The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [80]
As has often been the case with the Pledge, this new patriotism made itself felt first and foremost in the schools. There, patriotic symbols appeared with such suddenness and in such numbers that it almost appeared as if the nation was trying to erase the sickening images of the destroyed New York City skyscrapers, the hole in the Pennsylvania field (that saved the nation’s Capitol), and the huge hole torn in the side of the Pentagon. Reported Kevin Sack in The New York Times:
As a surge of patriotism has washed over the country in the wake of the terrorist attacks, nowhere has the revival been more omnipresent than in schools. Hallways and classrooms have been decorated with bunting and posters of Uncle Sam. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been raised for relief efforts through penny drives and bake sales. Blood drives have been held on campuses. Flags are showing up on clothing, book bags and lockers. . . . Schools that had mothballed the Pledge of Allegiance, like Batavia (Pa.) High School, have dusted it off, and those that had left its use up to teachers have made it mandatory. Celebration USA Inc., a civic group based in Orange County, Calif., hopes to synchronize a nationwide school recitation of the pledge at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 12. Teachers and principals report that once slouching students now stand at rapt attention and virtually shout a pledge they used to mumble. “You can actually hear people say the Pledge now,” said Cedric E. Brown, the student council president at Jonesboro High, about 20 miles south of Atlanta.
In New York City, the site of the tragedy, the Board of Education passed a resolution, by a unanimous vote, one month after the attacks, to require that the Pledge be said (though it did not mandate participation in the recitation) at all public schools every morning and at every schoolwide function. In fact, the resolution was almost identical to one already on the books, but which had been routinely ignored, according to many observers, since the end of the Vietnam War.
Nevertheless, over the course of the following year, similar measures were adopted in Tennessee, Illinois, Montana, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. The vote in the Pennsylvania House was 200 to 1. In places where such laws already existed, they took on a new meaning. In Virginia, State Senator Barry, who had chided committee members as “pinkos,” now found his bill to have been exceedingly “timely.” Before 9/11 his Pledge law was met by criticism, indifference, and boycott in many Virginia schools. Afterward, no one objected. “Before the terrorist attacks, everyone just sort of stayed in their seats,” said Katherine Dodson, a fifteen-year-old sophomore at H.B. Woodlawn school in Arlington, just across the river from the Pentagon. “No one even acknowledged the fact that we were supposed to be saying the Pledge. It’s hard for a school to come together—the Pledge of Allegiance was the last thing I thought our school would come together and do.”
The states had their say; so did the federal government. On September 13, 2001, President George W. Bush, and former presidents Clinton, Bush, and Carter, recited the Pledge together at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. And less than a month after the tragedy, Education Secretary Rod Paige sent letters to 100,000 schools recommending a simultaneous recitation of the Pledge. It was an idea, he later said, he got from a teacher.
Indeed, a “Pledge Across America” initiative had begun more than a decade earlier, in the years preceding the largely ignored centennial of the Pledge in 1992, and was spearheaded by a California substitute teacher named Paula Burton. Burton hatched the centennial