Photo: Ella Haddix, first 18-year-old to register to vote in the US in 1971. Here she speaks to high school students in 2006 about the importance of the 26th amendment, giving them the right to vote.

I came of age in the late 1960’s. I grew up with Republican parents, and until I was about sixteen, I believed the “Grand Ole Party” was the better one. But my parents were Eisenhower Republicans; Eisenhower, who cautioned against nuclear arsenals, and also believed in racial integration, but did nothing to foster it. He had a hands-off peacetime approach to his presidency, supporting the status quo of the very robust post-WWII economy, and trying to stay out of political controversy. He could have done more to support racial relations and to have spoken out against the witch hunt of Senator Joe McCarthy, a hunt and harassment of anyone McCarthy thought was too far to the left, which lasted roughly a decade from the late forties through the late fifties. But he didn’t. So many people, probably including my parents, didn’t realize that he was almost a liberal Republican. In any case, he was a moderate, and I believe my father may have been as well. My mother was Republican because my dad was.

(She always introduced herself as Mrs. Allen, not Frances, even long after my dad died. Most women in the early twentieth century United States considered themselves almost grateful appendages to their husbands. It’s hard to imagine now but being part of the same political party as one’s husband was expected. I imagine a lot of women didn’t even think about politics until they were able to vote, which wasn’t until age twenty-one. And this may not have held true for better educated women who had an interest in politics. But even First Ladies in the last few decades have had to keep their mouths shut many times when they would have preferred to speak out.)

So that was my background. Then of course the Vietnam War escalated in the late sixties. There was a draft in operation, as their had been in WWII, and boys had to register with the draft board on their eighteenth birthday. At first, it was considered traitorous to avoid the draft; our troops in southeast Asia were supposedly fighting the threat of communism, easy to promote after McCarthy’s claims. Public opinion had been with the government’s public stance on Vietnam, especially when Johnson was president and the dire loss of troops and the truth that we were losing that war were kept from the public. At least until Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine officer working for the State Department, worked on a report with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara which proved the war unwinnable; Ellsberg leaked the report in 1971 and was convicted under the espionage act. He served four months in prison until the verdict was overturned, with the government cited as having engaged in gross misconduct (referring to keeping the impossibility of winning the war a top secret from the public).

Because I had friends and a boyfriend in the late sixties who were in danger of becoming casualties of this war we couldn’t relate to, when it became evident that it wasn’t clear what we were fighting for, I worked on the primary campaign of anti-war candidate Eugene McGovern in 1968. None of us young college kids who went to his rallies and tried to get the word out were able to vote. We felt that this was grossly unfair, that so many young men who could not vote were being sent to die… as had partly been the case during World War II as well. But in that war, the terror of Nazi Germany and the US itself being attacked by Japan finally led us to take some responsibility for the freedom of other countries, and that was a war it was imperative to win.

McGovern didn’t get the nomination, and I couldn’t vote for Humphrey in November, 1968, because I didn’t turn twenty-one until a month later.

Eleanor Roosevelt had first proposed lowering the voting age in 1940, Eisenhower had supported the lower age in 1954, and even President Richard Nixon was all for it, which caused a great deal of controversy. At last, two Democratic senators from West Virginia and Indiana drafted what became the 26th amendment to the Constitution, which passed in July of 1971, after the Ellsberg leak, allowing all people eighteen years of age or older to vote.

Today when I hear that people have not voted, especially young people, I feel like telling them that some of my friends died so that they could vote. This may sound high-handed, but it’s essentially true. Over 58,000 US servicemen died in the Vietnam War. Nearly 12,000 of them were under age twenty. One was only fifteen. If they had been able to vote and tell their legislators they didn’t understand the value of that war… well, some of them might still be alive and have been able to live normal lives like the rest of us. This may be true for WWII as well, but that war saved lives after too many were lost due to one fanatical man’s prejudice and his being able to whip up frenzy in a population troubled by inflation and a poor economy. He was voted in. And then German citizens were sorry, but not enough of them and not soon enough.

Is this beginning to sound a little too familiar?

One vote does matter. We have a right to vote, and live in a country with the long-standing privilege of making our will known with the power of the vote.

We have men in the white house who want to limit or even take away that fundamental aspect of democracy. We have three branches of government that are meant to check each other so that no one branch has too much power. A megalomaniac and his cronies want to change our country into an authoritarian state.

It is time to speak out, even if you have never felt you needed to or could do this before. It is time to tell your legislators that you will not tolerate this, and you will not vote for them if they fall lockstep behind the current president.

…before we lose the right to vote, one that was hard won by women, by people of color, and by young adults.