The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [67]
While there were a few dissenting voices concerning the direct official expression of “God” in connection with government, those voices were squelched quickly and effectively. As early as 1957 there was a court case brought by the Freethinkers of America against the New York State commissioner of education asking that the phrase be deleted. The request was summarily denied by using the novel argument, in part, that although the Constitution prohibited a “State Religion,” it did not prohibit the development of a “Religious State.” And the court suggested that if someone had an objection to the phrase that it was simple enough just not to say it while reciting it.
Although a few other attempts were made to bring the issue to court, it would be fifty years before a concerted effort to challenge the words “under God” would hit the national scene in the Pledge’s third trip to the Supreme Court.
But during the years before that case, the Pledge was no less a national political firebrand—beginning in the turbulent 1960s and continuing to this day.
The seemingly cohesive American collective state of mind of the 1950s that gave America an “under God” and an “In God We Trust” slipped away as the Vietnam War heated up and the draft loomed large in the lives of young American men. This controversial military action, combined with the racial unrest and civil rights controversies of the period, as well as rapidly changing social mores that ranged from abortion to widening recreational drug use, began polarizing Americans in a way unseen since, perhaps, the Civil War. This time the polarization was not strictly geographical.
The Pledge once again became a weapon.
On one side, people who opposed the political direction of the country wanted to show their disapproval by abstaining from reciting the Pledge during occasions when the Pledge was traditionally recited. These people even started refusing to stand while the Pledge was being said. In the past, those who refused to say the Pledge generally compromised by standing silently during the recitation.
On the other side, an “America, love it or leave it” mentality boiled up among many people in positions of authority to force the objectors into saying the Pledge or be subject to punishment. The justification for this new round of reprisals was that the Supreme Court decision in the Barnette case only permitted Constitutional abstention from reciting the Pledge based on religious convictions and not on political convictions to serve as a protest. So, for example, in 1963 a group of Black Muslim students in Elizabeth, New Jersey, were suspended for not saying the Pledge because the school board determined that the Black Muslims were not a religious group but were instead a racial and political group and as such were not eligible on religious grounds to refuse to say the Pledge. This case made it to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled that the Black Muslims, whether a religious group or not, could abstain based on any “conscientious scruples.”
Teachers who refused to lead their classes in reciting the Pledge or refused to say the Pledge themselves while the class recited it came under particular scrutiny and punishment. Several teachers around the country were dismissed for these actions, but all were ultimately reinstated after courts reviewed the dynamics of the situations. For example in 1970, Susan Russo, a teacher in Henrietta, New York, did not have her contract renewed because she failed to recite the Pledge. (Several students and parents had complained to the school about her behavior.) Russo appealed to the courts to be reinstated. The first court agreed with the school and decided that Russo had failed to perform her required duties as a teacher and had been rightfully dismissed. Russo appealed to a federal court, which decided in her favor, stating that there was no reason students should have more Constitutional rights than teachers. The school board appealed to the Supreme Court