The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [51]
Even if this were the official belief, it’s not one that was exercised on the ground where most Americans live—and still live. Thus, initial reactions to refusals to recite the Pledge were often handled harshly by officials of local communities. During one such incident in New Jersey in 1912, for instance, a student who refused to say the Pledge was expelled with an admonition from a school board member that the student:
should go to a private school and pay for his tuition or go back to Canada or England. But if we make an exception in his favor I suppose that any anarchist might refuse to salute the flag.
Indeed, while this school board member expressed a sense of an implied threat from an “anarchist” when a non-U.S. citizen objected to reciting the Pledge, another New Jersey community during the same year had to contend with the objections of a self-professed political “radical.” In this situation a boy refused to participate in the Pledge ceremony because he claimed that his parents were Socialists who only held allegiance to the “Red flag.” And while political objections of this sort arose, other perspectives offered a different set of objections. In 1916, for example, a black elementary-school student in Chicago refused to Pledge to the flag because the flag represented to him a country purposely oppressive toward black people and not representing the “liberty and justice for all” that the Pledge celebrated.
In each of these early incidents, the local officials, after much huffing and puffing that included expelling the students from school—and in the case of the Chicago student, arrest and trial—the students were quietly let back into school and not forced to participate in the Pledge.
The next wave of challenges would be more serious and prove to be the source of the legal battles that would ultimately take the question of mandatory pledging to the U.S. Supreme Court. These challenges would be based primarily on religious grounds. The first major religious opposition to the Pledge came from the Mennonites, an Anabaptist and generally conservative religious sect that was also adamantly antiwar in all forms. And in 1918, as the United States was entering World War I, the group found in the Pledge a perfect symbol with which to express their pacifist beliefs. (The Amish, or Amish Mennonites, are a separate sect, having broken from the Mennonites in the late seventeenth century. Amish and Mennonite communities, however, are often found clustered together geographically throughout the world.)
The Mennonite objection to the Pledge in 1918 was summarized by one of the sect’s leaders:
Pledging allegiance to a flag as we see it, though we honor and respect it, at least implies a Pledge to defend it against all its enemies, which would mean to resort to arms and to take human life.
One of the first tests of the Mennonite position came in 1918 when a Mennonite father in Ohio was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to a twenty-five-day jail term because he had told his nine-year-old daughter not to recite the Pledge at school. The child was sent home each day she refused to say the Pledge and the father was convicted of allowing his child to be truant from school. The father, in appealing this conviction, argued that he did not keep his child home from school but had, in fact, sent her to school every day. It was, he claimed, the school that had sent her home.
The appeals court took the side of the lower court, concluding that if the father had not told the child to refuse to say the Pledge, she would not have been sent home and, therefore, it was the father’s fault the child was truant. The court also offered a stern lecture on the patriotic importance of reciting the Pledge:
Such conduct on the part of our citizens is not