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During my grammar-school days, we faithfully recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, although I can't remember whether it happened before or after the teacher took attendance -- perhaps that was left up to the schoolmarm.
Of course this made my Baby Boom generation into a
cohort of wholesome patriots who would never question the
righteous wisdom of American involvement in Vietnam. Nor
would we ever even think of violating the humane and
sensible drug laws of this great republic. And there was
no need for those Civil Rights laws in the 1960s, since
America already had liberty and justice for all,
despite the firehoses and police dogs we saw on
television.
Can we get a little bit real here?
That's going to be difficult, given the current furor
over a decision last week by a federal circuit court in
California that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance
in public-school classrooms is a violation of the
constitutional separation of church and state, thanks to
the under God
phrase.
The decision has been denounced 99-0 by the U.S. Senate, and if anyone has praised the ruling, the fact has escaped my notice. And I'm not going to praise the court's decision. As far as I'm concerned, the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech means you have a right to recite the pledge or not recite the pledge, and I am unaware that anyone has been fined or imprisoned in recent years for failure to recite the pledge.
But that seems to evade the bigger issue: What purpose does the Pledge serve? That is, what is supposed to be accomplished by recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the schoolday?
If the idea is to produce wholesome youth who rush to the military recruiters' offices, never question authority and attend church regularly, then it was a miserable failure 40 years ago.
And if that's not the idea, then why are conservatives like our own State Sen. John Andrews so eager to require the Pledge as part of the Colorado school curriculum?
It's not as though the Pledge was a creation of George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. It wasn't
part of the Federalist Papers; indeed, it didn't emerge
until 1892 when it was published in the Youth's
Companion
magazine and proposed as part of the
celebration of the 400th anniversary of the day that
Christopher Columbus blundered into American when he was
aiming for Japan.
Most historians credit it to Edward Bellamy, a Baptist
minister. Despite his clerical calling, though, he wasn't
the one who made under God
part of the pledge --
that didn't happen until 1954, as a result of a campaign by
the Knights of Columbus, presumably to differentiate
God-fearing Americans from those atheistic commies.
Bellamy was also a socialist. Our right-thinkers have
never been in any hurry to require the recitation of other
socialist works. Just think of the alarm if our
schoolchildren started the day by reciting Workers of
the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your
chains.
But parse the Pledge as I might for any subversive socialist message, I can't find one. Granted, the Pledge does not extol the virtues of insider trading, asset looting and price rigging, but on the other hand, it does not call for public ownership of factories, mines and utilities, either.
The Pledge does stress that the United States is a republic, not a democracy or an empire, and that's a distinction which is important to conservatives like Pat Buchanan.
But the main reason that the Pledge is a pet
conservative cause, according to historian Garry Wills in
his excellent 1990 book, Under God: Religion and
American Politics,
is the phrase under God.
According to Wills, our right-thinkers would rather have
school prayer, but since the courts have thwarted them in
that crusade, they've settled for pushing the Pledge,
because they think it's important to remind children that
they're under God,
and for some reason, they can't
trust parents or churches to do that.
But before there was a Pledge, Americans prayed and
tithed. Even if the rag-tag soldiers at Valley Forge never
recited the Pledge, they did defeat the superpower of the
day. Despite their lack of a Pledge, American soldiers
performed heroically in the Mexican War, winning battle
after battle even though they were outnumbered and deep in
enemy territory. More than 600,000 Union solders were
wounded or killed in the process of keeping this one
nation, indivisible,
and not a single one of them ever
recited the Pledge.
So America managed just fine without a Pledge, and it's safe to predict that the federal circuit court's ruling will not be upheld on appeal. Thus all the uproar and chest-pounding last week was mostly for show.
The Pledge will remain enshrined in American public life. But no matter how often it is recited, it won't make much difference, one way or the other.
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