Citizenship blues and reds

Toby Miller finds he knows a little more – and a little less – about US history than he suspected.

I recently collected my third nationality: in the last week of 2009, I became a US citizen. To do so, I had to swear repeatedly under oath that I was not a member of the Communist Party - in fact, at the citizenship ceremony, just three weeks after my formal test of civic knowledge, I had to swear to a Federal judge that I'd not joined the party in the interim. This was alongside promising that I'd never sought to undermine another country's government (I had thought that was a basic qualification for being a US citizen - think Lebanon, Indonesia, Iran and Vietnam in the 1950s; Japan, Laos,...