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Although the use of the Pledge, and the laws that required it, grew fairly rapidly, there are few recorded incidents of protest against the Pledge until 1912. The deficit could be attributed to the fact that there wasn’t any dissent or, more likely, news of any such protest was considered so minor that no one paid much attention. Considering the fact that what we today consider obvious violations of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and press went almost unnoticed until the 1920s (the American Civil Liberties Union was formed in 1920 in large part to rectify this oversight), it is surely not a historical stretch to think that objections to the Pledge were both few and far between—and unremarked upon—for quite some time after its use became widespread.

Oddly enough, the earliest recorded incidents of protests—almost all of which involved schoolchildren who were required by state or local law to recite the Pledge—concerned foreign nationals who, although they resided in the United States and attended American public schools, still felt loyalty to their native flag of citizenship. To pledge allegiance to the symbol of the United States would, they argued, force them to, in effect, renounce a flag and country with which they felt greater alliance. And, in fact, swearing allegiance to a “foreign” flag would make them traitors to their own countries.

Though this may sound positively traitorous today—and it would sound even more so as soon as the United States entered World War I—it should be noted, again, that historic context suggests otherwise. Despite healthy nationalistic beliefs—the cause of countless wars—laws and customs relating to citizenship and patriotism have not always been so, well, nationalistic. The Romans were thought to have invented the notion of formal citizenship as a way to legitimize their empire-building. And birth in a country has long been considered to automatically impart citizenship. But “citizenship” and “patriotism” didn’t mean much except in times of empire-building, war, or for purposes of taxation in the dividing and redividing that had characterized European history.

The history of loyalties within the United States is something unique. We expect loyalty to the United States as a whole; to the individual State of birth or adoption; and, of course, to the individual and his or her “inalienable rights.” There are also regional loyalties, which at the time of the Pledge’s creation remained intense in the decades following the end of the Civil War. Southern states and local communities of the former Confederacy did not join in on the early push for mandatory Pledge participation with the same enthusiasm as their Northern counterparts, perhaps in an unstated ambivalence about requiring allegiance to a nation that Southern sentiment continued to question for years after the end of the Civil War.

The notion of national loyalty for loyalty’s sake, the patriotic “my country right or wrong,” is at the heart of the mandatory Pledge of Allegiance laws and a relatively new, at least inconsistently enforced, phenomenon. Europeans, for example, didn’t need passports until World War I. The United States, of course, was created by “foreigners,” and so had to invent forms of citizenship and nationalism as it went. Various American states and localities often created their own “passports” at different times in our history and for different reasons. And, as we have seen, “Americanism,” as Francis Bellamy told the National Education Association in 1892, was a significant part of what the country needed to define. But though Bellamy was able to capture Americans’ urge to unity, it was still very much an urge-aborning.

Still, the United States, despite trends and popular sentiment to the contrary, remains deeply suspicious, if ambivalent, about forced allegiances. To this day, for instance, the United States allows “dual citizenship.” And the U.S. Supreme Court, as late as 1952 (Kawakita v. United States), ruled that dual citizenship