Taking The Pledge

By Richard Stengel

The issues bandied about during presidential campaigns typically have about as much to do with running the country as elephants and donkeys do with party platforms. Prison furloughs, school prayer and the Indiana National Guard are not matters that often cross a President's desk. But to campaign consultants, they are "hot buttons," the so-called valence issues that help voters define a candidate's character and values. So last week, while the national debt was topping $2.5 trillion, while a growing army of beggars wandered urban streets and America's overburdened school systems prepared for the return of classes, the electorate was treated to the spectacle of George Bush forcing Michael Dukakis to debate whether elementary-school children should be compelled to recite a loyalty oath before they rattle off their ABCs.

The Bush campaign has seized on Dukakis' veto of a 1977 Massachusetts bill requiring teachers to lead their classes in the Pledge of Allegiance to paint the Governor as a dangerous liberal whose concern for civil liberties would undermine American patriotism. "Should public-school teachers be required to lead our children in the Pledge of Allegiance?" Bush asked his audience at the Republican Convention. "My opponent says no -- but I say yes." Then he led the crowd in reciting the pledge, a gesture he repeated at a flag-bedecked political rally last week. The subtext of Bush's profligate pledging was simple: "I'm more patriotic than the other guy."

Dukakis, whose campaign stops also feature generous reliance on the Stars and Stripes, responds that patriotism means respect for the law rather than ritual. "I can't imagine a President of the United States who knows that a bill is unconstitutional and proceeds to sign it anyway," he declared last week. "If the Vice President is saying that he would sign an unconstitutional bill, then in my judgment he is not fit to hold office." Escalating the hyperbole, Dukakis likened Bush's stance on the pledge to the wanton disregard for law revealed in the Iran-contra affair: "We've had a series of incidents in this Administration where laws were broken or ignored, and I don't know if this is part of a pattern." Dukakis' subtext: "I'm more responsible than the other guy."

The Republicans took another sideswipe at Dukakis' patriotism last week when Idaho Senator Steve Symms told a radio interviewer that Kitty Dukakis had been photographed "burning an American flag while she was an antiwar demonstrator during the '60s." The rumor is totally unsubstantiated, but that has not stopped zealots from spreading it. Replied Mrs. Dukakis: "It's untrue, unfounded, and there is no picture." Said Dukakis, in obvious frustration and fractured syntax: "I find oneself in the position of denying nonexistent facts."

The Republican strategy is to keep Dukakis on the defensive by attempting to shatter his sphinxlike composure. Republicans complain that Dukakis is hiding his liberal record behind a vague platform. If the G.O.P. can keep up the pressure, explains a Bush strategist, "you may just see a Michael Dukakis you don't like. He is talking in nice pictures under false pretenses, and we're not going to let him get away with that." Moreover, Bush must overcome a negative image with a third or more of the electorate -- and what better way than to stick Dukakis with some negatives of his own?

But the efforts to impugn Dukakis' patriotism are part of a larger, time- tested Republican theme: to portray the Democrats as the inheritors of intellectual doubt and malaise, the party that is soft on defense, that perceives America as being on a long, slow decline. The Republicans, by contrast, have successfully cast themselves as the party of stand-tall patriotism and vigilant anti-Communism. As the hawkish Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia put it, "If this election is between George Bush and someone who is more liberal than George McGovern, we win. If it's an election between two competent leaders, we lose."

The Pledge of Allegiance issue is the product of Bush's opposition research team. In 1977, during Dukakis' first term as Governor, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill requiring teachers to lead their classes in the pledge each day. Following standard state practice, Dukakis sought an advisory ruling on the bill from his attorney general as well as the state supreme court. Both found the bill unconstitutional: the landmark 1943 U.S. Supreme Court decision West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette held that requiring a student to recite the pledge under the threat of expulsion violated the Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech and worship.

Dukakis' veto was overridden by large margins in the legislature, but the state attorney general ruled that the law was "unenforceable." As in most states, the pledge is still recited in Massachusetts elementary schools on a voluntary basis. "Of course, the pledge is taken all the time in Massachusetts," Dukakis said last week. "We take it in ceremonies and everything else. I encourage schoolchildren to say the Pledge of Allegiance . . . That's not the issue, and the Republicans know it."

Bush professes not to buy Dukakis' explanation for his veto. "Let's face it," the Vice President said to a cheering crowd in Los Angeles, "my opponent was looking for a reason not to sign that bill. I would be looking for a reason to sign that legislation." Bush implied that Dukakis intended to prevent Massachusetts students from reciting the pledge, which was clearly not the case. He then added, "It's very hard for me to imagine that the Founding Fathers -- Samuel Adams, John Adams and John Hancock -- would have objected to teachers leading students in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States."

It is hard to imagine the Founding Fathers being concerned with the pledge at all, since it was written 116 years after they penned the Declaration of Independence. The original 22 words of the Pledge of Allegiance were drawn up in 1892 as a promotional vehicle for a Boston magazine called Youth's Companion. Composed by a staff writer for the weekly publication, which normally featured morally uplifting anecdotes for young readers, the pledge was intended for recital at ceremonies marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. According to the official program distributed by the magazine, students first acknowledged the Stars and Stripes with a military salute. Then, "the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, towards the Flag, and remains in this gesture til the end of the affirmation."

The pledge caught on, and by World War I it was routinely recited in public schools. In 1924 the words "my flag" were amended to "the flag of the United States of America." The formal stiff-arm salute was discontinued in 1942 by an act of Congress; its similarity to the Nazi gesture may have been a contributing reason. In 1954 Congress added the words "under God" after "one nation."

Although the pledge has seeped into the popular imagination as a paean to patriotism, religious groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, who are forbidden to swear secular oaths, have repeatedly gone to court to keep it from becoming a mandatory ritual. In 1972 a federal appeals court ruled that an upstate New York teacher had a right to refuse to participate in the pledge in her classroom. "Patriotism that is forced is a false patriotism," Judge Irving R. Kaufman wrote, "just as loyalty that is coerced is the very antithesis of loyalty."

Kaufman's argument no doubt appeals to Dukakis' belief in what the Founding Fathers stood for, as well as his sense of legal nicety. But Bush's aides believe they have struck a vein of patriotic gold with the issue. "It's a winner for us," says Chief of Staff Craig Fuller. "If Dukakis wants to debate the Pledge of Allegiance with us, we're happy to oblige." In the sound-bite brouhahas of a presidential campaign, the dispute over definitions of patriotism has hardly been edifying, and hardly the stuff of a significant national dialogue.

With reporting by David Beckwith with Bush and Dan Goodgame with Dukakis