Charles and the 26th Amendment
Few people living today have successfully campaigned for the adoption of a Constitutional amendment. That’s because so few proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the hallowed document that established our democratic form of government, have ever passed.
But Kansas U.S. Senate Exploratory candidate Charles Schollenberger can truthfully say that he successfully worked for the passage of a U.S. Constitutional amendment.
Schollenberger started campaigning for the enactment of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, when he was age 16. Schollenberger had been involved in student government and was impressed by the argument, “Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote.”
At the time young men who reached 18 were being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. It seemed wrong to Schollenberger that while these young men could be required to fight and die for their country, they didn’t have a right to vote for those who made such policies.
He embarked on a campaign to publicize the issue, writing a column in favor of the 18- year-old vote in his community’s weekly newspaper, and working with his local state representative to promote the issue.
He even persuaded his father to drive him three hours south of where he then lived, to the Ohio State Capitol, to testify on the issue. On March 18, 1969, eight days before his seventeeth birthday, Schollenberger testified to the Ohio House of Representatives State Government Committee in Columbus, Ohio.
When a subsequent state initiative to lower the voting age to18 failed at the polls, Schollenberger didn’t give up. He joined efforts to lower the voting age to 19, forming a local chapter of “Volunteers for Vote 19” in November 1969, which was headquartered in an empty local storefront.
Schollenberger, then student body president of his high school, arranged a high school assembly on the topic with local legislators speaking pro and con, and even arranged for local students to appear with these legislators on Cleveland, Ohio, television to promote the issue.
After Ohio passed the 19-year-old vote, Schollenberger cast his first vote as a nineteen year old in November 1971. Subsequently his efforts were truly crowned with success when Ohio ratified the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on June 30, 1971, lowering the voting age nationally to 18.
“Being involved in the successful passage of the 26th Amendment was the proudest achievement in my life,” Schollenberger said later. “It enfranchised a whole new generation of voters with the power to change our government through the ballot box.”
Schollenberger admits that he was later discouraged when many young people failed to vote between 1971 and 2008. But he felt redeemed when a massive interest in the presidential election of 2008 mobilized millions of young people around the country to register and vote. It resulted in the election of the nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, in November 2008.
“Most election analysts agree,” Schollenberger says, “that the single most important factor in President Obama’s election was the massive support that he received from younger voters. Without it, he probably wouldn’t have won.”
So some 37 years after the initial passage of the 18-year-old-vote, young voters had finally spoken, and it changed the government. “I can’t tell you how proud that made me,” Schollenberger said.
(The black-and-white picture that you see at the top of this page is President Richard M. Nixon signing the 26th Amendment into law on July 5, 1971).
