The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [63]
As these different points of view jockey for a position around the oath to the flag, the courts have been called on to toss around a political hot potato, trying to maintain the appearance of nonpartisanship. But even while nodding toward a court’s objectivity, we recognize the essential political strings attached to the courts each time a president appoints a new Supreme Court justice and we are treated to the spectacle—more so in recent years—of partisan questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Though there have been many “surprises” with such appointments, it is no secret that presidents hope their nominees to the high court will carry on their legacy, and their point of view, long after they have left the White House.
The power of a Supreme Court decision, as well as lower court rulings, is limited, of course, since those decisions do not automatically require a purging and updating of laws. Instead, a Supreme Court decision applies only to the specific situation brought before the Court; its application to other laws or situations is handled on a case-by-case basis, in further court action. Indeed, we are a “nation of laws,” but they are laws constantly being challenged, reinterpreted, rewritten, and ignored, as new situations arise, new contexts within which to view those specifics. Though judicial experts often talk about an issue being “settled,” in fact, very few are. As we saw in the reversal of the Gobitis and Barnette cases, the Supreme Court can change its mind.
Actually, in the wake of the Barnette decision, some defiant school districts tried to continue enforcing mandatory Pledge participation, citing the minority decision in the Supreme Court case and hoping that the courts would change their minds again. These defiant actions didn’t get very far. The U.S. Justice Department notified all U.S. attorneys in November 1943 that these actions against religious freedom should be dealt with firmly before they ended up in lawsuits.
Still, thousands of laws, including laws mandating Pledge ceremonies, remain “on the books” despite having been deemed unconstitutional by a Supreme Court decision. They remain on the books simply because no one has bothered to challenge them, or, perhaps more commonly, no state or local agency has bothered to enforce the laws and thereby have avoided a legal challenge.
By the late 1940s, however, as America emerged from a patriotic and popular war, there were fewer challenges to mandatory Pledge participation and, once again, the oath enjoyed overwhelming popularity as a central expression of Americanism on the global stage. And politicians soon found the Pledge a perfect instrument for building the nationalism needed to fight the new war, a Cold War that began in the early 1950s and would dominate the world’s geopolitics for the next half century. In large part due to the brevity and expressiveness its author bestowed on it, the Pledge became the symbol of perceived basic differences between American ideals and the growing strength and influence of communism in the Soviet Bloc.
But as it was the touchstone of American ideals in the face of godless communism, some found Bellamy’s Pledge lacking—lacking, in fact, just two words.
The two words were, of course, “under God.”
That the Pledge lacked something was a sentiment that started gathering support after the first recorded use of the added words “under God” during a Pledge recitation on February 12, 1948, at a Lincoln’s Birthday celebration in Chicago at the Illinois Society of the SAR. The idea of adding the words is credited to Louis A. Bowman, the chaplain of the Illinois Society. The relevance of introducing the additional words at the Lincoln celebration is that