Did The 26th Amendment Fail, Part 1: The Tumult of the 1960s and The Ease of Passage of the Amendment

 

 

The fundamental right at the heart of any democracy is the right to suffrage. In America there has always been immense debate as to who is qualified to have it. The Founders themselves had a long debate over whether direct democracy was a good idea and it took thirty-five years from the time of George Washington for Americans to have a wide say in their choice for President in 1824.

Over the next century various amendments were added to the Constitution that enshrined the right to vote for citizens of the country who were not enfranchised. It was usually a struggle of decades, violence and bloodshed were required and generations frequently died without realized the fruits of their victory. Before she passed in 1906 Susan B. Anthony said that she had spent 60 years fighting for a little liberty “and then to die without seems so cruel.” It was another thirteen years before the ratification of the 19^th amendment.

Frequently their was division among the allegiances that were made. Anthony’s colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an abolitionist and worked tirelessly to with her colleagues to bring about the end of slavery. But after the end of the Civil War the suffragist movement fractured when Frederick Douglass a long time ally chose to argue from suffrage for his brethren in bondage rather than his white female allies. African-Americans did receive the right to vote in 1870 but the fracture between the two groups may have cost the suffragists decades in the struggle.

By comparison the struggle to lower the voting age from 1941 to 1971 was almost painless. It began to receive support as early as 1941 and became a topic of interest at the local level almost immediately. The Second World War had been a major factor in this. During that time the slogan “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” was used by young people. That slogan took on a new ferocity during the war in Vietnam.

The movement worked in conjunction with the Civil rights movement and other movements of political change during the 1950s and 1960s. It received bipartisan support very quickly and while opposition did exist it passed faster than any constitutional amendment in our nation’s history and with bipartisan support. Less then three months after it left the legislature by the required ¾ of the numbers of states. Yet unlike with every other major act to enshrine the right of suffrage to a certain group, from the start of its passage to the present day the people affected by it the most have never embraced it the same way. Indeed with each subsequent election for the twentieth percentage dropped among those effected precipitously. By the end of the 20^th century less than a third of all 18-24 voters had participated in the Presidential election. During the 1960s marchers had claimed that if they were old enough to fight they were old enough to vote. Based on the historical evidence, they showed little interest in doing either.

In his State of the Union Address in 1954 President Eisenhower became the first President to publicly supporting prohibiting age-based denial of suffrage for those eighteen older. The following year the Kentucky legislature approved measures to lover the voting age to 18, the second state after Georgia to do so. That both of these states had no problem with 18 year olds voting but the idea of African-Americans attending school is one of many ironies that involve the 26^th amendment.

Not long after he ascended to the White House, the President’s Commission on Registration and Voting Participation encouraged LBJ to lower the voting age to 18. This happened not long after Johnson proposed the passage of the Civil Rights Act before Congress.

During this relative short period of time all three branches of Congress worked together to bring more civil rights to more underrepresented groups than at any time in the nation’s history. Not coincidentally during this same period saw the birth of two divergent movements in the American political system. The conservative movement, initially represented by Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond, would more or less gamble on the idea that many Americans thought the country was moving too fast compared to the past. The leftist wing would be guided by two contradictory and seemingly conflicting impulses: that the country was not moving nearly fast enough and the idea that somehow the country had failed them.

The latter impulses found the most traction as America increasingly turned against the War in Vietnam. In that movement one finds what could be called the Lost Cause of the counterculture which among that generation has held as much sway as that of the Confederacy did in the South a century earlier, only in this case the delusion has been far more widespread through academia and Hollywood.

In the prevalent interpretation the student movement were protesting against a government that was lying to them about the war in Vietnam and they were engaging in a battle for the conscience of America in which ‘the system’ won. The interpretation held by the right – particularly the conservative movement that Nixon and Reagan led – this movement was led primarily by a bunch of spoiled children of privilege who were spitting on everything their parents had fought for all their lives. The evils of Richard Nixon and the lies about Vietnam have led the left’s interpretation to win the argument but there is as much truth now as there is then to the right’s interpretation.

During this same period one notes a radical shift in political activism on the side of the left. From the abolitionist movement to the progressive movement all the way down to the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, activism was built on demonstration combined with winning over the people who counted – elected officials. These struggles frequently involved violence but more often by its opponents and were built on winning the hearts and minds of the nation.

The student movement saw a decided shift to what I called performative activism. These involved marches, campus take over and in the case of the March on Washington, an attempt to levitate the Pentagon for the purpose of raising awareness alone. The anti-establishment movement, which followed a similar ideology of William Lloyd Garrison, argued the system was so fundamentally corrupt that attempting to change it through political means was pointless even if young people had the vote in the first place. The marches became louder, the protests became more violent and the demands were vague if non-existent. It is unclear if the Abbie Hoffmans and Tom Hayden’s of the world had any clear idea what kind of change they were demanding now and how these demonstrations were supposed to achieve it. It is unclear if these protestors truly believe that screaming names at the people in charge and blaming them for the problems in the world today was going to convince them to join them on the ramparts; the idea that they could somehow overthrow the entire government – which controlled the police force, military and financed the very colleges which the students now considered part of the problem – genuinely seems like the kind of thing only people smoking so much drugs could believe possible.

And yet the myth persists among this cause that they were this close to something and then the system failed them. It never seems to have crossed the collective consciousness of the left, then or now, that the whole world heard what they had to say loud and clear and didn’t agree with it. Many did believe in the failures in Vietnam in the lead up to the 1968 election. Two months after saying he would not stand for another term, Johnson proposed an immediate national grant of suffrage to the very people who were chanting: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” There is no record of whether those students knew this or if it made any difference in their opinions about being granted this recognition.

By contrast to the turmoil on the streets the movement to grant voting rights to eighteen year olds was one of the most painless and met with the least objection in our nation’s history to that point. In 1970 Ted Kennedy proposed amending the Voting Rights act to lower the voting age nationally. On June 22^nd of that year, President Nixon signed an extension of the Voting Rights that required the voting age to be 19 in all federal, state and local elections. Nixon admitted he had misgivings about the constitutionality of that part but he instructed John Mitchell to cooperate in a swift court test of this process.

Richard Nixon and Ted Kennedy had what was for them a relatively civil disagreement about this fact. Kennedy argued that if Congress acted to enforce the 14^th amendment but passing a law declaring that a type of state law discriminates against a ‘certain class of persons’ the Supreme Court would led the law stand if the justice could perceive a bias. In a letter to the Speaker and other house leaders Nixon asserted the issue was not whether the voting age should be lowest but how. Nixon was afraid that if age was used as a parameter of discrimination the concept would be overstretched and argued about the disaster of overturning the Voting rights act.

In Oregon vs. Mitchell the court upheld Section 302 that lowered the voting age in Federal elections by a 5-4 margin. In a separate 5-4 ruling the court held it was unconstitutional in state and local elections. Justices Douglas, Brennan, Marshall and White agreed it was constitutional on both counts while Justice Black agreed it was constitutional for federal elections but not local and state.

There was compared to other voting rights acts relatively little opposition. Emmanuel Celler, one of the biggest forces behind the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, insisted that youth lacked the ‘good judgment’ essential to good citizenship. Some academics argued that the ‘exaggerated reliance on higher education as well equated technological savvy with responsibility to intelligence were being used as an argument for voting. Tellingly he argued that common sense and the capacity to understand the political system grounded voting age restrictions. But by that point Birch Bayh, head of the subcommittee on constitutional amendments had begun hearings on extending voting rights. He concluded most states could not change their state constitutions in time for the 1972 election, mandating national action to avoid chaos at the polls.

On March 2, 1971 Bayh’s subcommittee and the House Judiciary Committee approved the proposed amendment to lower the voting age to 18 for all elections. Three weeks later it had passed both houses of Congress, the Senate unanimously and with only 19 Congressman voting in opposition. By June 30, it had been passed by the requisite 38 state legislatures and on July 5^th Nixon signed into law.

Besides from the argument by Celler there was no real opposition. There were no filibusters on the Senate Floor as had been the case with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and no equivalent of Phyllis Schlafly to stop it as their would be with the ERA at the end of the decade. George Wallace, who had done everything in his power to break up marches in Selma, went out of his way to argue that Alabama had been the official state to put it into law. And Nixon, who the counterculture considered public enemy number one and who had to consider that his reelection would be imperiled by an onslaught of young voters, talked about his confidence in the youth of America during the signing ceremony:

“…I sense that we can have confidence that America’s new voters, America’s young generation, will provide what America needs as we approach our bicentennial, not just strength and not just wealth but the ‘Spirit of ‘76’, a spirit of moral courage, a spirit of high idealism in which we believe in the American dream, but in which we realize that the American dream can never be fulfilled until every American has an equal chance to fulfill it in their own life.”

Considering the man who said it, one is inclined to take it with a grain of salt. But the election of 1972 was fast approaching and during that election it showed its first real test of young Americans electoral power.

In the next article I will look at how George McGovern’s resonance with the youth movement completely failed to lift him to the White House despite being in theory everything both they and the New Left wanted in a President.