The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [62]
But he also signaled a clear determination to honor and respect core American values. And he used the war then raging in Europe to make the point. “The values that the Nazi prizes are not our values,” he told the graduates. “We prize too much for them the lives of our young men. We do shrink from war. Hitler does not. We do have confidence in legal processes. Hitler does not.” After World War II, Jackson would serve as chief U.S. prosecutor in the Nuremburg trials of Nazi leaders.
Without specifically mentioning Nazi Germany in the Barnette case majority decision, Jackson said:
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. . . . To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions.
The decision did not prompt the type of violence that the Gobitis decision had. The question of mandatory recitation of the Pledge had finally been resolved, having been brought to lower courts in some twenty states over the decade before the Barnette decision. In the 1930s and 1940s the Witnesses alone brought almost forty cases to the Supreme Court. Following the Barnette ruling, numerous cases against the Witnesses in the pipeline were dropped or reversed.
But the Barnette decision did not stop continued efforts to make the Pledge a required part of American life.
The controversies and strong feelings expressed on both sides of the issue revealed the powerful attachment that the large majority of Americans had to the Pledge and the patriotic feelings it expressed. For politicians viewing this broad-based display of allegiance not only to the flag but to the Pledge itself, it offered an issue that could be translated into something more tangible than philosophical musings of Supreme Court decisions; namely, votes.
10. POLITICAL BATTLES
The political game of patriotic one-upmanship through the use of patriotic symbols has been part of the American landscape at least since Betsy Ross came up with a flag design that George Washington felt expressed the fledgling country’s principals better than any of the competing flags being promoted by his political rivals.
And so it is with the Pledge of Allegiance. In fact, the birth of the Pledge and its first use as a special feature of a celebratory event has definite overtones of political maneuvering and grandstanding. As we know, Francis Bellamy convinced President Benjamin Harrison to authorize the Pledge after first getting Harrison’s past (and future) opponent Grover Cleveland to throw his weight behind it. And Harrison wisely used his position as sitting president to win that round of the match—although he lost his next presidential bid to Cleveland. The real winner, of course, was Bellamy, since this act by Harrison was the beginning of the legend that cemented Bellamy’s Pledge in the American consciousness.
While politicians have used the Pledge for decades as a political football, various groups and individuals (both within the political spectrum and outside) have tried to add, subtract, reposition, reinterpret, contest, and embrace the oath, from a multiplicity of viewpoints, to express their particular political perspectives or gain political advantages. An antiabortion group, for instance, would like the Pledge to be rewritten to say “with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn.” Some women’s rights