The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [58]
In the 8 to 1 Gobitis decision, Frankfurter showed the concept of judicial restraint in action by expressing a firm reluctance to interfere with existing local laws. “The courtroom is not the arena for debating issues of educational policy,” he wrote. The language of the decision implied, and was certainly interpreted by many people at the time, that the need to establish national unity among citizens was more important than the possible, but unreasonable, positions of individual liberties. “National unity is the basis of national security,” he wrote. “To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of position from that of the property of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression of opinion through handbills.”
Frankfurter also rejected the claim that mandatory compliance with saluting the flag compromised religious beliefs:
Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious freedom toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law.
Then Frankfurter expressed a specific opinion about the flag and its importance as a symbol:
The flag is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences.
The sole dissenter in the Minersville decision was Justice Harlan F. Stone, a Calvin Coolidge appointee who had served on the Court since 1925. Perhaps one of the most conservative members of the court at the time, Stone emphatically rejected the notion that “national unity” trumped individual freedom:
The guarantees of civil liberty are but guarantees of freedom of the human mind and spirit and of reasonable freedom and opportunity to express them. . . . The very essence of the liberty which they guarantee is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say. . . .
Stone’s lone voice of dissent was drowned out by a wave of fury and violent actions against the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Thousands of Witness children were expelled from schools across the nation. In some communities, Witnesses were rounded up and jailed for sedition or run out of town. A sheriff in one Southern town who had helped escort some sixty Witnesses to the city limits famously remarked to a reporter, “They’re traitors. The Supreme Court says so. Ain’t you heard?”
The ACLU recorded violent actions against Witnesses in some three hundred communities across the nation, ranging from an incident of tarring and feathering a Witness in Wyoming to castration of a Witness in Nebraska to public beatings overseen by police and city officials in Texas and Illinois.
One of the largest displays of violence occurred just a few days after the Supreme Court decision, when a mob of some twenty-five hundred people in Kennebunk, Maine, rampaged through the town, attacking Witnesses’ homes and ultimately sacking and burning down the town’s Kingdom Hall, the name of the groups’ place of worship. A similar mob of some one thousand people stormed the Kingdom Hall in Klamath, Oregon.
Eleanor Roosevelt made a public plea for calm and called for a halt to the violence against the Witnesses.
Newspapers and magazines debated the issue at length on their editorial pages. Increasingly, as the violence got uglier, the mood changed to expressions of doubt about the Supreme Court’s decision. This was particularly true among religious publications. For example, the Christian Science Monitor said:
A voluntary unity of 99 per cent makes the flag a more impressive