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Buttons from the 1972 election promote first-time voters. (Photo courtesy Division of Political and Military History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)
The Voting Rights Act of 1970, which extended voting rights for 18- to 21-year-olds, went before the Supreme Court in December of that year. The measure came out of the Vietnam War, with its military draft of 18-year-old men, and the slogan of support, “Old enough to die, old enough to vote.”
A 5-4 ruling determined the law was applicable only to federal elections and thus required a constitutional amendment. On July 1, 1971, the U.S. Congress approved the 26th Amendment, and within less than three months, the legislation moved from Congressional approval to ratification by 38 states in record time.
Virginia ratified the decision on July 8, 1971.
An editorialist for the Commonwealth Times, Virginia Commonwealth University’s student newspaper, summarized the impending 1972 presidential election.
It was a dramatic political year when the apparent Democratic front-runner, U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, dropped out of the race prior to the convention. Muskie’s rising profile was blunted following a forged letter in which he allegedly insulted French-Canadians in Maine. A subsequent newspaper article accused Muskie’s wife, Jane, of racism and alcoholism — unfounded allegations created by Republican opposition. Some thought photographs of Muskie’s subsequent impassioned speech during a Manchester, New Hampshire, snowstorm showed him crying.
Democratic hopeful and Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s segregationist-fueled campaign ended with an assassination attempt that left him paralyzed. Wallace’s departure opened a wedge in the electorate that the Republicans sought to exploit.
U.S. Sen. George McGovern (D-South Dakota), the Commonwealth Times writer observed, “captured his party’s nomination in an innovative and open convention.”
This somewhat simplified the situation. McGovern, not known by many outside of Washington, D.C., didn’t rise at first as the ideal candidate. The editorial continued, “With the newly franchised voting 18-21 year olds and the conflict in Vietnam as his main theme to unseat a president who has failed in four years to bring a settlement to the Southeast Asia situation, McGovern, it seemed, would have his campaign work cut out for him.”
After the April 1972 Massachusetts primary, a column by journalist Robert Novak quoted an unnamed Democratic senator describing McGovern as representing amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, abortion rights and the legalization of marijuana. This, too, gave Republicans ammunition to use against McGovern, painting him as supporting drug use (his official stance went only so far as decriminalizing marijuana) and abortion, though McGovern’s campaign stated that abortion should be regulated by individual states. McGovern favored amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, but as The New Republic’s Timothy Noah pointed out in 2012, prior to the ’72 election, so had Nixon. The Republicans condemned McGovern as standing for “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.”
After the Voting Rights Act was passed, The Richmond News Leader reported that registrar Alice Lynch was not overwhelmed by 18- to 20-year-olds seeking to register to vote. She explained that only 400 voters under age 21 had registered from the year’s start, including an estimated 100 college students spread between VCU, the University of Richmond and Virginia Union University. She expected a marked increase in registrations in the upcoming presidential election year.
A flyer designed by Terry Rea for a September 1972 McGovern fundraiser at the Biograph Theatre (Photo courtesy Terry Rea)
During summer 1972 came revelations about the mental health of McGovern’s running mate, U.S. Sen Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. The senator wasn’t the first choice for vice president; an illustrious roster of refusals extended from Sen. Edward Kennedy to Rep. Shirley Chisholm. Kennedy carried liability as the driver during the 1969 Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, car accident that killed his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. Chisholm waged a vigorous and historic primary campaign and sought to block McGovern’s nomination.
McGovern and Eagleton didn’t know each other well. He neglected to inform McGovern that he’d undergone electroshock treatments for clinical depression. The campaign concluded that given the tenor of the times and the incumbency of President Richard Nixon, Eagleton needed to go. Republicans used the Eagleton revelation as a criticism of McGovern’s poor decision-making. (In 2007, Robert Novak revealed that the “Acid, Amnesty, Abortion” canard stemmed from Eagleton prior to his VP selection.)
Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity, stepped into the vice-presidential candidacy on Aug. 8, 1972. The husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the brother-in-law of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, Shriver burnished the campaign for some voters, but for others he was a liability.
On Sept. 13, the 8-month-old Biograph Theatre repertory cinema at 814 W. Grace St., managed by 24-year-old artist and writer Terry Rea, hosted a fundraiser for the McGovern campaign. Between two showings of the satirical documentary “Millhouse,” about Nixon’s political career from 1946 to 1968, speakers, including state Sen. Lawrence Douglas Wilder, advocated for McGovern. Wilder declared, “Who in good conscience could allow children, women and defenseless men to be unmercifully bombed? Only Richard Nixon.”
The measure came out of the Vietnam War, with its military draft of 18-year-old men, and the slogan of support, “Old enough to die, old enough to vote.”
Two days later, the News Leader’s Steve Row reported that 5,747 people between the ages of 18 and 21 had registered to vote, out of a total of 110,788. Registrar Lynch further detailed that about 16,000 18- to 21-year-olds lived in Richmond. The greatest number of registrations came from Bon Air, the Fan and Church Hill. She predicted a jump in absentee ballots, from the 2,000 received in 1968 to perhaps 8,000 in 1972. In Chesterfield County, out of 31,500 registered voters, 1,451 fit the youth profile. The Henrico total came to 74,875 registered voters, with 4,593 of them ages 18 to 21.
Richmonder Patricia Stansbury recently recalled visiting the McGovern headquarters on Harrison Street behind the Hard Times music venue while she was a VCU student.
“I was concerned about things like war and violence in the world,” she says. “We sat around in the Hibbs building and talked politics.”
She cast her first vote in 1972 with a pencil she used to darken a circle.
On election night, Richmond gave Nixon 46,244 votes, and McGovern took 33,055. John Schmitz of the American Party garnered 19,721 votes.
The country chose Nixon for a second term with 18 million votes more than McGovern, who carried only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. Nixon walked away with 520 electoral votes, the sixth-largest margin in U.S. electoral history. Part of that win came from the voting-rights amendment that he supported, as Nixon connected to a substantial portion of the 11 million newly minted voters who didn’t attend rallies, leaned to the right and supported the Vietnam War.
Stansbury reflects on the result that disappointed her and what came after. “You get to a place when you’re voting, and you’re faced with a dichotomy instead of a wide range of choices,” she says. “So politics has become polarized.”
