Let Us Vote! - by Jennifer Frost

About the Book

""Let Us Vote" tells the story of the multifaceted endeavor to achieve youth voting rights in the United States. Over a thirty-year period from World War II to the early 1970s, Americans, old and young, Democrat and Republican, in politics and culture built a movement and momentum for the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution. This amendment gave the right to vote to 18, 19, and 20-year olds in 1971, and it was the last time that the United States significantly expanded voting rights. The 26th Amendment means a major expansion of American democracy came right end of "the sixties." Progress toward achieving youth suffrage built on the decade's many developments, most importantly the movement and legislation for African-American civil and voting rights. This story illuminates the process of achieving political change, with the convergence of "top-down" initiative and "bottom-up" mobilization, coalition-building, multiple arguments, and strategic flexibility leading to success. Supporters came from a broad, bipartisan group of Americans and achieved a constitutional amendment that benefited every constituency in the nation. With the 50th anniversary of this important constitutional amendment this year [2021], and as calls for lowering the voting age to sixteen multiply today within the context of climate crisis, gun violence, and police brutality-all of which affect young people disproportionately-the 26th Amendment deserves our attention, application, and appreciation"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Frost explores the struggle for youth voting rights in the United States. Her comprehensive study of youth suffrage's major players ... 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."-- "Library Journal"

"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, author of Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s

"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"

"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, author of Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s

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.