PARSING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

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 school day?

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 America
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.