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Felix Frankfurter’s friends at the ACLU and The New Republic, a liberal periodical that he had written for prior to joining the high court, were particularly critical of the decision, thus isolating Frankfurter from the liberal mainstream that dominated Washington during the Roosevelt years. And within a few months of the barrage of violence against the Witnesses and editorial condemnation of the decision, three of the justices who had voted with Frankfurter recanted their decisions. The three newly dissenting justices were Hugo Black, William Douglas, and Frank Murphy. Perhaps influenced by the torrent of violence, the three justices made an unprecedented joint announcement that their vote in the case was wrong. The public recanting was expressed as part of a June 1942 dissenting opinion involving a case about Witnesses being charged special licensing fees in three states—Alabama, Arkansas, and Arizona—for distributing their religious materials. Although the case was decided against the Witnesses, Justices Black, Douglas, and Murphy now stated that this related case made it clear to them that they had been wrong in Gobitis:

The opinion of the Court sanctions a device which in our opinion suppresses or tends to suppress the free exercise of a religion practiced by a minority group. . . . Minersville School Dist. v. Gobitis . . . against the same religious minority is a logical extension of the principles upon which that decision is related. Since we joined in the opinion in the Gobitis Case, we think this is an appropriate occasion to state that we now believe that it was also wrongly decided.

This change of position infuriated Frankfurter. He started calling the three judges who changed their minds “the Axis,” a particularly nasty comment given the horrors of Hitler and his allies—the Axis—at the time. But Frankfurter maintained his view that the Pledge expressed the importance of loyalty to the United States and that was of utmost importance during World War II. Others, however, lauded the decision of the three judges to change their minds—who were helped by the agreement of new Justice Robert Jackson (who had replaced Charles Evans Hughes in July of 1941)—as well as Stone.

The Witnesses were encouraged in their struggle by the growing number of editorial comments denouncing the Gobitis decision, particularly in influential scholarly publications. The Harvard Educational Review said that the decision “goes quite as far toward the subordination of the civil liberties of minorities to the will of the majority as any other decision of the Supreme Court.”

And in what must have been a surprising amount of support from a longtime religious adversary, the law journals of Catholic schools took a hard stand against the Gobitis decision. Fordham Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Jurist, Notre Dame Lawyer, St. Johns Law Review, and University of Detroit Law Journal each published scathing denunciations of the Gobitis decision. In the Catholic publication America this perspective was summarized:

Lillian and Walter Gobitis are inconsiderable persons. But their case is the case of every man who holds that freedom in education and religion are our most precious rights.

All the opposition meant that a new case, raising similar issues, would have to work its way through the procedural process of the court system from an initial suit—perhaps on a local level with someone’s arrest by a municipality—through trials at lower court levels, then on to an appeal and then, if one party in the suit or another had the appetite to continue the battle without coming to some arbitrated agreement, ultimately on to the U.S. Supreme Court.

There were no lack of opportunities for the Witnesses to find adversaries to challenge in court. Immediately after the Gobitis decision was declared, many states and local communities passed new laws requiring Pledge conformity or tightened existing laws with stronger language. Also, the incidents of punishment for not performing the Pledge