The Pledge

This is a photograph of American students saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Up until 1942, this was the salute given during the Pledge. Pretty startling, no?

The Pledge (and its original salute) were created in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, whose political beliefs lay somewhere between socialism and communism. (His cousin Edward Bellamy wrote a best-selling futuristic novel describing a communist utopia. The novel was called Looking Backward, and I can see why it outsold almost every other book of its time: it involved strict management of the entire population by the State, which was a very popular idea around the turn of the century.) Francis Bellamy may have been a progressive socialist concerned with equality and other noble pursuits, but he also believed this could be attained through a more powerful, controlling government. I guess the author's motivations don't matter much, since the Pledge is merely one long sentence, but I think it gives some cultural context.

The Pledge was enthusiastically adopted by the National Education Association and local school boards in the years that followed, often along with a flag-raising ceremony. For a time in the 1940s, the Pledge was legally compulsory. In 1940 the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that even Jehovah's Witnesses, whose religion forbids them from swearing allegiance to any lesser power than God, would be forced to recite the Pledge in school. However, the court promptly reversed itself in 1943, ruling that no school could compel students to recite the Pledge due to free speech protections.

The "under God" portion of the Pledge was added in 1954 in order to distinguish our Pledge from the communist Soviet Pledge, which is pretty ridiculous if you think about it. What exactly is the message? "Sure, we have our own daily loyalty oath just like them, but at least we're not godless fascists"? Why not just drop the whole silly thing?

The main concrete effect of the Pledge is to socialize children that patriotism is normal; lack of patriotism is aberrant. Furthermore, patriotism is to be expressed through communist-like spoken loyalty oaths and militaristic salutes, not through expression of freedom of speech (talk about ironic). It may not seem like a big deal, when it's just a short 30-second ritual and kids don't even consider the meaning of the words most of the time, but I consider it both an anachronism and another example of school's hostility toward autonomy.

UPDATE: There's some more information about the history of the Pledge here, at my mom's blog.