That Dark Secret — The Constitution
In a June 1924 New York Times Magazine article, Charles Willis Thompson feared that most Americans' knowledge of the Constitution was extremely low.
"I think full half of the population, Protestant and Catholic alike, imagine that there is [a clause preventing a Catholic from becoming president] in the Constitution."
Clearly there isn't, considering the country has had two Catholic presidents: John F. Kennedy and incumbent Joe Biden. Indeed, there isn't any religious test or qualification at all.
"Conservatively I should estimate that 75 per cent [sic] of the American people do not know what treason is."
The Constitution's official definition of 'treason' is found in Article 3, Section 3: essentially, the United States needs to officially be at war and the person must have aided the declared enemy.
Congress hasn't officially declared war since 1942; subsequent "wars" in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq weren't technically official. That's why the last person convicted of treason was Tomoya Kawakita in 1952, when the Japanese-American dual citizen was found guilty of aiding Japan during World War II.
Thompson suggested that the key to increasing the American public's understanding of the Constitution lay with the then-young generation:
"A group of newspapers in different parts of the country recently combined under the lead of the Los Angeles Times to popularize the Constitution by getting schoolchildren all over the Union to compete in prize essays or orations... Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren learned more about the Constitution than their principals with the faculty thrown in."
Speaking of the nation's founding document, I'd recommend the new A.J. Jacobs book The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning about his attempt to live like a colonialist in modern-day New York City. At the Gaithersburg Book Festival, he even signed my hardcover copy!
That Dark Secret — The Constitution
Published: Sunday, June 29, 1924