1st Edition
Achieving the 26th Amendment A History with Primary Sources
This book is a collection of primary source documents and analysis that illustrates the forgotten history of the fight to lower the voting age to eighteen in the twentieth-century United States.
Proposed, passed, and ratified in 1971, the 26th Amendment gave the right to vote to 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds and prohibited discrimination in voting “on account of age.” Recognizing young Americans as first-class citizens with a political voice, it was the last time the United States extended voting rights to a new group. From the early 1940s to the early 1970s, Americans debated the merits of a younger voting age and built a movement across age, party, and regional differences for the 26th Amendment. The struggle for youth suffrage intersected with key events and developments during these years, such as World War II, the Vietnam War, the African American movement for civil and voting rights, the baby boom and youth activism. With historical images and excerpts from government documents, pamphlets, organizational and personal collections, mainstream and campus newspapers, and magazines, this book presents a rich portrait of the struggle for youth enfranchisement.
Achieving the 26th Amendment: A History with Primary Sources is an ideal resource for students and professors in twentieth-century United States history, civics and government, and social movements and activism.
Introduction "Franchise of Freedom": A Brief History 1. Early Efforts and Discussions 2. Polling the Public 3. Arguments For & Against Youth Suffrage 4. Youth Activism, Politics, and Culture in the 1960s 5. Strategies for Winning Youth Suffrage 6. Coalition Organizing for Vote 18 7. Congress and the 26th Amendment 8. America’s New Constituency
Biography
Rebecca de Schweinitz is an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University, USA. The author of If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (2009), her research focuses on young people, and ideas about them, in American politics and culture.
Jennifer Frost is a historian of 20th century United States society, politics, and culture at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author, among other books, of “Let Us Vote!”: Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment (2021).
"Achieving the 26th Amendment offers a vital resource for the study of youth, democracy, and social change. Bringing together a thought-provoking collection of primary documents with insightful introductory essays, this volume enables readers to think for themselves about the coalition building, political arguments, and well-organized opposition that shaped the last major expansion of the US electorate: the enfranchisement of eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old citizens in 1971. Perfect for use in college or high school classrooms, this book opens a window for students to consider the past and future of the youth vote."
Corinne Field, University of Virginia
"The story of lowering the voting age to 18 usually goes untold, but Achieving the 26th Amendment gives voice to this human, political, and cultural struggle for young people’s participation. Drawing from diverse sources, unexpected alliances, and forgotten fights, this reader gives students and historians the tools to unpack, understand, and debate a momentous change in our democracy. de Schweinitz and Frost fill in one of our greatest blindspots in our understanding of how reform happens in American political history. The evidence, context, and analysis they provide uncovers a hidden hinge in the development of youth politics, turning one of the most forgotten moments in that history into one of the clearest and most compelling."
Jon Grinspan, National Museum of American History
"Achieving the 26th Amendment: A History with Primary Sources provides a remarkable history of the youth franchise movement that is central to our democracy—a history that has been largely overlooked. This reader masterfully illuminates the hard-fought measures behind the 26th Amendment and sends a critical message that we must not forget nor take youth for granted in our struggle to actualize democratic ideals. Historians Rebecca de Schweinitz and Jennifer Frost provide what has been missing in our libraries, at our local high schools, universities, and our personal collections. Not only does Achieving the 26th Amendment improve our knowledge of history, this impressive collection of sources also provides us the tools to empower youth and youth advocates today."
Jon Hale, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Recent author of A New Kind of Youth and The Choice We Face
"Achieving the Twenty-Sixth Amendment: A Reader offers a robust collection of primary sources from the Second Reconstruction documenting how young people, with the support of older generations, finally turned to their own enfranchisement at the end of this critical period of American constitutionalism. Rebecca de Schweinitz and Jennifer Frost masterfully source and combine materials from the era and decades prior to showcase often-overlooked and thought-provoking frames of reference -- including published essays and quotes by young people, posters and programs by both political parties, governmental reports, public opinion polls, and minutes and records from the wide coalition of organizations behind the push for ratification -- to demonstrate the nearly unanimous popular consensus which grew to recognize that youth political participation is critical for the protection of democracy. All together, these materials offer a teaching instrument of the people-powered process of constitutional ratification, and a historical blueprint from which we can continue to draw to fulfill the promise of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment."
Yael Bromberg, Esq., Constitutional rights litigator and legal scholar; Author of Youth Voting Rights and the Unfulfilled Promise of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and The Future is Unwritten: Reclaiming the Twenty-Sixth Amendment; Special Counsel & Strategic Advisor, The Andrew Goodman Foundation; Lecturer, Rutgers School of Law
