The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [53]
Under Rutherford’s leadership the Jehovah’s Witnesses did not simply react to perceived government intrusions; the group pursued an aggressive, proactive strategy of seeking out ways to limit government power—because all government, Rutherford believed, was an essentially evil force (ruled directly by Satan) that would be destroyed during Armageddon. Rutherford’s attitude about government is said to have hardened as a result of his Espionage Act conviction and imprisonment.
The Witnesses objected not only to military service and reciting the Pledge, but to all government-dictated signs of acquiescence. And it was Rutherford who preached a virulent objection to what he perceived as the “idolatry” practiced by Catholics, themselves a persecuted minority until the great migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Needless to say, the Witnesses became the focus of considerable hostility within many American communities. And it didn’t help the group’s reputation that they were committed to promoting their beliefs by going door to door, especially on Sunday, and distributing printed publications such as the group’s semimonthly magazine, Watchtower. In fact, many local communities tried to abolish the practice by applying antipeddling ordinances to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Members were routinely fined, arrested, and often imprisoned under these laws.
While many Witnesses initially accepted this treatment as a sort of martyrdom for their religious commitment, Rutherford and others became increasingly militant. They considered their treatment unfair and illegal, and by the 1930s began a coordinated offensive against the various attacks on the sect’s members. Unpopular, small in size, and lacking any type of political influence, the Jehovah’s, through Rutherford, came to believe that their best ally was part of the evil government itself: the judicial system.
The legal arguments the Witnesses emphasized in all their cases centered on constitutional protections of freedom of the press (for the cases involving distribution of their printed materials), freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.
In 1935 the Jehovah’s Witnesses embarked on a focused campaign against the Pledge. This concentrated effort was sparked by two events.
First, Nazi Germany began its persecution of Witnesses when they refused to perform the “Heil Hitler” salute. (This persecution ultimately resulted in some ten thousand Witnesses being sent off to concentration camps.) The Witnesses saw similarities between that enforced action of the Nazis and the mandatory American flag Pledge of the outstretched hand. It made little difference that the American arm salute had the palm facing upward and the Nazi salute had the palm facing downward; the similarities were far too striking to be ignored.
Second, Carleton Nicholls, Jr., a Witness student in Lynn, Massachusetts, was expelled from his public school in September 1935. Not only was the eight-year-old boy expelled for not saying the Pledge, but his father and a friend of his father’s (a non-Witness who was a nephew of the philosopher William James) showed up one day in the classroom with the boy and all three of them refused to participate in the Pledge ceremony. The police were called. The two adults were roughed up, arrested, and trotted off to jail.
Witness leader Rutherford used a scheduled October 6, 1935, radio speech to express his outrage about the Nicholls case. He linked it to the growing persecution of Witnesses in Nazi Germany and warned that a flag salute of any type,