In November 1939 there was that odd poll of Princeton University undergrads–as educated an American student bunch as there was at the time–ranking Hitler “the greatest living person,” ahead of Einstein, who’d taken refuge from Hitler at Princeton, and FDR.
Five years later the New York Times’s Benjamin Fine won a Pulitzer Prize for a series detailing how ignorant of their own nation’s history college freshmen across the country were (the same year Ernie Pyle won a Pulitzer for telling the stories of GIs dying in defense of that ignorance). A large majority of the 7,000 students surveyed couldn’t identify Lincoln, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson or Theodore Roosevelt.
They didn’t know much about FDR either, even though he’d been president for 12 years. “One student wrote that Roosevelt was famous in American life because ‘he showed that an invalid is not lost.’” Others, confusing the two Roosevelts, “said that he walked on a big stick with a soft voice,” or that Franklin Delano “collected large quantities of animal heads.” You don’t want to know what they didn’t know about American democracy. And those were college students.
It’s a wonder the ignorant men who invaded Europe two months later could find their way through Normandy, or know the difference between a Kraut and a cormorant, or capitalism and fascism. An even bigger wonder that we won the war or went on to lead the free world, even though 40 years later, near the end of the Reagan regression, a National Endowment for the Humanities report that surveyed 8,000 students “found that they were as stupid as pig dribble,” in Bill Bryson’s description.
After the single largest investment in public and private education the world had ever known, nothing had changed. More than two-thirds of those 8,000 didn’t know when the Civil War took place, couldn’t identify Stalin or Churchill, thought Roosevelt was president during the Vietnam War and that Columbus discovered America about a generation before the Boston Tea Party. More recent surveys are no different. In its first year in 2022, 70 percent of Flagler County students failed the state’s civics test.
But does it really make a difference whether Americans know their Bill of Rights or their Gettysburg Address, or the meaning of the separation of powers? Are we a lost nation if we fail basic civics?
Of course not. Otherwise we’d have never made it past the Philadelphia Convention in 1789, when the overwhelming majority of Americans, even the tiny minority that had the right to vote, were generally as ignorant of politics as your average social media degenerate today. Somehow we made it then, as we would even as malnourished illiterates massacred each other during the Civil War or helped win World War I, and as more recent hordes of ignoramuses made Henry Luce’s “American Century” a reality.
I’m not against civics education depending on how you define it. But you don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to know your rights. It’s enough to be part of a popular culture that immerses us in a sort of herd awareness that makes us generally and sufficiently citizenship-savvy. We may not be able to name constitutional clauses and amendments chapter and verse. And really, who but unbearable pedants who like citing statutes by number and paragraph at public meetings should want to anyway?
Americans overwhelmingly know that they have the right to express themselves freely, that they may practice whatever religion or no religion they please, that they have a right to vote, that a cop can’t barge into their home without a warrant or interrogate them at will, that they have a right to a trial and to not be punished cruelly, and of course that they have a right to an arsenal worthy of an armory. Civics education has nothing to do with it. Culture does. And culture is stronger than politics or ideology. In that sense, our civics culture is healthier, more diverse and resilient than it was even in Tocqueville’s time. That’s what’s bothering the nationalists.
Because the cult of civics education is plaguing us again. It happens in fevered times when ideologues want to prove that they are better equipped to tell us what America is about, that their patriotism is more red-blooded, that their way of loving the country is not just the better way but the only way.
We had a surge like this during the Red Scare following World War I, during World War II, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the Reaganism of the 1980s, and the Christian nationalist revival we’re enduring now.
Every era of civic hectoring coincides with the country’s periodic infatuations with intolerance. The 1920s were a high point for the KKK, vigilante violence and censorship. In the 1940s as we were fighting fascism abroad we were perpetuating it at home with Jim Crow and amping it up with the internment of Japanese-Americans. McCarthyism gave East Germany a run for its secret police, and Reagan’s original “make America Great again” bombast planted a seed that led straight to whatever bacillus of nationalist authoritarianism you want to call the Trump era.
Florida’s push for civics under DeSantis has been especially cunning. DeSantis claimed a few years ago that “only two in five Americans can correctly name the three branches of government, and more than a third of Americans cannot name any of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.” I’m pretty sure more than two in five Floridians can point out that DeSantis has been waging war on pluralism and diversity, banning The 1619 Project so he could tell us how great slaves had it, demolishing unions and other attempts to lift this state’s wages from the toilet, shoveling public money at Christian schools, marginalizing non-heterosexuals, calling Muslim civil rights activists terrorists, erasing home rule and restricting the right to protest, to register and to vote.
How any of this rates as civically minded is part of the mythology of authoritarian doublespeak. The intent of the civics cult is not to make better citizens. It is to make dumb, submissive, obedient citizens. It is to more narrowly redefine the meaning of America as a Christian, nationalistic, preferably white nation where moronic trivia like enumerating amendments is more important than empowering citizens to exercise those rights. It is to define the January 6 rioters and ICE murderers as heroes while defiling democracy activists.
Indoctrination is the gaslighting vapor of spent empires. The civics cult is reemerging this time as an effluent of our superiority complex just as we are guaranteeing the end of the American Century by closing ourselves off from the dynamism that kept us vibrant: immigration, diversity, reinvestment, and the willingness to absorb and adapt other cultures. The British, the French, the Portuguese and of course the Germans have all been there. Their xenophobic superiority demolished them. We’re choosing the ordinary way down. We’ve gone from beacon to the world to menace, from a City Upon a Hill to a maga-muddied Golgotha. Civics trivia will not save us.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
Jim says
This articles starts with this statement:
‘In November 1939 there was that odd poll of Princeton University undergrads–as educated an American student bunch as there was at the time–ranking Hitler “the greatest living person,” ahead of Einstein, who’d taken refuge from Hitler at Princeton, and FDR. ”
This statement gives me hope for all of us! By 1939, Hitler/Germany had done the following (condensed list):
-Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934)
-Nazis initiated a national boycott of Jewish shops and professionals (doctors, lawyers) on April 1, 1933
-The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (1933) barred Jews from public sector jobs.
-Kristallnacht (Nov 9–10, 1938): A state-organized pogrom often called the “Night of Broken Glass.” Nazis torched over 1,400 synagogues, damaged over 7,000 shops, and murdered 91 people.
-Invasion of Poland (Sept 1, 1939)
-The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Aug 23, 1939)
-March 1939 occupation of Bohemia and Moravia
Now, this is not an all-inclusive list but you get the point. Yet, some of what should be “highly-educated, red-blooded Americans who believe in freedom” thought Hitler was “the greatest living person”. Within two years we were at war with Hitler and Germany.
So, ignorance of anti-democratic, racist, violent and illegal actions by the leader of a country was somehow perceived as making him great. Anyone paying attention ought to be able to see why many of us equate the behavior of our current president with that of Germany’s leader prior to WWII. But, I suspect, many who can not do that are basically ignorant of the history of Germany prior to WWII and will not take the time to actually learn about it. To do so would inevitably lead to seeing the many parallels with our current political events and climate.
Because we’ve obviously been in this position before, I have great hope that, yet again, we’ll muddle our way through the train wreck of our current administration (and Congress and the Supreme Court, who I personally hold at least equally responsible for our current democratic rot) and put our democracy back on the right track. And, I hope, as Germany has done, we can rehabilitate our reputation with our allies and our enemies throughout the world.
I hope I live to see it. I wish more Americans would just open their eyes and take in the view. $4.40/gallon gas is just a symptom of what is wrong right now. Take it as a hint…