The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [81]
And Rome, New York, was not ignorant of the anniversary made famous by its favorite son. “Pride and affection were evident as an estimated 2,000 people turned out to honor both the centennial of the Pledge of Allegiance and the memory of its author,” began a story in the Rome Daily Sentinel. New York’s first lady, Matilda Cuomo, was at Fort Stanwix National Monument, and camera crews for two of the three national broadcast networks had been in town to film segments for their morning shows. “Pride in country doesn’t play well in some communities,” said the pastor of the local Baptist church, capturing the mood of the country better than he may have intended, “but in Rome it’s a beautiful symphony.” It was also the First Day of Issue for a Pledge postage stamp (first-class mail was then 29 cents).
In the ebb and flow of political iconography, the Pledge was at a low-tide moment in 1992, a year of relative peace and prosperity in the United States (it was the year in which Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded from Yugoslavia, Quebec voters decided to stay with Canada, John Gotti was convicted of thirteen counts of racketeering, Mike Tyson was found guilty of rape, and Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show. Oh, yes, and Bill Clinton defeated George Bush for president that year—and the Pledge played no part in it).
By October 2001, of course, the nation was at war. And there was no lack of enthusiasm for a patriotic act.
“Our flag is a symbol for all Americans that we are protected from violence and terrorism,” Secretary of Education Paige wrote to the nation’s public school leaders. “It is important for teachers to display that freedom and patriotism by focusing on the flag.”
No doubt September 11 had changed the equation. What at its worst had been a cynical ploy of partisan politics became, in the hour of crisis, a symbol of real unity. The group activity of reciting the Pledge reaffirmed founding principles that were suddenly threatened. “I think it is important that at a time like this we all focus on the positive,” Principal Janet Foster, of Fox Mill Elementary School in Herndon, Virginia, said after the “Pledge across America” event. “I want these children to feel safe, that we are all in this together. The Pledge is another way of showing how we feel as a group.”
Eventually the super-patriotism of September 11 relaxed, and recitations of the Pledge were less monitored. The further the country moved away from the emergency, the more comfortable it became with loosening mandates on the recitation of the national oath. Even by the end of November of 2001, the District 3 school board in New York City, ground zero for 9/11, had decided that its thirty-one schools should decide on their own to say the Pledge in the morning. “Requiring students to blindly repeat the Pledge is no different than the Taliban requiring children to memorize the Koran and repeat it by rote, without understanding why or what they are saying,” said Larry Sauer, the board member behind the move.
Only in America!
Barely two months after the most lethal attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor and already someone was comparing the victim to the aggressor.
And by July of 2003 a federal judge struck down a law requiring Pennsylvania school students to recite the Pledge. U.S. District Judge Robert F. Kelly said the law was an improper attempt to circumvent Barnette, the Supreme Court’s opinion issued sixty years earlier.
What really brought to an end the period of spontaneous patriotism was the war on terror itself. To the extent that the Pledge represents fealty to national purpose and policy, as much as to core principles, the diminished enthusiasm for saying it represented America’s increasing ambivalence to the Bush war. (A loss of enthusiasm for the Pledge followed Vietnam as