The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [2]
He would surely be pleased to see that, in today’s ever more disparate society, reciting the Pledge can be a unifying ritual that bridges social and cultural divides. It is one of the few practices shared by all Americans. Yet who could have suspected that this simple flag salute would, time and again over the years, be a lightning rod for bitter controversy? That controversies over reciting the Pledge would be the focus of three U.S. Supreme Court cases and at least one other landmark appellate decision?
No doubt a former clergyman like Bellamy, whose university commencement oration was titled “The Poetry of Human Brotherhood,” would be dismayed to know that American elementary-school children who refused on religious grounds to recite the Pledge in school would be expelled, their families shunned and physically attacked. That during the politically supercharged days of the 1960s, in a town not far from his birthplace in western New York State, a teacher who stood in respectful silence rather than reciting the words of the Pledge would be fired and barraged with hate mail. That a candidate for president of the United States would impugn the other candidate’s patriotism because as a governor he vetoed a bill compelling teachers to lead the Pledge. That, in the twenty-first century, a municipal official in Colorado who refused to stand and recite the Pledge would lose his post in a special recall election. Or that a town in Massachusetts would divide in rancor when compulsory recitation of the Pledge would be compared by Holocaust survivors to the forced loyalty oaths of Nazi Germany.
How would the politically active Bellamy have felt if he could have looked decades ahead to see that a gaggle of pressure groups, from environmentalists to antiabortion protestors, would try to add their own ideological messages to the text of the Pledge? What would have been his position had he been alive in 1954, when the U.S. Congress added “under God” to the text, a reference to the divinity which the former clergyman himself had not included? Could he possibly have imagined that the U.S. House of Representatives would one day vote to break up the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because the court had ruled that having public school children recite the “under God” version of the Pledge violates the constitutional separation of church and state? Or that a sitting president would cite a commitment to preserving the “under God” Pledge in schools as a qualification for being named to the Supreme Court.
No one could have foreseen what the Pledge of Allegiance would become, the wrangles it would cause or the many ceremonial roles it would play, because there really had never been anything quite like it. The Pledge was an accident of history. It was something brand new, sui generis, that came to life out of a perfect coincidence of individuals and events. And nothing to match it has come along since.
What is the Pledge of Allegiance? It’s a simple question, but the more I have considered it, the more challenging it is to answer. In its uses and its symbolism, as a mirror of contemporary society and historical events, the nature of the Pledge of Allegiance is rich and complex.
One of the questions people ask me most frequently about the Pledge is whether other countries have anything like it. Yes, there are popular salutes to the flag in other nations—Indonesia and Ghana among them. But nothing I have heard about anywhere else is quite like the Pledge. No salute is so deeply rooted in the national experience or so intertwined in daily life. None is so varied in its roles and as redolent with connotation.
Reciting the Pledge is a primal American experience, a constant in our lives from earliest memory. As a part of a regular routine, saying the Pledge can seem a reflexive exercise. In a larger frame, though, the Pledge is a powerful force in the national psyche. For the great majority of people born in the United States, the Pledge