Chairman. this bill was introduced by the gentleman from Massachusetts and has a unanimous report from the committee. If this bill is enacted into law. we shall be taking a step in the right direction. We are going to try to have the newly naturalized citizen know something about the Constitution of the United States. We should have given attention to this matter many years ago. Although the people who become citizens of the United States are supposed to understand and to have read the Constitution of the United States. some of them do not know it. and some of them do not know where to find out about it. This bill proposes to give each naturalized citizen at the time of the issuance of his certificate of citizenship a copy of The Story of the Constitution. I believe if we had done this long ago we would have had as naturalized citizens a better and finer class of citizens. people who could tell us something about the Constitution. Probably we would not have had a lot of subversive agitators in this country if they had known we are living in this country under a constitutional form of government. The cost involved in this distribution is very small.
Identified stereotypes
Some naturalized citizens do not understand the Constitution and may be subversive agitators.