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During that same time, Major League Baseball (like other sports organizations) began the practice of playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the beginning of every game in a gesture of support for the military, and people stood. Within organizations like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the flag ritual became a focal point.

By 1918 the adoration of the flag was such that commentators began to describe the fixation in religious terms. In fact, that year, William Norman Guthrie, a clergyman and lecturer in literature at universities like the University of Chicago, published his The Religion of Old Glory. Guthrie “undertakes to interpret the historical meaning and the spiritual significance of the American flag,” said The New York Times at the time. “Our national banner, he holds, conveys and inculcates lessons of patriotism and emblemizes what he calls ‘the faith to which, as Americans, we’re born.’ He considers separately and together the flag’s elements of form, color, design, and number, and from his study draws the conviction that the flag is worthy of the reverence and worship of good Americans.”

As more states adopted Uniform Flag laws, prosecutions for desecrating or “insulting” the flag rose. It was in this context, and the thick of war, that Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, which outlawed “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States” and the willful obstructing of “the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States,” and the Sedition Act of 1918, which went further, and made it a violation of law to, among other things, “willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States. . . .” So it seemed not so odd that state flag statutes cracked down on desecrations: “No person shall publicly mutilate, deface, defile, defy, trample upon, or by word or act cast contempt upon any such flag, standard, color, ensign or shield.”

In one case, E. V. Starr of Montana was sentenced to ten years behind bars when he refused to kiss the flag. Accounts of the time indicate that in March 1918, Starr was confronted by a group of people who attempted to convince him to kiss the flag. He refused, and said, “nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it and some other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.” This statement was believed to be seditious. He was charged and five months later, sentenced and fined.

In 1918, Congress went on to pass the Sabotage Act and the Sedition Act, criminalizing “any expression of opinion that was disloyal, profane or abusive of the American form of government, flag or uniform.”

It was thus not extraordinary that the first mandatory flag salute law was passed in Washington State on March 13, 1919. It was a time of labor unrest in the Northwest. That January the city of Seattle was on the brink of a general strike after thirty-five thousand shipyard workers walked off the job and called for the rest of Seattle’s workers to join them. The conflict raised fears of radical agitators and the possibility of a “homegrown socialist revolution.” Calls for “revolution” by the striking workers evoked an emotional response, especially in light of the recent Russian Revolution.

Seattle’s mayor, Ole Hansen, warned that the Industrial Workers of the World union, which was orchestrating the strike, was attempting “to take possession of our American Government and try[ing] to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.”

The general strike fizzled due to public opinion, but the same day it ended the Washington State legislature passed the law that required schools to teach “the principles of American citizenship” and to prevent the hiring of any employee