Published in the May 27-June 9, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
Photo courtesy Muriel Allen
Students and staff salute the flag standing in front of the Morgan Hill Elementary School in 1931. The salute was changed after World War II to the right hand on the heart.
By Marty Cheek
The Morgan Hill Historical Society has a photo in its archives that always gets a double-take when a person first views it. The image shows a line-up of elementary school children in front of their school giving with extended right arms what we now consider a “Nazi salute” during their recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag.
The photo was taken in 1931. At that time thousands of miles away from Morgan Hill in Germany, Adolf Hitler was starting his rise to dictatorial power. The same straight-arm, palm slightly up salute was adopted by the Nazi Party in the 1930s to signal obedience to Hitler. It was a mandatory salute for civilians. My mother was a child in Berlin at this time and around the same age as the children in the Morgan Hill photo. I’m sure in her kindergarten and elementary school classrooms the teachers required her to give the salute just as other children across Germany were required to do.
The Nazi salute now comes with so much political and emotional baggage that it’s a safe bet to say that you probably won’t see too many legitimate presidential candidates giving it during their campaigning for the 2016 election. A photo of, say, Hilary Clinton or Ted Cruz giving this relatively simple gesture at a political rally would no doubt go viral and shoot down all their hopes of ever getting into the White House.
Use of the salute is now a criminal offense in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovakia. So it’s astonishing for many people to think that at one time in Morgan Hill, children were daily and innocently making this gesture to the American flag at the beginning of their school days. Perhaps one or two of the children in that photo might still be alive and living in our community. No doubt they might recall that they, their teachers and classmates, and their parents never thought that there was anything sinister about the salute.
Because of the fascist connotation brought to the salute by the Nazi Party, Americans changed the arm position to be bent with the right hand covering the heart. Daily in schools today, young children in unison make their loyalty pledge to the flag. At public meetings and community events, adults also pledge their allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands.
Most people hardly consider the 31 words as they rattle them off by rote. The original pledge was composed by Baptist minister and Christian socialist Francis Bellamy in 1892 as part of a national celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to Americas. It was formally adopted by Congress in 1942 as a World War II patriotism act. During the heat of the Sen. Joseph McCarthy witch hunts when many Americans were falsely accused of communist activities and disloyalty to the United States, Congress added in 1954 the words “under God.”
That brings us to 21st Century America – particularly a classroom at San Martin/Gwinn Environmental Sciences Academy. There, one sixth-grader got highlighted recently in a May 17 story in the San Jose Mercury News regarding the activity of saying the Pledge of Allegiance at the opening of the school day. This 11-year-old child, who will remain anonymous, decided on her own in December she would no longer recite the Pledge of Allegiance with her classmates. Only her friends and the children around her knew at first. When the teacher observed her not participating, the educator grew concerned and questioned her. The teacher also phoned the girl’s mother, asking if there might be a situation at home that led to the child’s decision.
Somehow, the situation grew far more complicated than it should have. Two other students joined the child in not saying the Pledge. The Mercury News story said that teacher told the children that reciting the Pledge was an expectation much like doing homework. Principal Claudia Olaciregui and Morgan Hill Unified School Superintendent Steve Betando received a letter from the Appignani Humanist Legal Center in Washington, D.C., warning them that the school was violating the students’ constitutional rights.
I asked Betando what happened and he said that the teacher did not demand that the child make the Pledge but was concerned that there might have been an underlying reason for this decision. In the article in the Mercury News, the girl said: “I object to saying the Pledge because I’m an atheist. I kind of feel that it divides people between people who believe in god and people who don’t.”
Betando acknowledged that the child, as does every American, has the constitutional right not to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
When we salute the flag, we are not actually saying we feel a sense of loyalty to a rectangular piece of red, white and blue cloth. The flag represents the values of the republic, including liberty and justice for all. And that includes liberty for a San Martin/Gwinn elementary school girl to choose not to salute the flag in her classroom.
