Uncovering the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the history of the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the minimum voting age in federal and state elections from twenty-one to eighteen. Drawing on a close reading of Congressional documents about the minimum voting age, I offer a typology of the various arguments that were offered for and against a lower voting age between 1942, when the issue first surfaced on the national agenda, and 1971, when the amendment was ratified.

I maintain that the rationales behind eighteen-year-old voting were more varied and complicated than has been generally acknowledged. Commentators have tended to emphasize arguments about synchronizing the minimum draft and voting ages; while this lines of reasoning was undoubtedly a crucial part of the voting age debates, the rhetorical power of the soldier-voter link was limited in some important ways. Beyond the military service angle, advocates of eighteen-year-old voting also asserted, especially during the 1950s and early 1960s, that the voting age should be reduced because contemporary young people were far better educated and politically aware than previous generations had been. Later, during the late 1960s, the idea that eighteen-year-old voting would channel young people’s rising discontent and undermine campus demonstrations gained considerable momentum in the halls of Congress. Finally, advocates made both philosophical and legal arguments that the situation of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds was analogous to that of women and African-Americans in earlier eras.

This work seeks not only to deepen our understanding of the history of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, but also to illuminate the nature of political debate. Eighteen-year-old voting might have been a narrow goal, but the issue nevertheless prompted a lengthy process of justification in which both sides struggled to respond to immediate political events and trends while also wrestling with the inevitable theoretical questions that surfaced in the course of debate. The voting age debates offer a window into this process of political deliberation, which lies at the heart of politics itself.