The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [79]
Twenty-four years later, during the 1988 presidential campaign, it was Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis who found himself trying to explain why he had vetoed a Pledge recitation law in 1977 when he was governor of Massachusetts. Dukakis rightly pointed out that the Supreme Court had, in the 1943 Barnette decision, struck down enforced recitation laws. “A fired-up Mr. Dukakis responded that Mr. Bush wasn’t fit to be President if he couldn’t understand the Constitution,” reported The New York Times. “Mr. Bush replied that he understood the Constitution but that the Massachusetts bill had never been legally tested; had he been governor, he would have signed it and let the Supreme Court decide.” Game, set, match.
The Pledge wins. The popular actor Charlton Heston, who joined Bush at campaign rallies, would lead audiences in recitations of the Pledge. Democrats gamely fought back, having Garrison Keillor, “the homespun humorist,” as the Times called him, lead the Pledge at the Democratic convention. Mr. Bush ended his GOP acceptance speech with the Pledge. “Everyone seems to be trying to out-pledge everyone else,” said the Times, which went on to opine, “It’s silly. The Pledge expresses noble sentiments and celebrates shared values. But the Pledge is not the issue. The issue is whether the Pledge can be required. It does nothing to elevate the level of political discourse to turn a complex Constitutional question into a litmus test of patriotism—or of how to vote in November.”
In one of their more heated exchanges, during a televised debate in late September of 1988, Bush was asked by a questioner about his Pledge attacks on Dukakis. “I think I am more in touch with the mainstream of America,” the vice president replied. “I hope people don’t think I am questioning his patriotism. I am questioning his judgment.”
Dukakis shot back, “Of course he is questioning my patriotism and I resent it.”
But Dukakis’s indignation proved ineffective against the GOP’s caricature of him, and Bush was right about being in better touch with mainstream America, which loved the Pledge—probably more than the Constitution, whose Amendment “freedoms” have always served more to protect minorities than buttress the mainstream. In any case, the Pledge issue stuck and Bush went on to win in a landslide victory.
The lesson was lost on no one. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate subsequently instituted a recitation of the Pledge before opening their sessions, and as Richard Ellis has pointed out, “The Pledge had become the third rail of politics,” and the nation demanded, and continues to demand that its office seekers pass the “patriotism test.”
If this political jockeying seems to confirm Samuel Johnson’s quip that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” more recent events offer a much muted picture.
The events of September 11, 2001, and the years since have marked a turning point in the history and cultural relevance of the Pledge. The spontaneous rise of patriotism after 9/11 combined with Michael Newdow’s “under God” lawsuit, created, as it were, a perfect storm for the Pledge. But overnight the context had changed.
For the fifty years prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pledge was seen as a bulwark to communism. The addition of “under God” to the text of the Pledge, at the height of McCarthyism, was intended to provide a counterpoint to the “Godlessness” of our Russian enemies. After the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, however, the Pledge remained locked in the Cold War vortex. Thus it was that only a few months before 9/11, when Virginia state senator Warren E. Barry saw his Pledge mandate proposal being watered down by colleagues, he called them “spineless pinkos.”
Almost overnight, after 9/11, the anti-Communist rhetoric that surrounded the conflict over the Pledge ended, and in the months that followed, the flag and the Pledge were framed once again by the rhetoric and images of a “hot” war, not a cold one. The image of the three firefighters raising the flag at ground zero became the iconic