[September 8th
marked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the
Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this
complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then
moving into four new ones. Leading up to a weekend post on the very salient
question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]
On two contexts
for my older son’s inspiring act of civil disobedience.
First, here’s
the relevant paragraph from my “Inspiring
Children” post from earlier this year: “Throughout his time in 5th
grade this past year, my older son took a knee during his class’s recital of
the Pledge; the idea, entirely his own, was to honor and extend Colin
Kaepernick’s anthem protest. [ED: Which is even more frustratingly salient
now that the NFL season has begun and Kaepernick remains unemployed, due at
least as much to his protests as to concerns over his quarterbacking. But he
has inspired a number of other parallel
protests from fellow NFL players during this year’s preseason, so the story
continues to evolve.] Thanks in part to Bruce’s
amazing “American Skin (41 Shots),” a shared favorite song of ours, I’ve
talked to the boys about police shootings and race in America for many years
now; but there’s talking and then there’s listening, understanding, and
developing one’s own perspective and voice. My son’s Pledge protest reflects
just how fully he’s done all of the latter, and become his own amazing young
man as a result (among many other influences of course).”
Kaepernick, his
fellow NFL protesters, and the history
of sports protests thus offer one clear context for my son’s Pledge
protests. But I wanted here to add a second such context, one directly linked
to the turn of the 20th century era in which the Pledge originated:
public schools and patriotism. While public education had been part of the United
States since long before the Revolution, it was in the late 19th
century that states began passing so-called “compulsory
laws,” making school attendance mandatory for all young Americans. By 1900,
34
states had passed such laws, with the effect that by 1910 over 70% of
American children attended school for at least some time; by 1918, every state
required at least the completion of elementary school. There were of course
many factors and arguments that led to this shaerd emphasis on mandatory
education for all American children, but prominent among them was the sense
that it was through such a shared educational experience that all young
Americans—whether they were born here or had immigrated—could become
“Americanized.” This was the goal of such parallel efforts in the era as
the settlement
house movement, and it was a clear facet of the push for mandatory education
as well.
That doesn’t
mean by any stretch that our modern public education system was designed to
brainwash the nation’s young people—it had far too much of a John
Dewey influence for that. But at the same time, a certain patriotic
reverence for the United States seems to have been a prominent part of American
public education in the early 20th century; one need only read Mary
Antin’s memoir The Promised Land
(1912) to see the effects of that educational emphasis on a young immigrant
girl (Antin frames those effects as entirely positive, to be clear). Given the
centrality of the Pledge of Allegiance to a typical public school day in 2017,
that linkage between public education and patriotic sentiment is still quite
visible a century after Antin published her celebratory book. And given my own
work, in my most
recent book and overall in
my career, on the concept of critical patriotism, it will come as no
surprise that I see my son’s Pledge protest as not only appropriate for a space
so tied to ideas of patriotism, but a vital example of applying such sentiments
and concepts to one’s own life and choices. Fortunately, his school seems to
feel the same, and allowed him to perform his patriotic protest throughout the
year.
Next Pledge post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other takes on the Pledge you’d share?
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