One-third of Americans cannot name U.S. government’s branches

OPINION:

In less than two weeks, Americans will renew the quietest privilege of our public life.

We will argue about the direction of the nation, and then we will settle the argument at the ballot box, as we have every two years for nearly 2½ centuries. Voting has become so routine in this democratic republic that we have forgotten how remarkable it is.

Yet 35% of Americans cannot name the three branches of government, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s annual civics survey, released last month. Only 9% can name all five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and nearly 25% cannot name a single one.

We are about to exercise the machinery of self-government, but one-third of us cannot define the machine.

I spent the past year writing a book called “The Movers and Shapers” about the seven men who built that machine. What struck me most, beyond their brilliance, was how close the American experiment came to failing — and how clearly they knew it.

In June 1788, James Madison stood in a crowded Richmond, Virginia, theater, arguing for ratification of the Constitution against Patrick Henry, the most gifted orator in America. Madison was small, frail and weak-voiced, and days earlier, one of the sudden attacks that had plagued him his whole life had driven him from the stage midspeech.

Still, he returned to make an argument that deserves to be carved above every polling place. Other nations had formed their governments under the pressure of war, he reminded the delegates. Americans were establishing their peace, freely and deliberately, with no enemy at the gates.

That, Madison argued, was the true fulfillment of the revolution — not just the victory at Yorktown but also the vote at Richmond.

Every election since has renewed that act. When we vote, we are not merely choosing candidates. We are carrying the Founders’ work forward.

The men who made it possible were not the cold, distant figures we see in marble. They were a candlemaker’s son with two years of schooling, a farmer’s boy who lost his first court case on a technicality and an orphaned immigrant from the West Indies who wrote his way to America and out of poverty.

The quarrels between Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, produced the nation’s first rival political parties.

At Monticello, their busts still face each other across the entrance hall, where Jefferson placed them, “opposed in death as in life.”

The system they left us did not require them to agree. It required them to keep arguing within the rules they had made together. It asks the same of us today.

It also asks us to see our founding clearly. The Declaration of Independence was aspirational — written by Jefferson, in his own words, to reflect “the American mind.”

Its authors were still subjects of a king, not citizens of a republic, yet they staked a new nation on the premise that all men are created equal. Many of the Founders who pledged their lives to liberty owned slaves and struggled to extract themselves from their dependence on slave labor.

The aspiration, however, had traction. The abolitionists, suffragists and Civil Rights movement marchers all made their case with the Founders’ words, not against them. The Founders built better than they lived. That is not a reason to stop studying them; it is the strongest reason to know them.

Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Constitutional Convention, was famously asked what kind of government the delegates had produced. “A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.”

The keeping begins with knowing what you hold.

That is why November, the month in which Americans exercise their privilege to govern themselves, should also be the month we study the origins of self-government. The organization I founded is working to permanently designate November as National American History and Founders Month through bipartisan legislation now before both houses of Congress.

It would create an annual invitation to classrooms and communities to learn the full American story, triumphs and shortcomings alike.

So before you vote this November, pair the ballot with a book. Learn why Madison believed that the revolution was fulfilled not on a battlefield but at the ballot box. Learn what Franklin meant by keeping our republic.

This nation has lasted 250 years not because its documents are self-executing, but because in every generation, enough Americans have understood what they have inherited.

Whether that remains true is the unspoken question on the ballot every year.

• Jennifer London is the founder and president of the National American History and Founders Month Organization and author of “The Movers and Shapers.”