I Pledge Allegiance To Linguistic Obfuscation
There’s something almost willfully obtuse about the way people talk about the language of the Pledge of Allegiance, whichever side they’re on. Earlier this month, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the words “under God” could remain in the pledge — the first time a court had addressed the constitutionality of the phrase head-on. In the decision, the court’s majority called the pledge “a proud recitation of the ideals on which our Republic was founded.”
You’d think this was one of those culture-war curriculum battles, a debate over the syllabus of the first-period civics class. But what makes the pledge important isn’t the meaning of the words. It’s the way we’ve managed to keep them from meaning much of anything at all.
Obscurity has been built into the pledge since Francis Bellamy created it in 1892. It was ostensibly designed to rouse the patriotic attachments of schoolchildren, particularly the recent immigrants who might need extra encouragement. But Bellamy obviously wasn’t thinking of all those little Solomons, Svens and Sergios when he chose to start with the words “I pledge allegiance.” That was an arcane scrap of feudal English that had made its last appearance in the loyalty oath that Confederate soldiers had to sign to recover their rights after the Civil War. But the reference was obscure to most people even in Bellamy’s time, and the words have always been utterly opaque to schoolchildren.
Read more, and hear the full story at NPR.org
