The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [3]
Because its uses and associations extend so widely in contemporary America, the Pledge is pushed and pulled, squeezed and pummeled as never before. We use it as a political cudgel, an ideological bumper sticker, a vehicle of protest, a constitutional battering ram, and a judicial litmus test. Still, the Pledge lives on. In fact, it thrives. Especially since September 11, 2001, the uses of the Pledge of Allegiance have multiplied. The day after the terrorist attacks, Muslim men in beards and robes stood before cameras in Dallas, Texas, reciting the Pledge as a demonstration of their Americanness. One month after 9/11, then secretary of education Rod Paige urged American schoolchildren to recite the Pledge as an exercise in solidarity. On the third anniversary of the attacks, then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld read the Pledge at the Chevy Rock & Roll 400 NASCAR race. And in the fall of 2004, neighbors and friends of an American executed in Iraq intoned the Pledge at a candlelight vigil in his Michigan hometown. Reported the New York Times:
The vigil took place in the early evening while it was still light in front of the Hillsdale County Courthouse on a town square framed by light poles bearing hanging planters with purple flowers. The Pledge of Allegiance was recited, candles were wedged into plastic coffee cup lids and passed through the crowd, and a local pastor . . . was asked to say a few words.
Everyone, it seems, has a Pledge story: how they used to think it began “I play Joe legions”; how they one day blanked on the words; or about the schoolmate who refused to recite it. Lee Siskind, a businessman in Lowell, Massachusetts, told me he remembers saying the Pledge outside his tent each morning during a Boy Scout Jamboree at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Art Lubetz, a Pittsburgh architect, said he recalls that his Jewish grandmother, who escaped persecution in czarist Russia, complained about the Pledge: “I love this country. I don’t need to pledge allegiance.”
After Private James Prevetes was killed in Iraq in the fall of 2004, his first-grade teacher, Janice Hengle, called up a vision of him saying the Pledge in her classroom. “He stood perfectly straight and tall,” she told a New York Times reporter. Raise the Pledge as a topic at a local Lions Club meeting, as I did not long ago, and a flood of words pours forth. Even the most taciturn have memories to share, anecdotes to report.
My own firsthand experience with the Pledge as an adult includes two particularly memorable experiences. One occurred a few years ago in Petersburg, Alaska, where I had gone to do ground work for a documentary. I remember the Alaska Airlines jetliner I had caught in Seattle descending out of a low cloud into the half-light of a northern winter morning. Houses, boat harbors, and commercial buildings spread out below along a rim of land, surrounded by muskeg and trees, mountains and water. The cliché about Alaska as the last frontier came vividly to mind.
At the little airport terminal, Ted Smith, the mayor of Petersburg, greeted me. Mayor Smith and I drove down the town’s gravelly streets under a brightening midday sky. It was Rotary day, and the mayor had invited me to lunch.
In the low-slung Boys and Girls Club building where the Rotary Club meets, I joined a line of thirty or so men and women waiting for soup and sandwiches, which we ate at long folding tables. As lunch wound down, it was time for the business meeting, presided over by a woman in a Forest Service uniform. When she walked to the front of the room, everyone stood and prepared to recite the Pledge.
It was the first time I had said the Pledge in a public gathering in a long while. Not being a Rotarian, or a member of any of the many other groups that say the Pledge routinely, I was frankly surprised