As Mason once said to Dixon, “You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”
Out of curiousity, are there areas that have the equivalent of learner’s permits for drinking? As far as I know, there’s a cut-off - before a certain age you cannot drink at all and after that age you can drink whatever, wherever, and as much as you want. Has any state ever experimented with graduated drinking ages - for example, allowing home consumption of beer or wine at 18, public consumption at 20, and the drinking of distilled liquors at 21?
Yes, I have an old layman’s guide to law book from circa 1970. It lists alls sorts of state by state charts for things like drinking, voting, marriage, etc. Sadly it’s in storage and I don’t remember specifics off-hand (other than Georgia started letting 18 yrs vote during WWII). Some states did have different ages for beer/wine/spirits and if I remember correctly at least one had different drinking ages for men and women (& it was lower for women).
Ok, it’s not a US state, but we have that. Parents can give their children alcohol at any age. At 16 you can drink beer, wine and everything else that isn’t distilled (or contains a non-trivial amount of distilled alcohol) on your own. At 18 you can drink everything else.
:smack: You are quite right. I am well aware the Third Millennium began 1/1/2001. IIRC I wrote a letter to the editor chiding the St Louis Post-Dispatch in 1997 regarding the correct first day of the upcoming new millennium.
Not sure where my reasoning got off-track, as a check I went through in my mind the whole “baby’s first year is from birth to first birthday” and “the 19th Century is the 1800s” reasonings. Oh well, :o
Upon Further Review, twenty-one is three equal periods of seven years: Seven being the age of reason- knowing right from wrong; then add another 7 years and you get Fourteen, being the age of consent [around the onset of puberty in earlier times]; then add another 7 years and you get Twenty-one-- the age of majority.
It’s the case in many states that a parent can purchase and serve alchohol to their child. Some places it’s only legal at home, and others the parent can buy for the child in a bar. We had a thread on it a while back, but I’m not having any Search luck right now.
In some places the age of majority used to be different for the sexes age 18 for female and age 21 for male.
The 26th amendment from what I can remember reading was a reaction to the Vietnam area when the federal government came to agree people ought to have a voice IF they are being sent to die. So the federal government said anyone 18 or older could vote in FEDERAL elections.
Most of the states didn’t want the hassle of having two election rolls, one for those 18-20 who could only vote for federal and one for those over 21 who could vote for everyone, so the 26th amendment giving everyone the vote 18+ was cheaper and easier.
Indeed I believe it was the quickest amendment passed.
Most states also lowered their drinking age below 21 after the 26th amendment passed. When they saw it became a problem the upped the age again. Some like Wiscosin, had more trouble with the under 21 set from Illinois crossing over and drinking, than they did with their own under 21 population.
The historical age of majority in Colonial America was 21 for men. The revision to 18 was very recent. The historical reason for that age goes back to British common law, unless I’m mistaken, which would have its roots in traditions that are 800–1000 years old. You could probably trace it back farther, to Chivalric traditions, but I think 800+ yeas of tradition is enough to explain the modern usage of that age.
I remember reading that there was some debate about suffrage among the founding fathers. Some wanted the age of majority to be older (25) and have a requirement of being a landowner in order to vote. The reasoning was that landowning meant that you had a vested interest in the well-being of the country, and the greater age along with the seasoning of holding property would mean that those making the decisions were more likely to be responsible. Advocates of tradition won out over those wanting reform, so the age of majority remained at the historical age of twenty-one. The requirement to own land stood though, and in fact “universal” suffrage (if you were a white male) didn’t go through until 1870.
I heard the 21 rule had to do with the male. specifically the liver doesnt reach full development until then.
Where? In Spain it was not unusual to be a knight at 16. You had to have been trained and you had to be able to pay for your own horse and squire. If you got to 20 and hadn’t made it, you probably were not going to ever make it.
Norweigan historical majority ages for comparison purposes:
Magnus Law-mender’s unified Norwegian laws of 1274 set the age limit for participation in regional parliament to 20. In 1619 the age of majority was raised to 25. In 1869 it was lowered to 21, 100 years later down to 20, and then to 18 in 1979.
There used to be something along that line in Ohio. At 18, you could purchase and drink “low beer” legally, which was beer with alcohol content below a certain percentage. (Sorry, I don’t recall the percentage.) Hard liquor and other things were not legal for purchase until 21. My siblings turned 18 under this rule, and I, the tacked-on baby, did so under the 21 for all alcohol rule. So it changed sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.
I’ve never heard it referred to as a drinker’s learning permit, though, and the concept tickles me. 
It’s because in 13th century England, people were knighted at 21.
There was very little debate at the federal Constitutional Convention, because there was a consensus that suffrage requirements should be left to the states.
Most states did indeed have a land-owning requirement during the early republic. These were gradually repealed, on a state-by-state basis, during the early Nineteenth Century. I’m not aware of any debate at the state level over raising the age of suffrage to 25, nor of any state actually doing so.
Georgia was the first state to lower its voting age to 18, during World War II.
The “Regents Prep” link is wrong, so the regents aren’t “prepping” anyone very well. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) didn’t require “universal male suffrage”; it merely forbade states from discriminating on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. As I say, most (if not all) states had already repealed property qualifications by this time, but some New England states imposed literacy tests to make it more difficult for immigrants to vote, and in the ensuing decades Southern states did so to make it more difficult for African Americans and poor whites to vote.
In 1970, the federal government attempted to enfracnhise 18-year-olds in federal elections by statute. This would have required states which maintained a higher voting age to maintain dual rolls. However, the law was struck down as unconstitutional in Oregon v. Mitchell.
At about the same time, Congress sent the proposed Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the states, which enfranchised 18-year-olds in all elections, federal and state. This was duly ratified in 1971 and created no dual-voter-roll problems.
I hate to do this to a guest, but…
Cite?
That really sounds like it’s… well crap. Even if the average age the liver was fully mature was 21 (which is fairly late I’d think), this would not have been known when the laws were passed nor is that a reasonable thing to pass a law on. Just like age of consent laws have very little to do with age of puberty.
According to Blackstone , it’s an arbitary age that varied from country to country. There’s a general consensus in western societies that young people are not fully capable and need to be under the tutelage of a parent or other adult until a certain point. There’s usually a graduated approach, with a young person in their teens gradually gaining more legal rights, until a time finally comes when the young person is considered a full adult. The exact age at which that transition to full adulthood occurs varies from society to society:
So he speculates that the age of 21 dates back to the ancient Saxons. Note as well that in this graduated system, the most important thing that marked full age was the ability to dispose of one’s lands. Political decisions (like swearing allegiance) and personal decisons (like marriage), or minor economic decisions (like the ability to dispose of personal property), were not nearly as important as the ability to alienate land. Land was the single most important form of property in a feudal/agrarian society, so the power to alienate land was the marker of full age. Nothing to do with schooling, drinking ages, or the maturity of the liver.
Or, to summarise, what Little Nemo said.
Minor nitpcik: there’s no such thing as “British common law.” The common law evolved in England and was applied to Wales and Ireland, but Scotland had its own legal system, based on a combination of Scots feudal law and the Roman civil law.
This is true in California per this site. (pdf)
I’ve never personally had a problem with pouring my (almost 20 year old) son a glass or two of wine while dining out. I’ve never had a problem with pouring a glass for my almost 16 year old son either, but apparently I was breaking the law by doing so according to that site. Looks like 18 or over is the ‘interim’ age.