The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [55]
Ultimately, the Gobitis case would reach the Supreme Court in the Pledge’s first national test of its constitutionality.
As soon as the Gobitis children were expelled from the Minersville school—on November 6, 1935, when the family presented its Pledge objections to the local school board, which rejected their arguments, which prompted the superintendent to stand up and expel them on the spot—the legal team at Witnesses headquarters in Brooklyn jumped at the opportunity to see this case through the court system.
They knew the legal situation in Pennsylvania was different from other jurisdictions.
For one thing, the Keystone State did not have a statute compelling Pledge compliance for its public school students. The Minersville school district followed the ceremony out of custom, which included, coincidentally, the school district superintendent’s adamant requirement of adherence to that custom. Thus, expelling the Gobitis children was more “arbitrary and capricious” than in states with specific laws.
Also, the Witnesses gambled that there was a larger than normal support of their position among the general public in southeastern Pennsylvania, which had an unusually high percentage of antimilitarian Quakers than nearly any other place in the nation. And, in fact, this assumption was true. There was a small, but growing, tolerance of the Witnesses’ perspective. So when Lillian Gobitis stood up in class and declared that she would not recite the Pledge, her teacher embraced the child and commended her on her valor. Then, as school officials dug their heels in deeper in their insistence on their position, local newspaper editorials started expressing support of voluntary acceptance of the Pledge ceremony.
The Witnesses’ gamble paid off when the federal judge randomly assigned to the case turned out to be a Quaker. It was clear from the beginning of the arguments in the case that Judge Albert Branson Maris had absolutely no sympathy for the Minersville school district’s position.
And in his 1938 decision, nearly three years after the matter started, Judge Maris did not mince words about a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance:
. . . the flag salute by children who are sincerely opposed to it upon conscientious religious grounds is not a reasonable method of teaching civics . . . but tends to have the contrary effect upon such children. . . . Our country’s safety surely does not depend upon the totalitarian idea of forcing all citizens into one common mold of thinking and acting or requiring them to render a lip service of loyalty in a manner which conflicts with their sincere religious convictions.
This was a major victory for the Witnesses and the ACLU and it introduced into the debate what had not been allowed by all the other previous judicial determinations: that forced patriotism could violate a religious belief. Up to now the courts deemed the Pledge debate a secular one because nothing in the Pledge, or in its forced recitation, mentioned God or religion. Judge Maris had ruled that it was enough that certain people, in this case the Witnesses, believed that a political practice could violate a religious belief.
The Minersville school board reacted by immediately filing an appeal on the decision. In late 1939, four years after the initial incident, the appeals court upheld the Maris decision and confirmed the ruling against the Minersville school district.
Because the Witnesses won on this appeal, it meant that they would not be able to take this particular case on to the U.S. Supreme Court as the test case