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Even Congress was forced into the Pledge act that year when, on September 9, Congressman John G. Rowland (R.-Conn.) proposed changing House rules to make the Pledge a regular order of business. His motion was ruled out of order—and the ruling was upheld 226 to 168—but the following Tuesday, feeling the political pinch, in what The Washington Post said was “a departure from regular practice,” Speaker of the House Jim Wright (D.-Tex.) ordered the Pledge recited.

Said Wright after the vote, sounding defensive, “None of us objects to the Pledge of Allegiance; all of us embrace the Pledge of Allegiance. But I think it is very important that all of us recognize that the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag is something intended to unite us; not intended to divide us. I think all of us and each of us in his heart of hearts would subscribe to the belief that patriotism knows no political party. . . . And surely nothing would be more reprehensible than for any of us to suggest that another member or another citizen simply by reason of adhering to the principles of the other political party, was less patriotic than ourselves.

“Judge Learned Hand said it well,” Wright continued. “He said that ‘society is already in the process of dissolution where neighbors begin to view one another with suspicion or where nonconformity with accepted creed becomes a mark of disaffection.’ Let that not be the epitaph of this civilization.”

Such high-minded rhetoric did not prevent Michael Dukakis from fading into the mists of political history. Both George H. W. Bush, the forty-first president, as well as his son George W. Bush, our forty-third president, used the Pledge to great political advantage. But it was an awkward year for the Pledge. Humorist Calvin Trillin weighed in just a month before the 1988 election with a column in the left-leaning Nation that began with a girl at the breakfast table demanding, “Daddy, can you recite the Pledge of Allegiance?”

“What kind of cereal do you want this morning? We’re pushing this high-fiber stuff—although, as I understand the list of ingredients on the box, I think you could satisfy the same vitamin requirements by chewing on your pencil in math class.”

“Come on, Daddy. Just try one time.”

“Or you might want some of this kind that’s fortified with a couple of years’ supply of iron, unless you think it’ll weigh you down.”

“But aren’t people who recite the Pledge of Allegiance more patriotic than other people?”

Trillin makes fun of GOP vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle—infamous for avoiding the Vietnam draft by joining the National Guard and for issuing such malapropisms as “A mind is a terrible thing to lose”—by telling his daughter, “So Dan Quayle is more patriotic than the people who went to Vietnam.”

And what about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, his daughter asks. She had heard on the “television news” that there was no Pledge until 1892.

“Then they were unpatriotic,” said Daddy.

Daddy goes over the history of the Pledge, including the victorious Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Supreme Court case. But the daughter persists, asking again why people who recite the Pledge are more patriotic than those who don’t.

“As your mother said when I asked her if she knew the name of the Secretary of Labor, I won’t stand here and be grilled like a common criminal. . . . I think history might have taken a different turn if Benjamin Franklin had known about riboflavin.”

All this popular debate about the use and misuse of the Pledge didn’t prevent a new legal challenge to the nation’s sacred creed—in fact, it probably contributed to it: a test dipping back to the Eisenhower-era change to the Pledge.

The many direct (and ineffective) objections over the decades to the “under God” addition to the Pledge focused on First Amendment rights separating church and state. Eisenhower’s Reverend Docherty made a specific point by insisting that the original idea behind the First Amendment was simply to guard against a government-dictated