, and I wrote the next day after, and I was communicating with my assistant about the fact he had stayed so long to vote. I said, “I’m really glad you stayed. This will be something you tell your grandchildren about,” and he said, “That’s exactly what we were saying in line. This would be a story we’d tell our grandchildren.”

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, I love that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I thought it’s about being part of something, but it’s also perhaps about being the start of something.

Joanne Freeman:

And having an impact at the start of something, right? I mean, you’re not going to think to yourself, “I’m going to tell my grandkids about this,” unless you already have a sense that what you’re doing is significant. You’re shaping something at a moment when it really matters. That’s the logic that goes into that kind of statement. So, I really love that that was what your assistant said. That makes me feel actually quite good.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it was especially interesting because the youth vote has never mattered before in American history.

Joanne Freeman:

Really?

Heather Cox Richardson:

You just know I have to set you up. It’s like the law. It’s like in my contract.

Joanne Freeman:

In the work that I’ve done on the first third of the 19th century, the degree to which when you look at the language that people use about their political sentiments in those decades, particularly 1830s on, party membership is formal. It’s seen as deeply personal and foundational to who you are, and people talk at the time about, “Since I’ve been in the cradle, I’ve been a Democrat. It runs in my blood.” There’s a depth to it and a thingness to it. Right? People didn’t talk about the Democratic Party. They talked about the democracy as though it was an object. So there’s this deep political sentiment about party membership and party loyalty, but particularly, beginning in the presidential election of 1840, you begin to see really energetic, widespread, influential participation in electoral politics by young men.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So part of that though is an attempt actually to create voters. Right? So when you get the rise of public schooling that really pushes people towards civic identity and even toward particularly the Democratic party, it’s interesting that this happens in the 1840s because I think the real move to try and put the concepts of civic engagement and civic teaching really. I mean, there’s always been civic engagement, but literally, readers in schools that talk about what a good voter ought to do, that really starts in the 1830s. So, by the election of 1840, they’ve actually started to get some people who have been steeped in this childhood, “This is how you need to behave to belong to a democracy thing.”

Joanne Freeman:

So, on one hand, coming from the side of the young people themselves, they’ve been educated that way. They’re thinking that way. On the other side, you have people recognizing that base of people. In 1848, this is actually according to Abraham Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, Lincoln, who at the time was a freshman Whig congressman, he was stumping for Zachary Taylor, he wrote home to Herndon in Springfield, Illinois, instructing him to create a rough and ready club of young men as part of their campaigning, and this is how he described that effort. He said, “You, young men, get together and form a rough and ready club, and have regular meetings and speeches. Take in everybody that you can get. As you go along, gather up all the shrewd wild boys about town, whether just of age or little underage. Let everyone play the part he can play best. Some speak, some sing, and all hollow.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Hollow, and this, I really like as well because Lincoln of course spent his younger years traveling with… and we’re going to get a thousand letters about this, but traveling with a gang. That’s one of the reasons he was as popular as he was is because he was used to hanging out with these young roughs, if you will, and recognized that if you could get them going, and you could get them to make a lot of noise and get them to look like it was a happening kind of place to be because on the frontier, there ain’t a lot to do, but you could go out, and you could wave flags, and you could make noise, and you could center it all around politics, then you could make your guy look really popular, and you could get people behind his movement. That’s a really important political concept to tie people into backing a particular politician by grabbing people in off the streets, especially young boys who are usually up for creating some noise.

Joanne Freeman:

What we’re coming to, what were known as the Wide Awakes, which was a youth organization. It was paramilitary, but my impression, and you tell me if this is right or not, the Republican Party, it’s coming of age. It begins to exist and it’s coming of age in the late 1850s, and there’s this great youth movement. They come to be known as the Wide Awakes. It seems to me that a big part of their energy and excitement is because this is a new party. It’s standing up against the establishment. Now, you tell me what is driving this youth effort since it’s not just coming from people asking for it to happen. It’s the youth themselves who are pushing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s a really good question, and I do think it’s partly that it’s a new party, but I don’t think it’s just that. Think about when the Republicans rose and where they rose. They were primarily a Western for the time party. They come out of Illinois. They come out of Indiana, Ohio, the Midwest, which was then the old Northwest. Many of them are not yet married or they’re just very new to the new Western states, and they don’t have a lot of established ties. So these groups of young men…

Joanne Freeman:

Clubs.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Clubs, there you go, are in a way a social club or a way to bond. They had just gotten out to those states or territories. They didn’t know a lot of people. Someone says, “Hey, come along. John C. Frémont is going to be talking. Let’s go hear him.” You get there, and you start swaying with the crowd and shouting, and then you go out for some… whatever they were drinking in those days on the frontier. They made memories.

Joanne Freeman:

That becomes not just a one time thing, but that becomes an organized thing. Ultimately, you end up with these Wide Awakes, essentially these clubs of these young men who are wearing military-ish uniforms. They often have lit torches. They march in military formation. So you have this quasi-military-ish Republican group that wasn’t out to make trouble. As a matter of fact, some of them claimed that really, what they were doing was just preserving order, right? Policing the area so that bad things don’t happen, but the military formation in the uniforms had, I think, and again you tell me, but it feels to me like that that encouraged a spirit of camaraderie, and teamness, and masculinity. Right? These are young men fighting a war, right, in a sense together, joined as a team, fighting a political war.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think all that is true. I also want to make the same point I made when we talked about musical instruments before, and that is those torches really matter in the sense that this is an era in most of those towns that doesn’t have lighting at night. So, to be part of a crowd that is actually carrying light, I mean, people go toward the light. I mean, that sounds like a stupid thing nowadays because we’re so…

Joanne Freeman:

No. It would’ve had a huge impact in the dark.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, yeah.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It would’ve given you something to do because otherwise, you’re going to stay home and maybe read by candlelight or by firelight, but there’s not a lot going on at 9:00 at night in Albion, Illinois, and this is something that you could get out with your friends and go do.

Joanne Freeman:

So it’s political, it’s personal, it’s social. You can see why this would catch on, and you can see why the Republicans ultimately deemed this a good thing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that’s really significant about this for many of these younger men is that this was their first real engagement in politics. So, by the time they’re out there voting in the 1840s and especially the 1850s, this is their first vote.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed. It’s their first vote, and many of them considered it their “virgin vote,” “My virgin vote, the first vote I’m giving.” Again, like your assistant, I will remember this, and I will be talking about this to my grandchildren. There’s something about my virgin vote that also is already looking down the pike, is already looking ahead into the future and acknowledging that this moment when you’re casting your first vote matters. It’s the first of many votes. You’re doing something civic-minded. In a sense, you’re also being an adult. So that was how it was understood. That was how people in later years fondly look back and referred to my virgin vote, “What was my virgin vote?” There’s a personal dynamic to it. I’m not even going to go into the sexual dynamic to it, but there’s a personal manly way of thinking about the vote that isn’t just, “I was a good citizen, and I voted.” It’s, “I stepped forward and had my virgin vote.” There’s an emotion to that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And perhaps a lifelong commitment.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So we actually have an account of a virgin vote by Charles Francis Adams, and Charles Francis Adams is one of the Adams family.

Joanne Freeman:

I know you just want to sing when you…

Heather Cox Richardson:

Obvious. Yes, but also…

Joanne Freeman:

John Adams, John Quincy Adams, those Adamses.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. You can’t do them all in order, can you?

Joanne Freeman:

No.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Believe me, I can’t, but I do know that once you know about the Adams family, you can’t go anywhere and not trip over the Adams, a member of the Adamses. There were 645 of them in each… I’m kidding. Totally.

Joanne Freeman:

I know, and people will quote you on that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right.

Joanne Freeman:

“So I’ve got up to 392.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. That’s right. Exactly, but he as late as 1892 was writing an article in a journal called Forum. He was actually writing about the fact that he was backing Grover Cleveland in 1892, which itself is really interesting. But to justify that, he was talking about the fact that his first vote ever was for John C. Frémont in 1856, and that was the first presidential candidate the Republican party ran. Somebody is going to write in and say, “Oh, it’s ‘Frémont.'” Actually, we know that it is “Frémont.”

Joanne Freeman:

Say as the accent, right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, we know it because somebody found a letter in which a man wrote home to his wife, and he had just heard Frémont speak, and he said, “John C. Frémont, it rhymes with Vermont.” So that’s how, Frémont.

Joanne Freeman:

Thank you very much…

Heather Cox Richardson:

Whoever.

Joanne Freeman:

The person who wrote that. Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes. Anyway, Charles Francis Adams wrote about that, and he said, “It was in 1856, the year in which the Republican Party came into existence and in which also James Buchanan was elected president that I cast my first vote. It is needless to say that I did not vote for Mr. Buchanan. My virgin vote was deposited for John C. Frémont, The Pathfinder as we then called him. Never at any time do I remember to have experienced so bitter, a sense of political disappointment and temporary discouragement as when a merciful providence through the result of the Pennsylvania state election of October 1856 saved the young Republican Party from the grave disaster of a premature success.”

Joanne Freeman:

You have these people who are inspired by casting their virgin vote. You have these Wide Awakes who are energized and taking part in the Republican, the rising Republican Party. A logical question is, what kind of an impact did they have? Now, it’s interesting. In 1860, there wasn’t polling of the sort that we talked about last week as a matter of fact here on Now & Then, but what we do know is how many people voted, and turnout was 81.2% of those eligible to vote. That’s apparently the second highest turnout in American history, but according to those who study the Wide Awakes, they don’t necessarily think that this was because the Wide Awakes in great numbers swayed the vote. In fact, what people think is that they whipped up the enthusiasm of other voters, that they got people to pay attention to what was happening. They had energy. They were, literally, in one way or another, walking around with their torches, with their lights, encouraging people to take notice of what was happening.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was cool to be a Republican.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was cool to be a young man, and young women were not part of the Wide Awakes, but they’re certainly not… I mean, some of them are probably staying home, but they’re showing up. They’re admiring the men with their torches. They’re part of these organizations because there’s nothing else to do among other things. So they’re going to show up, and they’re going to be part of that. One of the things that it does or that did, I think, to the Republican Party, which as you say was forming newly, but it was forming out of older groups, is that it drew a generational distinction.

William Henry Seward, for example, who is going to become Lincoln’s secretary of state and was a senator from New York, talked about the implications of the younger generation of the Wide Awakes, and he said, “The reason we didn’t get an honest president in 1856,” that is we got James Buchanan, “was because the old men of the last generation were not wide awake, and the young men of this generation hadn’t got their eyes open. Now, the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep.” That is the people who signed on to the idea of the spread of enslavement and the persistence of American slavery. “The old men are folding their arms and going to sleep, and the young men throughout the land are wide awake.”

Joanne Freeman:

He’s talking about a generational shift. There has been a shift, and now, the mentality of the electorate, particularly on the side of the Republicans is different.

Heather Cox Richardson:

“Our torches flared with turpentine and filled the streets with smoke, and we were sure whate’er might come, secession was a joke.” That’s a Wide Awake song.

Joanne Freeman:

I know. I wasn’t chuckling that secession was a joke, but that is indeed a Wide Awake song. That whole idea of the virgin vote, and the emotional power of that, and the voting power of that was not only in the 1840s. It continued for a period, even after the Civil War, 1876, I believe, had the highest voter turnout of any election in American history, and they’re still talking about the virgin vote and being careful of your virgin vote in that election as well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Then, younger voting drops off, and there’s a number of reasons for that younger voting dropping off and a number of arguments about why that might have happened.

So, at the time, in 1883, we get civil service reform, and civil service reform means that the machine politicians, the bosses of the machines, especially in urban cities, no longer have as much at their disposal jobs to hand to the people who vote for them. So this, for example, is the way that cities like Philadelphia, and Chicago, and New York especially operated, and Philadelphia was a republican city. New York City was a democratic city. So this is just the way the machines worked. They would find jobs for their supporters, and those supporters in turn, getting their job as a ditch digger or whatever, would vote for that party member, and that created, as they call them, these machines where people, if they wanted to become politicians, work their way up in the machine.

Well, at the end of the 19th century, there’s this guy named George Washington Plunkitt who writes series of essays that become collected together in a book called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. It’s famous because he basically says, “Of course, we’re all corrupt. This is the way it’s supposed to work because it ties people to the system when they’re corrupt,” and people always… It’s a great book to teach because it’s so outrageous in so many ways, but he says in that that civil service reform is a curse because, as he says, “I have studied politics and men for 45 years, and I see how things are drifting. Sad indeed is the change that has come over the young men where I try to keep up the fire of patriotism by getting a lot of jobs for my constituents whether Tammany is in or out.”

Tammany is the machine in New York. “The boys and men don’t get excited anymore when they see United States flag or hear The Star-Spangled Banner. They don’t care no more for firecrackers on the 4th of July, and why should they? What’s in it for them? They know that no matter how hard they work for their country in a campaign, the jobs will go to fellows who can tell about the mummies,” that is there was a civil service exam that required you to be able to read and write, and to have achieved a certain level of education, “and the birds stepping on the iron.”

I’m sorry. I can’t help you with that one at all. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but there’s something else that happens in 1890 just seven years after the civil service reform that probably has just as much to do with keeping the youth vote off the street, and that is we get the Australian ballot, the secret ballot, so people have to be able to read, and we get new state constitutions that cut out a lot of voters. In the north especially, they cut out immigrant voters. They cut out Black voters in the South, but they cut out immigrant voters in the North. A lot of those people who get cut out see no point any longer in voting because they can’t read the ballots. Before that, the ballots were color coordinated, and you simply deposited in a voting box. They’re cut out. They literally write the laws in such a way that it hurts the youth and makes it harder for them to turn out.

Joanne Freeman:

If you think about the two things that you just said there, on one hand, you have a ballot that is pulling things, in a way, out of the public eye and putting them into some kind of a system, and you have the political machines again, which are creating a kind of system or institution for how people get involved in and rise in politics. What you’re doing in both cases is working against the independent spirit that pulled these young men into politics. So, for example, in 1909, the social reformer, Jane Addams…

Heather Cox Richardson:

A different one. She’s the only one who’s not related to all the other Adamses.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, yeah. That’s true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

She’s got two Ds in her name. Yeah.

Joanne Freeman:

She’s not one of those Adamses.

Heather Cox Richardson:

All the rest of them are related, except her.

Joanne Freeman:

They are otherwise all related, but her, but she comments on this very factor that the way that things have gone in politics are no longer pulling young people into politics in the same way. She says, “We do little or nothing with this splendid store of youthful ardor and creative enthusiasm. Through its very isolation, it tends to intensify and turn in upon itself, and no direct effort is made to moralize it, to discipline it, to make it operative upon the life of the city. Yet, it is perhaps what American cities need above all else for it is, but too true that democracy, a people ruling, the very name of which the Greeks considered so beautiful, no longer stirs the blood of the American youth and that the real enthusiasm for self-government must be found among the groups of young immigrants who bring over with every ship a new cargo of democratic aspirations.” That’s fascinating.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so one of the things about having a powerful youth vote is that it begins to draw power away from those who hold power and away from the older people who generally have a lot more money than the younger people and tend to write laws and policies in such a way that they preserve the structures within society as they already are rather than doing what, say, the Republicans did with the Wide Awakes, which was, dramatically, to change the US government. So it did in fact serve people who previously had not been included in it. So, by the end of the 19th century, you see young voting falling off and people not seeming to get very excited about it or, at least according to Jane Addams, about American democracy. At least not the native born people. I think it’s important. That idea that the people who are preserving the concept of democracy are the immigrants is so important.

Joanne Freeman:

The people that are coming here and looking for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, that’s right.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, that’s actually really moving.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, that’s a really big deal. So youth voting falls off, and then it comes back.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed, it does twice for a similar logical reason, and that has to do with young people fighting wars. Now, before we plunge into this, let me actually read to you what ends up being the 26th Amendment, and then we’re going to talk about how we get there. Okay? So this is the text of what we’re working towards, 26th Amendment, Section 1. “The right of citizens of the United States who are 18 years of age or older to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of age,” and Section 2, “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” So, there you go. Basically, 18 years and older, that’s who’s going to have the right to vote, but this first becomes, really, a big issue beginning with World War II when you have 18 and 19-year-olds being drafted to fight. Logically enough, that raises the question, if you can be drafted to fight for your country, should you or should you not have the power to actually vote for the country that is asking you to fight?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I love this moment because it is such a key statement about the relationship between government and individuals. If the government literally has the right to take your life, don’t you have a right to have a say in it?

Joanne Freeman:

But, for example, you have in this period Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, and he says point blank what you just said, Heather, “If young men are to be drafted at 18 years of age to fight for their government, they ought to be entitled to vote at 18 years of age for the kind of government for which they are best satisfied to fight.” Pretty logical, pretty straightforward.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So just four days after Congress voted to make 18 and 19-year-olds eligible for the draft, a democratic West Virginia congressman introduced a proposed amendment to the Constitution to lower the voting age, and he talked about why it was so important for that to happen. At one point, he actually testifies before the House Judiciary Committee about why he wanted the amendment, and he talked about a private from Massachusetts who went into the army at 18, he’d become a paratrooper at 19, and he died in North Africa. Then, he talked about another man who was from Marietta, Ohio, who left home at 20, ended up dying on the islands off the coast of Alaska. The reality that you had individual young men giving up their lives for the country that they didn’t have a say in really hit home in an era when so many people were going to war so very young. This really hit home that you were drafting young men to fight old men’s wars.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting about this too, to me, is that on a state level, during this period, there wasn’t a really assertive push for youth suffrage. Between 1942 and 1944, 31 states at least proposed lowering the voting age, although pretty much, they all failed with one exception, which somehow it seems worth mentioning given our politics today. The one exception is Georgia. Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall oversaw the ratification of an amendment to Georgia State Constitution that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and supposedly, that campaign to do that was the first really aggressive use of the slogan, “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote,” by a public official, and Georgia would remain the only state to take that plunge for the next 12 years.

Now, although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt never weighed in on this idea of lowering the voting age, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt came out in support of this amendment in her syndicated newspaper column in early 1943 and continued to offer support for the proposal for years after. She said, “If young men of 18 and 19 are old enough to be trained to fight their country’s battles and to proceed from training to the battlefields, I think we must accept the fact that they are also old enough to know why we fight this war. If that is so, then they are old enough to take part in the political life of their country and to be full citizens with voting powers.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things I love about that is, of course, she had five sons, so she knew where of she spoke. That amendment did not go into effect during World War II, but of course, after the war, President Truman embraced it. But then, equally or perhaps far more importantly, Dwight Eisenhower did. Dwight Eisenhower, of course, had directed the American and Allied Forces in World War II and was really seen in the 1950s as being a great hero and somebody who had been very, very loyal to his soldiers. He said in his annual message to Congress in 1954, January of 1954, “For years, our citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 have, in times of peril, been summoned to fight for America. They should participate in the political process that produces this fateful summons. I urge Congress to propose to the states a constitutional amendment permitting citizens to vote when they reach the age of 18.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now, logically enough, based on what we were just saying, although the question of voting age stalls for a little while, is less at the forefront of things, America’s entry into Vietnam brings it back because once again, we’re at a place where you have soldiers who are younger than 21 beginning to die in Southeast Asia and activists beginning to note this strange reality that these people who are giving their lives for their country can’t vote in their country, can’t vote for what kind of government they want, and thus can’t really vote on what they think about the war that they’re fighting in.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Not only do we have the reality of these young men and women who are nursing, for example, in Vietnam, you also have many of their peers who now are very informed about foreign affairs and are very informed about what they think is wrong with America’s engagement in Vietnam and in Cambodia, and they’re not quiet about it in a way that… In World War I, a lot of the soldiers and people in their peer group didn’t necessarily have a great handle on what was going on. Certainly, in World War II, there was so much going on, it was not like you had a contingent of other college-educated people standing up and saying, “Hey, wait a minute. What’s going on here?” By the way, not to say that the… We know statistically that the people going to fight were not the people necessarily who were in college, but the point is there’s a bunch of other young people saying, “Hey, wait a minute. Why are you sending people like us to go fight in that war when in fact we don’t think we should be in Cambodia anyway, and we’re really not convinced about Vietnam in the first place?”

Joanne Freeman:

So this question about voting age, and the way that it’s bound up with America’s entry into Vietnam, and the fact that, obviously, this is highly politicized, you have… Again, we’re talking about a generational issue, a generation of people who, in many ways, feel empowered and justified to speak up and express what they’re thinking about. As one might imagine in the 1960s, that’s what that era is about. You begin to get a movement of sorts, again, centered around reducing the age to vote. In this case, very often, featuring young people who are pushing as part of this movement. You certainly get initially some popular culture that touches on this. So, for example, in September of 1965, folk singer Barry McGuire did a version of someone else’s song called Eve of Destruction, which hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and it caused a lot of controversy because it says, among other things…

Barry McGuire (archival):

“The Eastern world, it is exploding. Violence flaring, bullets loading. You’re old enough to kill, but not for voting. You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re toting?”

Joanne Freeman:

So it was a widely popular song, and it’s singing about this very controversial continuing issue, which now has really new relevance.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, that’s a lot of relevance in part because by 1968, 29% of the American soldiers who were dying in Vietnam were under 21 years old.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, with Vietnam rising and this issue about how the people who are fighting should also be the people who are voting, there were a lot of different political interests that came together to support the idea of reducing the age to vote. You had the NAACP. You had the young Democrats. You had the young Republicans. In 1969, these young activists seized on this rising interest in reducing the age of the vote and brought their cause to Congress, and there was… In April of 1969, the NAACP sponsored a youth mobilization conference in Washington. It was organized by Carolyn Quillon, and she had actually started her work as an activist protesting segregation in Savannah, Georgia. She moves to this topic and the gathering that she organizes brings together several thousand young people from 33 different states to lobby Congress in support of youth voting rights.

Now, it’s interesting because underlying a lot of what we’re talking about here is the concept of protest, and we’re talking about ’60s culture, and also, I suppose, in many ways, that brings to mind for many people young people with liberal politics protesting. But as I suggested a moment ago by referring to the young Republicans, there were people of all political stripes coming forward for any number of reasons talking about reducing the voting age.

So, for example, in 1968, there was testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on this issue from Jack McDonald of the Young Republican National Federation, and McDonald said, “Lowering the voting age was a way to give conservative youth a political voice and destroy the myth that young people were all disillusioned, and violent, and radical.” He said, “Young America is a voice that says, ‘Work a solid day,” far more than it says, ‘Take an LSD trip.’ It is a voice that urges us to build, man, build rather than burn, baby, burn.” So there is the conservative side of the tracks. On the other hand, you have people on the liberal side of the tracks also pushing for the same kind of change.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In part because of their stance against the Vietnam War.

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly, exactly. In 1970, the US Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments heard people from the NAACP talking about the same issue about reducing the age to vote. One organizer named Philomena Queen said two things that I found particularly moving. She said in front of this Senate Subcommittee, “There are those who say that because of crime and demonstrations, young people are too irresponsible to use the vote wisely. Certainly, no one would ever think of denying all adults the right to vote because an angry mob of blood-thirsty adults destroyed property and showed utter contempt for the safety of innocent school children riding on a school bus in South Carolina.” She’s referring to a racist mob that attacked Black children on a school bus in South Carolina. “Nor because the troops in the army of organized crime are adults, nor because a 45-year-old adult is charged with murder of a 51-year-old business associate.”

So, first, she’s saying, “You would deprive these people of votes, would you?” So, first of all, it’s not necessarily true that the youth are violent, but even if they are, that’s not a reason to take away their vote. She then continues on. First, she says that the age of 21 is both arbitrary and hypocritical. She says there’s no evidence that being 21 “confers instant electoral wisdom on a voter.” She then says another reason why young people deserve to vote, “We see in our society wrongs which we want to make right. We see imperfections that we want to make perfect. We dream of things that should be done, but are not. We dream of things that have never been done and we wonder why not. Most of all, we view all of them as conditions that we want to change, but cannot. You have disarmed us of the most constructive and potent weapon of a democratic system, the vote.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

I love the fact that she herself is not 21 when she does this.

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly. She’s about 20 years of age when she does this. So, now, what’s significant to me in digging around and finding out about Philomena Queen, and Carolyn Quillon, and Diane Nash, all of them, young Black women, younger than 21 who were very engaged in this cause is that when you look at how this fight to change and lower the voting age happened, they’re usually not included in it. They usually don’t appear in the story, and I actually explicitly looked at some formal accounts by government agencies, which I shall not name, and they are celebrating what happened, but none of these women get mentioned, and the NAACP gets glancingly mentioned. I wanted to talk about them today because first of all, her words are remarkably moving, but secondly, it’s part of the protest movement, and the awareness, and the reform-minded people in the 1960s. It’s part of a larger process, and Philomena Queen and these other women really emphasized the ways in which that’s really true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and one of the things that is especially interesting about that is that the way we have remembered the protest movements of the 1960s often focus on individual activism rather than on changing the system, and these are three powerful young women who said exactly what people said in the 19th century, “Give us the damn vote because we can’t change the system until we can vote.” It’s interesting that that’s not something that has made it into our memory of this particular moment.

So Congress goes ahead in 1970 and amends the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with an extension act. It was a Civil Rights Extension Act of 1970, which lowered the voting age, 18, in federal and state elections, but that’s going to present a problem because in our system, states get to determine who can vote in state elections, and so it becomes clear first after they passed this law. Richard Nixon, who’s the president at the time, is concerned and pushes a test case to the Supreme Court to see whether or not this can stand over state laws. The Supreme Court says Congress can’t pass a law changing state voting rules. In fact, you need to pass the constitutional amendment.

Joanne Freeman:

So Congress responded by drafting an amendment that said that states explicitly would be included in this amendment regarding voting rights in addition to the federal government. In March of 1971, the Senate voted 94 to zero in favor of the 26th Amendment. Two weeks later, the House voted 401 to 19 to approve the measure. So the amendment was sent off to the states for ratification, and on June 30th, 1971, Ohio became the 38th state to ratify the 26th Amendment. It became law in 100 days, the fastest ratification of any constitutional amendment to date. A week later on July 5th, 1971, President Nixon certified the amendment in the East Room of the White House. 500 youth choir members called Youth in Concert attended the ceremony and sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic for Nixon.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So after young people get the vote in 1971, there is an assumption that young Americans will be voting for progressive policies, and that is really quickly going to be put to the test, and what they’re going to discover, in fact, is that first big wave of young voters by 1980 is in fact not going to back a Democrat for president. They’re going to back Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan picked up more than 60% of the youth vote in 1984, and what pundits at the time thought was that young people who had grown up through the end of the ’60s and through the 1970s with inflation, and the hostage crisis, and so many of the things that felt unsettling was they wanted a grandfatherly, orderly sort of leader who would restore the kind of stability that they associated with the government.

Again, where we started with this whole episode was the idea that the identities that you laid down young tended to persist, that was precisely true of those young Reagan voters. They maintained their status as Republican voters through decades after that, and one of the reasons that this particular moment is of interest to historians, I think, at least the two at this table, are that we’re seeing a group of young people who have lived through that era, that Reagan era, if you will, that 40-year period and are coming in at the end of it and saying, “Hey, wait a minute. It’s actually not the kind of world that we like very much, and we would like, in fact, to have you paying attention to the things that matter to us.”

Joanne Freeman:

It’s interesting bringing us to the present here is that in many ways, in the kind of crisis-laden moment that we’re in, it’s natural in some ways to be very focused on the present, and on what’s happening, and what needs to happen now, and what’s the next step. But taking us all the way back, Heather, to your assistant at the beginning, when these young voters are stepping forward, they’re thinking about the future, not just the present. They’re thinking about what’s ahead. By definition, that’s where their lives are going to be, and so not only do we have now these young people stepping forward at a moment when they can tell like so many other Americans that important things are happening, important things are being decided, but the message that they’re receiving in response is, “Wow, your stepping forward, in one way or another, really mattered,” and we are at a moment where important decisions are being made, and you indeed have a right to step forward and have an impact on those choices.

It does feel as though, and it will be interesting decades from now to see, but certainly, it feels as though the people who gave their virgin vote at this election or in the elections right around now, that looking ahead in time, they will look back to this moment potentially and think about this as a moment when they felt that their vote mattered, as a moment when they were thinking about bigger implications, as a moment when they were willing to stand in line for six hours to do something that they really cared about.