The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [64]
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
There have been many interpretations of Lincoln’s “under God” in this context. One linguistic historian claims that during Lincoln’s time people would have understood “under God” to mean “God willing.” Whether or not this historic interpretation of linguistics is accurate (and there are scholars who would disagree), by the time Bowman took the initiative to add the deity to the national oath, there seemed little doubt that he meant “God’s guidance” or “God’s approval” or even “God’s acknowledgment of rightness” of the specific nation, the United States. And in the subsequent lobbying effort, those definitions were surely the ones promoted by “under God” proponents to emphasize the difference between the United States and the “godlessness” of the Communist Soviet Union and its satellite countries.
By 1951 the “under God” movement gained great traction when it became a cause of the Knights of Columbus, which gave it the same strong support that the group gave the original Columbus Day celebration. Only now the Knights were a much more powerful organization, representing millions of Catholics and armed with a healthy war chest. Though some of the anti-Catholic sentiment that had been the original motivation behind the formation of the Knights had dissipated by the 1950s, there remained considerable concern about “the Papists” taking over the White House, which is what worried many people when John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960. It was no small irony that the Pledge, which was born at a time when Catholics were excluded from many of the benefits it trumpeted, would find among twentieth-century Catholics its staunchest supporters. But it didn’t hurt that the Pledge was born in a celebration of the group’s namesake, Christopher Columbus, the founder of modern America, a Catholic, and Italian.
Added to those already strong bonds, as we saw in the previous chapter, Catholics had no love lost for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had been a constant burr in the Papists’ side for years prior to the Supreme Court Pledge challenge. Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, Witness leader “Judge” Rutherford waged a war of words against the “idolatry” of Catholics. In turn, Catholics were among the most outspoken groups in support of the high court’s ruling against the Witnesses in the Gobitis case. (One Catholic parish had organized a boycott of the Gobitas store in Minersville.)
While there does not seem to be any explicit evidence that the Knights promoted “under God” as a direct reaction to the Witnesses’ success at the Supreme Court, they didn’t need the sect to whet their “under God” fervor. Catholics were among the most ardent anti-Communists in America.
In fact, in early 1951 the Knights made the addition of “under God” a requirement for meetings of the group’s highest member level, Fourth Degree Assemblies. And before the end of 1952, the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus passed a resolution to require the change in wording at all of the group’s meetings. In addition, the Supreme Council sent off copies of their resolution to all government leaders, including the president, urging congressional action to add “under God” to the Pledge.
Coinciding with the Knights’ push to include “under God” was a general movement toward public expression of religious worship involving government approval. For example, in 1952 Congress called for a National Day of Prayer to be held annually. President Dwight Eisenhower introduced the National Prayer Breakfast and Congress set aside a room in the Capitol for prayer. These and other actions might simply have reflected a growing American move toward embracing religion. But whenever a new religious ceremony was added to some public event, it was draped in anticommunism and what was perceived as the growing threat from