The Strange Place of the Pledge of Allegiance
In 1988, Michael Dukakis, the Democrat’s nominee for president, faced a crisis. When Governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had vetoed a bill making it a crime for teachers not to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance. He evoked the long-standing assumption, one upheld in Court rulings, that such a requirement would violate both freedom of speech and of religion. The Massachusetts legislature overruled his veto, but to date the law has never been enforced.
Nonetheless, it became one of the central issues of the 1988 presidential campaign. Then Vice-President and Republican nominee George W. Bush argued that ''It is very hard for me to imagine that the Founding Fathers - Samuel Adams and John Hancock and John Adams -would have objected to teachers leading students in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States.'' Meanwhile, Dukakis averred that any candidate who would uphold a policy of such dubious constitutionality “was not fit to hold office.” In this essay, I want to pivot off that exchange and ask this: what would the Founding Fathers have thought of The Pledge of Allegiance? I suspect that many of them would be less than thrilled.
The passions that arise in our disputes over the pledge obscure its rather strange history as well as some of the related Constitutional issues. In an earlier essay I introduced readers to Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward. I wrote in that essay:
“Of late 18th century American novels only Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold and out-paced in significance Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the story of Julian West, who falls asleep in 1887 amidst the chaos of late capitalism and awakes to the socialist utopia of the year 2000. Bellamy’s story sparked the formation of ‘Bellamy Societies’ across America and was an important intellectual progenitor of the progressive movement.”And further:
“The book repeats the conversations Julian West had with the Leete family who [had] nursed him out of his stupor. In the course of the conversation West discovered the absence of a need for charity, it having been replaced by a philanthropy administered by the state. The negation of private virtue represented the rearrangement of life “on a higher ethical basis” whose purpose was “to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and completeness never before conceived” as a “heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people.” … These ideas would later find concrete form in Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘New Nationalism’ speech of 1910.”The Bellamy Societies became a national phenomenon and were the central mechanisms for mainstreaming socialist ideas and principles in the United States. The central principle of socialism is the abolition of private property and placing the means of production in the hands of the state, which alone can be trusted to direct human energies to the proper ends. The state operates as the agent of the people in their collective capacity. This means that the state actively gathers all disparate, private, and independent elements of society into one entity. Bellamy, like other progressive thinkers, worried that in the absence of such collectivization, individual’s divided allegiances would sap energy away from the nation and prevent it from achieving its “promise.”
Most normal people live with a complex and hierarchically arranged set of allegiances. Faith, family, friends, neighborhoods, places of our birth, specific political interests, associations, our work life — all require from us more or less compelling demands on our attention and energy and commitments. We trust ourselves to arrange these allegiances from more to less important, and understand that we owe more strict obligations to some than others. Often we do this imperfectly but would not have others dictate these arrangements for us.
For example, a person might (reasonably) believe that his obligations to his wife and children supersede all other demands. All our talk about a “work/life balance” reflects in part our fear that somehow the demands of work have eclipsed, or at least unsettled, what ought to be most important to us. We worry about an employer who would demand of us the kind of commitment and loyalty best reserved for a spouse and progeny. Or: if we believe that our employer is mistreating a friend and colleague, we might well choose to support our friend, even at the risk of losing our job.
The issue becomes even stickier when we consider religious beliefs. In the book of Matthew, Jesus says to his disciples: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household.” This absolute claim on our devotion places extreme demands on us and attenuates all other connections that we have. Christian thinkers have long struggled with balancing such absolute claims against the relative, though significant and consequential, claims made by those in close congress with us.
Political thinkers have long recognized that the absolute demands of Christian faith would unsettle, if not upend, political order. For that reason, they’ve typically recommended one of three strategies (or a fitful combination thereof): 1) outlaw absolute religious beliefs; 2) subordinate the claims of the state to those of religion; or, 3) absorb religious claims into a kind of state religion (what we call civil religion). Socrates, you may recall, was put to death for not believing in the gods of the city, and Jesus’s defiance of the governing authorities led to his crucifixion.
In post-Reformational political thinking (during and after the 16th century), Catholic religiosity posed a special problem for political thinkers. Catholics, so the claim went, could never be good citizens because their primary allegiance would always be to Rome. (In the future, we will discuss how John F. Kennedy dealt with this claim.) Even the so-called “liberal” thinkers with their capacious views of tolerance could hardly find a civic space for Catholics. A good deal of anti-Catholicism has long manifested itself in American politics and was especially prominent in the period in which Bellamy wrote.
For many socialist reformers, the gathering of individuals into “the great community” necessitated the abolition of other modes of communal interaction that would otherwise divide us against ourselves, others, and the community. The family, churches, associative life, and even friendship itself were seen as threats to national integration. Totalitarian societies not only negate these institutions but weaponize them to entrench and expand the state’s power.
We should keep context in mind. Bellamy’s book largely responded to a series of crises created by capitalism. Marx, in his Communist Manifesto, had noted that capitalism had already dissolved the family well before communism ever made its appearance. The division of labor and the alienation it created, the separation of work from home, the immiseration of workers, the concentration of wealth, the societal ramifications of “the labor problem” and, most importantly, the cash nexus with its liquidation and evaporation of wealth and everything else solid, all led necessarily to capitalism’s demise. Still, capitalism had done all the hard work in creating wealth and acting as a solvent upon all our other allegiances, thus preparing the way for the socialist paradise.
Bellamy Societies (otherwise known Nationalist Clubs) began to sprout around the United States soon after the publication of Bellamy’s book. State ownership of all the means of production was a central theme, and so was the national transformation of the education system into an agency of state control, in no small part resulting from the idea that both parental and local control would fracture so important an enterprise.* The common school movement also proved essential to assimilating immigrants into national life.
Francis Bellamy, the author’s cousin, a Baptist preacher and a leader of the Bellamyite movement, became involved in the effort to have the American flag fly above every schoolhouse and to have every school subscribe the The Youth’s Companion, a magazine designed to “encourage virtue and piety.” Francis Bellamy studiously upheld the Baptist conviction concerning the separation of church and state, but was also an avowed socialist in his politics. He penned the first iteration of the Pledge of Allegiance for The Youth’s Companion, which accompanied every flag purchased by the schools. His original text read: “I pledge Allegiance to my Flag and to[a] the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”
A couple of matters command our attention. Bellamy made clear what he meant by “Republic” (which is definitively not what the Founders meant by that term): “And what does that last thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches.”
The word “indivisible” carries a lot of freight in Bellamy’s formulation. Recall that our Constitution operates on the principle of division, both between the state governments and the national government, but also among the different branches of government. The states retained their sovereignty in the new arrangement. Madison, in his famous reflection on faction, had argued that our divisions served the cause of liberty; but in the socialist recasting of the Constitutional system any principle of division served only to frustrate the aspirations to national greatness. Congress and its system of local or state representation had to yield to the unitary nature of executive power, and members of Congress had to be trained to think not of their district but of the nation.**
Then, too, there are the words “with Liberty and Justice for all.” They sound noble enough. Bellamy had originally wanted the pledge to contain the watchwords of the French Revolution — liberty, equality, fraternity — but rejected them not for their abstract character or for the way they had been used to justify the violent bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, but because they were “too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization.”
Bellamy structured the pledge to be accompanied by a salute. The right arm raised and stretched out, palm down while facing the flag, came to be known as “The Bellamy Salute” and was used in American schools for fifty years until the nearly identical Nazi salute made it, shall we say, unpopular. Congress passed a law in 1942 recommending the hand be placed over the heart instead and also standardized the language of the pledge, with the exception of the words “under God,” which were added in 1954 in order to help distinguish America’s “Christian” nation from the godless Soviets and Chinese. Not coincidentally, Catholics during this period began to experience more mainstream acceptance into American life and Catholic thinkers such as John Courtney Murray began to reconcile Catholic social teaching to the American project. On Flag Day, 1954, Ike signed the bill adding the words “under God” into law, and two years later he adopted “In God We Trust” as the nation’s motto.
There had long been religious objections to the compulsory reciting of the pledge, but legal challenges to the pledge arose not long after Ike amended its language. Most famously, Michael Newdow, a California lawyer and physician, sued on behalf of his daughter the Elk Grove Unified School District for its compulsory recitations. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled in his favor, declaring the words “under God” to be an unconstitutional endorsement of religion and thus a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court of the United States subsequently set aside this ruling, not dealing with the Constitutional issue but rather arguing that Newdow lacked standing in court because he did not have custody of his daughter and therefore could not sue on her behalf. The Ninth Circuit ruled against Newdow in subsequent suits, arguing that his daughter was not compelled to say anything during the recitation. Interestingly, that argument has rarely held up when it comes to prayer in school.
Today, 47 out of the 50 states require schools to set aside time to say the pledge (or other “daily patriotic exercises”), although 38 out of those 47 allow for exceptions. Roughly half of Americans believe it is important to know the Pledge of Allegiance, with Republicans being more than twice as likely to think so than are Democrats, and the younger a citizen is the less likely he or she will think knowing the pledge matters to citizenship. Only 61% of adult Americans support the idea of reciting the pledge daily. Data on how often the pledge is still recited are limited, but one study argued that “60% of the middle school students and 68.6% of the high school students chose not to recite the loyalty oath.” I honestly don’t remember saying the pledge very often in the Protestant Christian schools I attended, and certainly not in high school. My son attended Catholic schools through 10th grade and said they recited it every day, but that ended when he attended a public school in 11th grade. My daughters say the same: every day in the Catholic schools they attended but never in the public ones.
The debate between Bush and Dukakis highlighted one of the essential problems involved in any public ritual, particularly compulsory ones: what meanings do they convey, and what meanings get diminished or obscured by such displays? What is the effective as well as the affective results of such ritual enactments? Do these rituals actually make better citizens? Does the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance commit us to a way of understanding the country that is contrary to its founding? Sadly, campaign politics do not lend themselves to such nuance.
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*As I’ve written about the great educational reformer John Dewey: “But how to catechize democratic citizens, with their chaotic willfulness and nettlesome individuality, into a secularized kingdom wherein alone they could find their true freedom? The obvious answer was state-mandated and -controlled educational apparatuses. Dewey was long enamored of 19th-century America’s greatest effort at socialist catechesis: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which Dewey ranked only behind Das Kapital as the most important book of the previous century. In April of 1934, as the Great Depression descended on America, Dewey wrote an appreciation for Bellamy’s bloodless revolution, where human activity was directed toward a common good and all wealth was held in common. Dewey saw Bellamy as the great defender and prophet of American democracy. Perhaps the most important educational idea that Dewey got from Bellamy was that the traditional systems of education were predicated on and perpetuated an unjust class system. Dewey, like Bellamy, vehemently opposed any vestiges of hierarchy and old class structures in education. The democratic purpose was to facilitate communication and to involve everyone in a great society founded on mutual sharing and responsibility, while also identifying the tasks for which each person was uniquely fitted.”
**From Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” address: “The American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism, without which we cannot hope to deal with new problems. The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over-division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock. This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.” This paved the way for the Court’s subsequent devaluing of property rights in favor of “substantive due process.”
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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