As a child in England and then in Canada, I was used to the relatively low-key acknowledgements of the Crown and the nation which may be why I was quite befuddled watching American TV portrayal of the in-your-face patriotic displays of the United States, especially the Pledge of Allegiance required of schoolchildren. It seemed oddly statist and even collectivist (although I didn’t know those terms at the time) for a country that constantly seemed to be patting itself on the back as the “home of the free”. I later learned that the Pledge hadn’t even been invented until nearly a century after the nation had been established (and the current version was devised and popularized by a noted utopian socialist, then adopted by Congress in 1942). Tom Mullen explores how the Pledge came about and considers the idea that it is time to drop it:
“American Flag” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0
An Atlanta, Georgia, charter school announced last week its intention to discontinue the practice of having students stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance during its schoolwide morning meetings at the beginning of each school day, opting to allow students to recite the pledge in their classrooms instead. Predictably, conservatives were immediately triggered by this “anti-American” decision, prompting the school to reverse its decision shortly after.
The uproar over periodic resistance to reciting the pledge typically originates with Constitution-waving, Tea Party conservatives. Ironically, the pledge itself is not only un-American but antithetical to the most important principle underpinning the Constitution as originally ratified.
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Then, there’s “indivisible”. One would think a federation born by its constituent states seceding from the nation to which they formerly belonged would make the point obvious enough. But the Declaration makes it explicit:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
It would be impossible to exercise that right — that duty, as the Declaration later calls it — if the republic were indivisible. The strictest constructionists of the time didn’t consider the nation indivisible. Thomas Jefferson didn’t threaten to send troops to New England when some of its states considered seceding upon his election. Quite the opposite. And in an 1804 letter to Joseph Priestly, he deemed a potential split in the union between “Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies” not only possible but “not very important to the happiness of either part.”
The people advocating “one nation, indivisible” in those days were big government Federalists like Hamilton, whose proposals to remake the United States into precisely that were flatly rejected in 1787.
Proponents of absolute, national rule like to quip this question was “settled” by the American Civil War. That’s like saying Polish independence was “settled” by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.
In fact, it is precisely the trend towards “one nation” that has caused American politics to become so rancorous, to the point of boiling over into violence, over the course of the last several decades. This continent is inhabited by a multitude of very different cultures, which can coexist peacefully if left to govern themselves. But as the “federal” government increasingly seeks to impose a one-size-fits-all legal framework over people who never agreed to give it that power, the resistance is going to get more and more strident. If there is any chance to achieve peace among America’s warring factions, a return to a more truly federal system is likely the only way.
Getting rid of the un-American pledge to the imaginary nation would be a good, symbolic start.
