The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [7]
As the pending Supreme Court case drew more and more attention to the “under God” controversy, I received a phone call from my niece Arianna. A sophomore in high school at the time, Arianna was doing a paper on the issue, and my brother had urged her to call me for guidance. As it turned out, I was the beneficiary of my niece’s clear thinking.
Arianna began telling me about her research in the diffident way school kids broach their ideas with adults. As she talked, though, it became clear that she had learned a great deal about the history of the Pledge and had thought hard about the “under God” debate. “The theme of my paper,” she said, “is how ironic it is that the Pledge of Allegiance was written as something to bring people together and now it is pulling people apart.” Ironic indeed.
The “under God” quarrel reveals the double-edged power of the Pledge. As a ritual nearly universal in American life, reciting the Pledge is really the closest thing we have to a national prayer. In this respect, though, the Pledge taps into a deep-rooted tension in American society between the religious and the secular, and it draws out the white-hot emotions that this interplay can produce.
The Pledge reveals a deep division over how best to express love of country and its founding principles. To some, the Pledge is a sublime ode to essential American ideals. To others, it is a hypocritical profession of standards—“liberty and justice for all”—that the nation fails to meet. To some, the Pledge is an opportunity to profess patriotic sentiment. For others it is a noxious test of patriotism, a loyalty oath.
The way we think and talk about the Pledge can cast light on the political and philosophical arguments that animate and divide Americans today. A retired high-school English teacher named Jim Kraus told me that, in his classroom days, he had recited the Pledge with his students, or not, depending on his feelings about the political situation at the moment. Jim’s approach to the Pledge is, I think, a striking example of a general phenomenon. People’s attitudes toward the Pledge often parallel their basic beliefs and feelings about the country.
There are parallels also between the history of the Pledge and the changing state of the nation. Over the 118 years since Bellamy wrote down the original version of the Pledge, the vicissitudes of the flag salute have vividly reflected the state of the nation and the popular mood—born, as it was, at a time when anxieties over the impact of mass immigration coexisted with expansive optimism about the nation’s future. The Pledge was the focus of intensive use during the First and Second World Wars, during the Cold War, and during the Vietnam War, and it was a fulcrum of controversy during each of those periods, as it has been in our own era of uncertainty and perceived peril.
What exactly does the Pledge mean? There is no single answer. Francis Bellamy left several accounts of what he had in mind when he composed the text. Since then, though, the Pledge has developed multiple levels and dimensions of meaning. Today, no two Americans are likely to agree on every facet of its significance. Inevitably, though, when I talk to people about the Pledge of Allegiance, the conversation always comes around to what they see as the nation’s essential values. So it seems to have been from the beginning. Francis Bellamy’s brief salute to the flag has had an almost magical power to galvanize people’s deepest feelings and beliefs about who we are and ought to be as a nation. In that sense, the story of the Pledge of Allegiance is the story of America and the American people.
2. THE ERA OF THE PLEDGE
The Pledge of Allegiance was a product of its time, a time that was in many ways like the present. The nation