One hundred years ago, as the presidential election approached, the Lykens Standard of July 18, 1924, opined on the educational state of affairs of the voters of the country:
VOTING, HIT OR MISS
More than 4,300,000 voters in America cannot read, says the National Education Association in a startling report. More than startling: shocking.
Less than 50 per cent of eligible persons voted last year. It is barely possible that most of those missing from the polls were those who cannot read. That’s consoling, but the sheer fact that four per cent of our so-called citizens can’t possibly know what they’re voting for, and so they vote, hit or miss, makes us think.
National party conventions have been the most important political events in the last month. They showed us how ephemeral, how transitory, and indifferent and cynical the popular interest of politics is. The Washington graft dispatches, exceedingly important, wearied readers after the first week or so. Election is coming on. If it doesn’t take too long, everybody will be at least a little interested. If it stretches out like the Democratic Convention in New York, folks will tire easily again.
The newspapers keep urging everybody to be definitely interested if not active in politics. The logical, substantial reason for that plea are familiar to all. Our main plea is for prompt registration and sure voting. To vote sure, of course, means to get acquainted with facts at issue and candidates in the running, see what they are, take a choice and write it on the ballot.
For these 4,300,000 who can’t read, we have just a little reproof. Many of them have never had the chance; others got too little encouragement and aid. Folks to be rebuked are the others, co-called citizenry, those who can read and pretend to seek the best national welfare. As if we could attain a dead weight of 4,300,000 illiterate voters!
Teachers are busy all the time, but they can’t go out and collect men or children. Ministers plead for vision, then faith in that vision, and action to verify and confirm that vision. But ministers can’t reach everybody, nor help all those they reach. Editors, lawyers, doctors, even professional politicians work hard to spread the light of exact knowledge. But they can’t do it all.
We still insist that democracy as a sure-fire system of government is still on trial. It hasn’t been tried fairly yet, of course. But it won’t be until this four per cent of acknowledged hit or miss voters are educated are educated to know what they are doing. It won’t be until the fourteen per cent, or more of these who can read or seldom do; who can thin, but do so only on the surface, parrot-wise; who can discern and reason and weigh, but do so wrongly or not at all; it won’t be fairly tried, we say, until all these know what to do with their citizenship and then do it.
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Obtained from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.
Intelligence in the human race hasn’t changed very much in a hundred years.
People are just plain STUPID!