The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [49]
Still, even though faced with such large popular odds against them, the critics of the Pledge, drawn from a wide spectrum of perspectives, from the deeply religious to atheists and from civil rights activists to pacifists, have been persistent in their belief that forced recitation of the Pledge compromises basic rights of freedom of choice—both political and religious—that the flag is supposed to represent.
New York State started this part of the argument in 1898, when it became the first state to pass a law calling for statewide adoption of a Pledge to be used in the schools.
Over the next twenty years, several states copied the New York statute and passed their own flag salute laws, including Washington State, the first to mandate the recitation of the Pledge “at least once in each week.”
In the next few years, as more and more states passed similar statutes—and as more and more local communities passed laws governing the use of the Pledge in those states that did not have statewide statutes—the mandatory nature of the laws became more and more punitive. In most cases they penalized teachers—usually by dismissal—for not leading their students in reciting the Pledge. Presumably, the state legislators thought students would automatically follow the mandatory lead of the teachers; they did not anticipate students refusing. Thus, many local school districts expanded on the mandatory requirement by adopting punishment of students who either failed to recite the Pledge or who refused to.
The common punishment for students was expulsion from school until they agreed to return with the promise to recite the Pledge. Then, by 1918, some local communities started declaring and enforcing punishment for the parents of students who refused to recite the Pledge, including fines and/or imprisonment.
And this is when local controversies developed into a national debate that ultimately spiraled into unexpectedly violent and tragic consequences.
As often happens in a democracy, especially one as unfettered and decentralized as the United States was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Pledge laws came about as popular, almost spontaneous, local expressions and were generally enacted as a patriotic response to some historic event or social movement or political fear of the time. The 1898 New York State statute, for example, was enacted as a display of patriotic solidarity the day after the United States declared war on Spain. One hundred and three years later, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, nearly a dozen states that previously did not have Pledge statutes passed them, bringing to forty-six the number of states with laws on reciting the Pledge.
Also, in the early part of the twentieth century, beginning in 1919 and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, there was a general concern about the effects of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the growing incidents of radical political activity in the United States. As minor cracks in the concept of “indivisible” were noticed, there were increasing calls for public displays of loyalty that activities like the Pledge provided. And state and local laws followed.
But the personal convictions of some people found an untenable conflict with those laws. And no matter how popular mandatory recitation laws were, an increasing number of people saw them as stepping on the toes of their constitutional rights of freedom of personal choice and action—and used the principles