One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (20 page)

As the House sorted through its seventeen separate bills, the Senate moved with uncharacteristic speed. Senator Homer Ferguson, a conservative Republican from Michigan, introduced the first and only pledge
proposal in that chamber just days after Docherty's sermon. A fellow Presbyterian, Ferguson claimed that the minister's advice needed to be followed to remind Americans that “our Nation is founded on a fundamental belief in God and the first and most important reason for the existence of our Government is to protect the God-given rights of our citizens.” Speeding through the Senate, his resolution won passage on May 11 and went to the House. But Rabaut, who had fought his House colleagues to secure credit for changing the pledge, refused to step aside for the Senate. The two proposals were virtually identical, with only the placement of a single comma distinguishing one from the other, but Rabaut refused to cede his ground. In a violation of congressional etiquette, he convinced the House to ignore the Senate resolution, pass his own measure in its place, and force the Senate to adopt the House law instead. Because supporters of the change wanted to have the bill signed into law by Flag Day, then quickly approaching, Ferguson graciously ignored the breach of protocol and urged his colleagues to pass Rabaut's resolution. On June 8, they did.
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On Flag Day, June 14, 1954, President Eisenhower signed the bill into law. Congressional advocates had hoped to televise the moment, but the president decided instead to sign the bill privately and issue a public statement. “From this day forward,” Eisenhower announced, “the millions of our school children will proclaim daily in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.” Members of Congress held an event of their own on the steps of the Capitol. Most of the congressional leadership attended, including Senate majority leader Bill Knowland of California and Senate minority leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. A flag given to Vice President Nixon by the American Legion during that year's “Back to God” ceremonies was raised over the Capitol building. Rabaut and Ferguson jointly led the assembled in reciting the new Pledge of Allegiance, which was followed by a lone bugler's rendition of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” CBS broadcast the event live on television, with Walter Cronkite leading the coverage of what he called “a stirring event.” “‘New glory for Old Glory'—a wonderful idea,” he said. “Maybe if we all remember to display our flags today and every special day, we will remember more clearly the traditions of freedom on which our country is founded.”
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Celebrations of the new Pledge of Allegiance continued into the following year. To mark the first anniversary, Rabaut convinced a composer best known for writing the song “Tea for Two” to set the words of the new pledge to music. On Flag Day 1955, the twenty-man Singing Sergeants choral group performed the patriotic tune on the floor of the House, accompanied by the full United States Air Force Band. More significantly, the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) made “One Nation Under God” the principal theme of its Brotherhood Week. Some ten thousand cities and towns across the country took part in the ceremonies, celebrating the theme with special religious observances, speeches at civic clubs, and film shorts in theaters. Separate from the NCCJ events, local communities highlighted the message in events of their own design. In October 1955, for instance, the annual Burbank on Parade festival featured hundreds of marching majorettes, fifteen marching bands, and seventeen parade floats, all devoted to the theme “One Nation Under God: A Portrait of American History.” By 1957, the phrase had become so popular that the Washington Pilgrimage, the group that originally rebuffed Docherty's pledge proposal as too radical, revised its stance. Not only did the Pilgrims travel to Washington under the banner of “This Nation Under God,” but they also secured a formal proclamation from the commissioners of the District of Columbia attesting that their group had been the first to hear Docherty's revolutionary idea.
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In short order, the phrase “one nation under God” quickly claimed a central position in American political culture. It became an informal motto for the country, demonstrating the widespread belief that the United States had been founded on religious belief and was sustained by religious practice. Although its creation depended a great deal on the groundwork of the Christian libertarian movement, the new pledge moved well beyond that original base of conservative Protestants to unite Americans from across the religious and political spectrum. Soon this unofficial motto was joined by an official one.

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,” “In God We Trust” had its origins in the bloodier chapters of nineteenth-century American history. Francis Scott Key's “The Star-Spangled Banner,” composed
during the shelling of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, originally contained an often-forgotten fourth stanza with the couplet “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just / And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.'” A half century later, the Civil War inspired Americans to rediscover the phrase. In 1861, a Pennsylvania minister wrote an urgent plea to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase. “From my heart I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters,” mourned Reverend M. R. Watkinson. He urged the secretary to secure “recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins” as penance. Chase seized on the idea. “Trust in God should be declared on our national coins,” he instructed the director of the US Mint. “You will cause a device to be prepared without unnecessary delay with a motto expressing in the fewest and tersest words this national recognition.” The mint offered several suggestions, but Chase ultimately selected “In God We Trust” and lobbied for legislation authorizing the new slogan. It soon appeared, on bronze 2¢ pieces, in 1864.
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Soon after, proposals to add the phrase to paper currency were made as well. Lincoln, aware that the gold supply supporting “greenbacks” was dwindling, joked that a more appropriate motto might be found in the words of the apostle Peter: “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee.” In the end, Lincoln dismissed the idea. Still, the motto quickly began to grace a wide variety of coins: the gold double eagle, eagle, and half eagle—pieces valued at $20, $10, and $5, respectively—as well as the dollar, half-dollar, quarter, and nickel. While Chase applied the motto enthusiastically, many of his successors lacked his passion. In 1883, the motto was removed from the nickel and would not return for another fifty-five years. In 1907, designs were commissioned for new $10 and $20 gold coins, accompanied by instructions from Theodore Roosevelt to drop the phrase. “My own firm conviction,” the president reasoned, “is that such a motto on coins not only does no good, but positive harm and is in effect, irreverence, which comes close to sacrilege.” By this time, however, the words had become fixed in the public's mind, and an outcry led to a quiet reversal of Roosevelt's order. From that point on, the phrase was inscribed on most of the nation's coins.
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The fortunes of “In God We Trust” took a new turn during the religious revival of the postwar era. In 1952, Ernest Kehr, the Catholic author
of a popular newspaper column for stamp collectors, came up with the idea of creating new postage bearing the phrase. Such a stamp, he argued, would be a strong warning to America's enemies that “before they can attack democracy and freedom, they first must destroy a people's faith in God.” He recruited other newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations to spread the idea and convinced national organizations such as the American Legion to pass resolutions of support as well. The campaign soon secured Congress's attention. In the Senate, two bills were introduced in late March 1953, with Democrat Mike Mansfield, a Montana Catholic, and Republican Charles Potter, a Michigan Methodist, offering nearly identical measures calling for “In God We Trust” to be added to all future stamps. (In yet another sign of the broad political support for ceremonial deism, these senators stood at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. According to ADA voting guides that year, Mansfield sided with the progressive organization on thirteen of fifteen key votes; Potter, only two.) Three days later, Representative Rabaut sought to link his name to the cause as well, introducing a bill in the House requiring that all mail be postmarked with the phrase. With Congress on board, proponents of the plan then turned their attention to postal officials. “Putting it mildly,” the
Washington Post
reported in April 1953, “Post Office Department officials have been harassed in recent weeks by a flood of letters urging that the national motto ‘In God We Trust' be placed on all future postage stamps.” This “deluge of letters,” the
New York Times
added, was so unprecedented in the history of the postal service that officials suspected a coordinated campaign lay behind it all.
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Although the press reported that Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was “not happy” about the campaign, he responded dutifully to the requests. In April 1954, he unveiled a new 8¢ stamp, a red-white-and-blue image of the Statue of Liberty with the words “In God We Trust” arrayed as a halo around the statue's head. As one account noted, the stamp claimed “a number of ‘firsts'”: the first regular-issue stamp with a religious theme and the first low-price stamp with a multicolor design. Most notably, it was the first stamp to be officially introduced by a sitting president, in what postal officials called “the biggest ceremony of its kind in the history of the United States Post Office Department.” Eisenhower, Summerfield, and Secretary of State Dulles all offered their thoughts on the
stamp, with a tri-faith selection of religious leaders—Dr. Roy Ross, executive secretary of the National Council of Churches, a leading Protestant umbrella organization; Francis Cardinal Spellman, Catholic archbishop of New York; and Dr. Norman Salit, president of the Synagogue League of America—offering blessings as well. Interest in the event was so high that Vice President Nixon hosted a luncheon for an overflow crowd of three hundred government officials and guests at the Shoreham Hotel.
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NBC carried the proceedings live on TV. “The issuance of this stamp,” Summerfield proclaimed, “symbolizes the rededication of our faith in the spiritual foundations upon which our Government and our Nation exist.” Because the postage had been issued in an amount used for international letters, he called it a “Postal Ambassador” that would travel abroad at an estimated rate of two hundred million letters a year. “We want men of good will everywhere to know that America will always remain a God-fearing, God-loving nation, where freedom and equality for all are living and imperishable concepts,” Summerfield added. In his extemporaneous remarks, Eisenhower sounded the same themes. “Throughout its history, America's greatness has been based upon a spiritual quality,” he said, noting that the new stamp offered every American a chance to spread that message far and wide. “Regardless of any eloquence of the words that may be inside the letter,” Eisenhower reflected, “on the outside he places a message: ‘Here is the land of liberty and the land that lives in respect of the Almighty's mercy to us.' And to him that receives that message, the sender can feel that he has done something definite and constructive for that individual.”
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The response to the new “In God We Trust” stamp was overwhelming. On its first day of availability, nearly nine hundred thousand stamps were sold; within weeks, twenty-five million more were distributed to post offices across the country to answer the still-growing demand. “Will the stamp set the precedent for others embodying religious belief,” worried the editors of
Church and State,
“and for other acts of government in aid of religion?” Many believed that the first regularly issued, religiously themed postage set a clear precedent. “The Post Office Department is to be complimented on the issuance of this stamp,” Rabaut noted after its unveiling, “and I hope it witnesses the adoption of a policy with regard to new issues which will make our postage stamps true symbols of the history and
traditions of our Nation.” The Catholic congressman proposed a “world peace prayer” stamp to commemorate the first-ever Marian Year that Pope Pius XII had declared for 1954. Meanwhile, his colleagues offered ideas of their own, including two Christmas stamps, a Jewish synagogue tercentenary stamp, and postage depicting the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches taking place that year in Evanston, Illinois.
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