The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [52]
For decades, similar court rulings prevailed over comparable religious objections to the Pledge. But none of these cases reached a boiling point of national attention. This was due in large part to the fact that nearly all of these early cases were settled quietly and on a local level. Often the conflict was resolved simply by allowing the student to delay coming to school until after the morning Pledge ceremony was performed.
During the 1920s, however, groups on both sides of the issue—one demanding universal mandatory adherence to reciting the Pledge, the other demanding voluntary involvement that permitted abstention from the ceremony when it compromised personal convictions—began polarizing in stronger and stronger ways.
On the Pledge support side, groups such as the American Legion, the VFW, and the DAR lobbied successfully to broaden and strengthen state statutes requiring the Pledge. They also pushed to force local communities to enforce the statutes. These efforts picked up speed and intensity following the National Flag Conferences of 1923 and 1924—at the same time that Francis Bellamy was beginning to defend his authorship of the Pledge. These conferences, sponsored by the United States Flag Association, provided the first “official” nationwide guidelines for proper flag etiquette—although it wouldn’t be until 1942 that the federal government would adopt truly official guidelines—and would galvanize supporters of the Pledge.
On the other side of the issue, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), formed to defend First Amendment rights, took up the issue as a cause. And though Pledge opponents weren’t as well organized or well funded as those supporting the Pledge, in the early 1930s one religious group emerged with the resolve—and, more importantly, the resources—to ultimately bring the issue to a head in the U.S. Supreme Court: Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian sect that today has a worldwide membership of some seven million followers, was founded in the late nineteenth century as the Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society. Changing its name to Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931, the group may seem an unlikely champion of First Amendment rights. But the fervently evangelical antiestablishment group had already been the object of mob violence for its contentious views on Catholics. Its “unpatriotic” beliefs included simple spurning of political involvement to pacifist opposition to military service. During the height of World War I, in May 1918, the president and board of directors of the Witnesses were indicted by the U.S. government for violating the Espionage Act. The indictment accused the heads of the group with conspiring to cause disloyalty to the United States and refusal of military duty. They were found guilty and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. However, in March 1919, the judgment against them was reversed, and they were released from prison and the charges later dropped.
Still, these were long odds for a small religious group that was uncompromising in its positions against a force as powerful as the federal government. But the odds got much better when, in 1916, the group chose a leader who had an unusual credential for a religious chief: he was a lawyer—and a damn good one.
Joseph Rutherford was born in 1869 and showed an early interest in the law, working his way through college as a court stenographer and later becoming a trial lawyer and prosecutor in his home state of Missouri. He was drawn to the Watch Tower Society doctrines in his early twenties. In 1906 he became a baptized Bible Student and the following year became the legal counsel for the Watch Tower Society.
Rutherford’s understanding of the court system, constitutional law, and the rights of the individual under the law was so astute that he was soon nicknamed “Judge” Rutherford by both his supporters and his adversaries. Although