On the Educational Meanings of September 11
Michael W. Apple
The volume of material that has been published on the September 11 tragedy has been extensive. While some of it has been filled with an uncritical acceptance of official views on the subject, a good deal of it has been considerably more nuanced and self-critical about the role that the United States may have played in helping to generate the conditions that led to the kinds of despair that might make some people believe that such action could be a “legitimate” response to U.S. hegemony. I do not think that there is any way to justify the acts of September 11. But I do think that they cannot be understood in isolation from the international and national contexts out of which they arose. I will leave an exploration of the international context to others.1
In this chapter, I want to do something else. I wish to focus on the most local of levels: the complicated ways in which September 11 was experienced phenomenologically by teachers such as myself, and the little known effects it had on pedagogy and on the urge to have schools participate in a complicated set of patriotic discourses and practices that swept over the United States in the wake of the disaster. Given this focus, parts of my analysis will need to be personal. I do this not because I think that I have any better purchase on reality than the reader, but because all of us may be better able to understand the lived effects of September 11 by exploring what it meant to identifiable social actors like myself. Thus, I start at the personal level, but my aim is to participate in a collective project in which people from many different social locations and positions tell the stories of what September 11 meant, and continues to mean, for their lives and educational practices.
“Damn. Who could be calling now?” My annoyance was palpable. This was one of the increasingly rare mornings that I had been able to carve out uninterrupted time to devote myself to serious writing. I ran from my computer to the phone, hoping not to lose the line of thought I was struggling with. The call was from one of my most politically active students.
“Michael, do you have your TV on? Put it on now, quickly! The World Trade Center is collapsing. It’s unbelievable. We’re in for a new McCarthy-ism! What do you think we should do!”
I put the television on. You’ll forgive me, but the first words out of my mouth were “Holy shit!” I sat. I watched. But this was decidedly not passive watching. Mesmerized is exactly the wrong word here. As the buildings collapsed, my mind was filled with an entire universe of competing and contradictory emotions and meanings. This wasn’t the O. J. slow-motion caravan. Nor was it like my experience of being a young teacher when Kennedy was assassinated. Then, I was giving a spelling test at the time the shooting was announced over the school’s loudspeaker. I kept giving the test, too shocked to do anything else. Yes, like the Kennedy experience there now was the intense shock of the surreally slow-motion plane, of the collapsing towers, and worst of all of people jumping out of buildings. But I had changed and so had the cultural assemblage around which one made interpretive sense of what was happening.
At nearly exactly the same time as I felt immense horror at the World Trade Center disaster, something else kept entering into the lenses with which I saw the images on the screen. The key word here is exactly that—screen. It seemed almost unreal. The explosions weren’t large enough or dramatic enough to seem “real.” It was as if I expected Bruce Willis to come running out of the collapsing buildings after a fireball of gargantuan proportions lit up the sky. The fireball was “too small.” The scene of the plane as it headed for the second tower—a scene broadcast over and over and over again, as if there was something of a perverse politics of pleasure at work—was too undramatic, too “unemotional” (as if it needed a musical crescendo to tell us of the impending tragedy). The only word I can use to describe that part of this welter of meanings and emotions was that even though I had prided myself on being critically conscious of the ways that our dominant commodified cultural forms worked, I too had been “Hollywoodized.” The horror of death meets The Towering Inferno. But the falling bodies always brought me back to reality. It was that sight that brought the carnage back home.
Like many people I am certain, I sat and watched—for hours. Interviews, screaming people running away, running toward, but always running—or seeking cover. Another plane—this one missing. What was its target? Then came the news that the Pentagon was hit. This created an even more complex set of interpretations and readings. Why did I have even more complicated emotions now? I had marched on the Pentagon against the Vietnam War. I had been tear-gassed there. It was the seat of American military might and power. Somehow it deserved to be a target. And yet, real people were killed there, real people who worked there, not only out of choice but because, in a U.S. economy that was what is best called military Keynesianism (use government funding to prop up the economy, but by channeling huge amounts of that money into military-related enterprises), the Pentagon and similar sites were where many of the jobs were.
Then, by that night and throughout the days and nights that followed, the ruling pundits took charge of the public expression of what were the legitimate interpretations of the disaster. The visual construction of authority on the screen and the spoken texts themselves will provide critical media analysts with enough data to once again demonstrate how power is performed in public, how the combination of somber setting, the voices of righteousness, and the tropes of patriotism and vengeance all work together to create a mighty call not for justice but for vengeance.2 (This is one of the reasons that I and many others joined forces to create the Justice not Vengeance movement in towns and cities throughout the nation.)
In understanding this, I try to remember that the media not only help us construct the nature of the problems we face, but they are powerful mobilizing tools. And everywhere one turns after September 11 there are voices of the media saying the same thing. Dissident voices are not totally silent, but the shock has affected them as well; and their messages are muted. We are at war. Terrorists are here. Freedom has taken a horrible blow. But God is on our side. We cannot afford the luxury of worrying about civil liberties. Lenient policies toward immigrants, the defunding and depowering of the FBI and the CIA, our diminished military strength, all of these and so much more were nearly the only official response. There must be one unitary reply. Track “them” down in all places at all costs. Find their supporters wherever they may be, especially if they are here. Any questions about why so many people in so many nations might have been mistrustful of— indeed hated—the US is seen as nearly unpatriotic; they could not be tolerated at this time. Oh, these questions might be worth asking, but after “we” had destroyed the threat to our very way of life that international terrorism represented. Of course, even asking the question “Why do they hate us?” is itself part of the problem. At the same time, I also realize that by constructing the binary of “we/they,” the very nature of the question establishes center/periphery relations that are fully implicated in the production of a reactionary common sense. Good/bad terms have always dominated the American political landscape, especially in terms of international relations.
How can we interpret this? Speaking very generally, the American public has little patience with the complexities of international relations and even less knowledge of the United States’ complicity in supporting and arming dictatorial regimes; nor does it have a developed and nuanced understanding of U.S. domination of the world economy, of the negative effects of globalization, of the environmental effects of its wasteful energy policies and practices, and so much more, despite the nearly heroic efforts of critics of U.S. international policy such as Noam Chomsky.3 This speaks to the reality of the selective tradition in official knowledge and in the world beyond our borders that the news portrays. Even when there have been gains in the school curriculum—environmental awareness provides a useful example—these have been either adopted in their safest forms4 or they fail to internationalize their discussions. Recycling bottles and cans is “good”; connections between profligate consumption of a disproportionate share of the world’s resources and our daily behavior are nearly invisible in schools or the mainstream media. In this regard, it is helpful to know that the majority of nonbusiness vehicles purchased in the United States are now pick-up trucks, minivans, and sport utility vehicles—a guarantee that energy conservation will be a discourse unmoored in the daily practices of the United States consumer and an even further guarantee that the relationship between U.S. economic and military strategies and the defense of markets and, say, oil resources will be generally interpreted as a fight to protect the “American Way of Life” at all costs.
I mention all this because it is important to place what happened in the wake of September 11 in a context of the “American” psyche and of dominant American self-understandings of the role the United States plays in the world.5 In the domestic events surrounding September 11, we had now become the world’s oppressed. The (always relatively weak) recognition of the realities of the Palestinians, or the poor in what we arrogantly call “the third world” were now evacuated. Almost immediately, there were a multitude of instances throughout the nation of people who “looked Arabic” being threatened and harassed on the street, in schools, and in their places of business. Less well known, but in my mind of great importance since they show the complexities of people’s ethical commitments in the face-to-face relations of daily life, were the repeated instances of solidarity including university and community demonstrations of support for Islamic students, friends, and community members. Yet these moments of solidarity, though significant, could not totally make up for such things as Islamic, Punjabi, Sikh, and other students in high schools and at universities being threatened with “retaliation” and in the case of some Punjabi secondary school students being threatened with rape as an act of “revenge” for September 11. This documents the connections between some elements of national identity and forms of masculinity, a relationship that cries out for serious analysis.6
At the universities, some teachers ignored the horror, perhaps for much the same reason I had dealt with the Kennedy assassination by simply resorting to normality as a defense against paralysis. In other classes, days were spent in discussions of the events. Sadness, disbelief, and shock were registered. But just as often, anger and a resurgent patriotism came to the fore. Any critical analysis of the events and of their roots in the hopelessness and despair of oppressed peoples—as I and a number of my colleagues put forward in our classes and seminars—had to be done extremely cautiously, not only because of the emotionally and politically charged environment even at a progressive university like my own, but also because many of us were not totally immune from some of the same feelings of anger and horror. Even for progressive educators, the events of September 11 worked off of the contradictory elements of good and bad sense we too carried within us and threatened to pull us in directions that, in other times, would have seemed to be simplistic and even jingoistic. But at least for me and the vast majority of my colleagues and graduate students, the elements of good sense won out.
Given these elements of good sense, it was clear that pedagogical work needed to be done. But this wasn’t a simple issue, since a constant question, and tension, was always on my mind. How could one condemn the murderous events, give one’s students an historical and political framework that puts these events into their larger critical context, and provide a serious forum where disagreement and debate could fruitfully go on so that a politics of marginalization didn’t occur in the classes—and at the same time not be seen as somehow justifying the attacks? While I had very strong feelings about the need to use this as a time to show the effects of U.S. global economic, political, and cultural policies, I also had strong “teacherly” dispositions that this was also not the time to engage in a pedagogy of imposition. One could not come across as saying to students or the public, “Your understandings are simply wrong; your feelings of threat and anger are selfish; any voicing of these emotions and understandings won’t be acceptable.” This would be among the most counterproductive pedagogies imaginable. Not only would it confirm the already just-near-the-surface perceptions among many people that somehow the left is unpatriotic, but such a pedagogy also could push people into rightist positions, in much the same way as I had argued in my own work about why people “became right.”7 This required a very strategic sense of how to speak and act both in my teaching and in my appearances on national media.
Take my teaching as a major example. I wanted my students to fully appreciate the fact that the U.S.-led embargo of Iraq had caused the death of thousands upon thousands of children each year that it had been in place. I wanted them to understand how U.S. policies in the Middle East and in Afghanistan itself had helped create truly murderous consequences. However, unless their feelings and understandings were voiced and taken seriously, the result could be exactly the opposite of what any decent teacher wants. Instead of a more complicated understanding of the lives of people who are among the most oppressed in the world— often as a result of Western and Northern economic and political policies8—students could be led to reject any critical contextual understanding largely because the pedagogical politics seemed arrogant. In my experiences both as an activist and a scholar, this has happened more often than some theorists of “critical pedagogy” would like to admit.9 None of us are perfect teachers, and I am certain that I made more than a few wrong moves in my attempts to structure the discussions in my classes so that they were open and critical at the same time. But I was impressed with the willingness of the vast majority of students to reexamine their anger, to put themselves in the place of the oppressed, to take their more critical and nuanced understandings and put them into action. Indeed, one of the things that was striking was the fact that a coalition of students in my classes was formed to engage in concrete actions in their own schools and communities, as well as in the university, to interrupt the growing anti-Islamic and jingoistic dynamics that were present even in progressive areas such as Madison and the University of Wisconsin.
This politics of interruption became even more important, since these complicated pedagogical issues and the contradictory emotions and politics that were produced in the aftermath of September 11 were felt well beyond the walls of the university classroom. At times, they also had the effect of radically transforming the politics of governance of schooling at a local level in communities throughout the United States. One example can serve as a powerful reminder of the hidden effects of the circulation of discourses of patriotism and “threat” as they move from the media into our daily lives.
More than 1,200 persons packed the auditorium. Flags were everywhere, in hands, on lapels, pasted on jackets. The old and trite phrase that “you could cut the tension with a knife” seemed oddly appropriate here. The tension was somehow physical; it could literally be felt, almost like an electrical current that coursed through your body. And for some people present at the hearing, the figures behind the front table deserved exactly that. They needed to be electrically shocked, indeed were almost deserving of something like the electric chair.
Months before the September 11 disaster, the seeds of this conflict had been planted in what were seemingly innocuous ways. Smuggled into the state budget bill was a bit of mischief by conservative legislators seeking to gain some arguing points for the next election. There was a section in the budget authorization bill that required that students in all public (state-funded) schools publicly recite either the Pledge of Allegiance or play the national anthem (The Star Spangled Banner, a strikingly militaristic song that has the added benefit of being nearly impossible for most people and certainly most children to sing). Even though the legislation allowed for “nonparticipation,” given the long and inglorious history of legislation of this kind in the United States, there was a clear implication that such lack of participation was frowned upon. This was something of a time bomb just waiting to explode. And it did. In the midst of the growing patriotic fervor following September 11, the Madison, Wisconsin, School Board voted to follow the law in the most minimalist way possible. For some Board members, the law seemed to be the wrong way to teach patriotism. Rote memorization was not the best approach if one actually wanted to provide the conditions for the growth of thoughtful citizenship. For others, the law was clearly a political ploy by conservative legislators to try to gain more support among right-wing voters in an upcoming election, which was felt to be a close call. And for other board members, there were a number of principles at stake. The state should not intervene into the content of local school board decisions of this type. Further, not only had the new law not been subject to close public scrutiny and serious debate, but it threatened the cherished (at least in theory) constitutional right of freedom of dissent. For all of these reasons, a majority of people on the school board voted not to have the reciting of the Pledge or the singing of the anthem.10
Within hours, the furor over their decision reached a boiling point. The media made it their major story. Prominent headlines in a local conservative newspaper stated such things as “School Board Bans Pledge of Allegiance,” even though the board had actually complied with the formal letter of the law, and even though the board had indeed held public hearings prior to their actions where many people had objected both to the law and to the saying of the Pledge and the singing of the anthem. Conservative politicians and spokespersons, colonizing the space of fear and horror over the destruction of the World Trade Center, quickly mobilized. “This could not be tolerated.” It was not only unpatriotic, but it was disrespectful both to the women and men who died in the disaster and to our military overseas. To those being mobilized, it also was a signal that the board was out of touch with “real” Americans, one more instance of elite control of schools that ignored the wishes of the “silent majority” of “freedom loving” and patriotic Americans.
The populist notes being struck here are crucial, since hegemonic alliances can only succeed when they connect with the elements of “good sense” of the people.11 Popular worries over one’s children and the schools they attend, in a time of radical corporate downsizing and capital flight, worries about social stability and cultural traditions that are constantly being subverted by the commodifying processes and logics of capital, and so much more, allow conservative groups to suture these concerns into their own antipublic agenda. Thus, rampant and fearful conservatism and patriotism are not the only dynamics at work in this situation, even though the overt issue was about the Pledge and the anthem. None of this could have happened without the growing fear of one’s children’s future and over the nature of an unstable paid labor market, and especially without the decades-long ideological project in which the right had engaged to make so many people believe that “big government” was the source of the social, cultural, and economic problems we face.12
Yet, there were more conjunctural reasons for this response as well. It is always wise to remember that while the state of Wisconsin was the home of much of the most progressive legislation and of significant parts of the socialist tradition in the United States, it also was the home of Senator Joseph McCarthy—yes, the figure for whom McCarthyism is named. Thus, behind the populist and social democratic impulses that have had such a long history here, there lies another kind of populism. This one is what, following Stuart Hall,13 I have called “authoritarian populism,” a retrogressive assemblage of values that embodies visions of “the people” that has been just as apt to be nationalistic, anti-immigrant, anticosmopolitan, anticommunist, pro-military, and very conservative in terms of religious values.14 In times of crisis, these tendencies can come to the fore. And they did, with a vengeance.
We cannot understand any of this unless we understand the long history of the struggles over the very meaning of freedom and citizenship in the United States.15 For all of the protagonists in the school board controversy, what was at stake was “freedom.” For some, it was the danger of international terrorism destroying our “free” way of life. Nothing must interfere with the defense of “American freedom,” and schools were on the front lines in this defense. For others, such freedom was in essence meaningless if it meant that citizens couldn’t act on their freedoms, especially in times of crisis. Silencing dissent, imposing forms of compulsory patriotism, these acts were the very antithesis of freedom. A hidden curriculum of compulsory patriotism would, in essence, do exactly this.
This documents an important point. Concepts such as freedom are sliding signifiers. They have no fixed meaning, but are part of a contested terrain in which different visions of democracy exist on a social field of power in which there are unequal resources to influence the publicly accepted definitions of key words. In the words of one of the wisest historians of such concepts:
The very universality of the language of freedom camouflages a host of divergent connotations and applications. It is pointless to attempt to identify a single “real” meaning against which others are to be judged. Rather than freedom as a fixed category or predetermined concept, … it [is] an “essentially contested concept,” one that by its very nature is the subject of disagreement. Use of such a concept automatically presupposes an ongoing dialogue with other, competing meanings.16
The realization of how concepts such as democracy and freedom act as sliding signifiers and can be mobilized by varying groups with varying agendas returns us to a point I made earlier, the ideological project in which the economic and cultural right have engaged. We need to understand that widely successful effects of what Roger Dale and I have called “conservative modernization” have been exactly that—widely successful.17 We are witnessing—living through is a better phrase—a social/pedagogic project to change our common sense, to radically transform our assumptions about the role of “liberal elites,” of government and the economy, about what are “appropriate” values, the role of religion in public affairs, gender and sexuality, “race,” and a host of other crucial areas. Democracy has been transformed from a political concept to an economic one. Collective senses of freedom that were once much more widespread (although we need to be careful of not romanticizing this) have been largely replaced by individualistic notions of democracy as simply “consumer choice.” While this has had major effects on the power of labor unions and on other kinds of important collective social movements, it also has created other hidden needs and desires besides those of the rational economic actor who makes calculated individual decisions in a market.18 I think that these needs and desires have also played a profound role in the mobilization of the seemingly rightist sentiment I have been describing.
Underneath the creation of the unattached individualism of the market is an almost unconscious desire for community. However, community formation can take many forms, both progressive and retrogressive. At the time of September 11, both came to the fore. The Madison School Board’s decision threatened the “imagined community” of the nation, at the same time as the nation actually seemed to be under physical threat.19 It also provided a stimulus for the formation of a “real” community, an organization to “win back” the space of schooling for patriotism. The defense of freedom is sutured into the project of defending the nation, which is sutured into a local project of forming a (rightist) counter-hegemonic community to contest the antipatriotic and ideologically motivated decisions by urban liberal elites. Thus, the need to “be with others,” itself a hidden effect of the asocial relations of advanced capitalism, has elements of good and bad sense within it. Under specific historical circumstances these elements of good sense can be mobilized in support of a vision of democracy that is inherently undemocratic in its actual effects on those people in a community who wish to uphold a vision of freedom that not only legitimates dissidence but provides space for its expression.20
In saying this, do not read me as being totally opposed to ideas of nation or of the building of imagined communities. In my mind, however, social criticism is the ultimate act of patriotism. As I say in my book Official Knowledge, rigorous criticism of a nation’s policies demonstrates a commitment to the nation itself. It says that one demands action on the principles that are supposedly part of the founding narratives of a nation and that are employed in the legitimation of its construction of particular kinds of polities. It signifies that “I/we live here” and that this is indeed our country and our flag as well. No national narrative that excludes the rich history of dissent as a constitutive part of the nation can ever be considered legitimate. Thus, in claiming that the board had acted in an unpatriotic manner, the flag-waving crowd and the partly still inchoate movement that stood behind it in my mind was itself engaged in a truly unpatriotic act, one which showed that the national narrative of freedom and justice was subject to constant “renegotiation” and struggle over its very meaning.21 The September 11 tragedy provided the conditions for such struggles at a local level, not only in the classrooms at universities such as my own but in the ordinary ways we govern our schools.
I could spend many more pages describing what happened with the school board. But, even with the forces arrayed against it, the threat to call a special election to oust all of the board members who voted against the mandatory Pledge and anthem singing stalled. The recall campaign failed by a wide margin. The conservative organizers were not able to get anywhere near the number of votes needed to force a new election. This is a crucial element in any appraisal of the lasting effects of September 11. In the face of resurgent patriotism and anger, in the face of calls for an enhanced national security state and for schools to be part of the first line of defense, at the local level in many communities wiser heads, ones with a more substantive vision of democracy, prevailed. Yet, this is not the end of this particular story. The pressure from the right did have an effect. The board left it up to each individual school to decide if and how they would enforce the mandated patriotism. This decision defused the controversy in a way that has a long history in the United States. Local decisions will prevail; but there is no guarantee that the decisions at each local school will uphold a vision of thick democracy that welcomes dissent itself as a form of patriotic commitment.
It is unclear then who really won or lost here. But one thing is clear: no analysis of the effects of September 11 on schools can go on without an understanding of the ways in which the global is dynamically linked to the local. Such an analysis must more fully understand the larger ideological work and history of the neoliberal and neoconservative project and its effects on the discourses that circulate and become common sense in our society. And no analysis can afford to ignore the contradictory needs and contradictions that this project has created.
Oh, and one last thing, a complete analysis would require that we look at the effects of the commodified products of popular cultural forms of entertainment that each of us use to “see” the momentous events taking place all around us. Critical cultural analysts have taught us many things. Yes, we participate in guilty pleasures. (How else to explain my framing of the disastrous events of September 11 in terms of Hollywood images?) And, yes, we can read any cultural form and content in dominant, negotiated, and oppositional ways. But it might be wise to remember that—at least in the case of the ways in which Michael W. Apple experienced the horrors of the planes and buildings and bodies on September 11—all three went on at the same time. Recognizing our own contradictory responses may be a first step in finding appropriate and socially critical pedagogic strategies to work with all of our students in interrupting the larger hegemonic projects— including the redefinition of democracy as “patriotic fervor”—that we will continue to face in the future.22
1 See for example, Noam Chomsky, 9–11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002).
2 Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).
3 Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).
4 Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
5 Even though I have used this word before in my text, I have put the word “American” in quotation marks for a social purpose in this sentence, since it speaks to the reality I wish to comment on at this point in my discussion. All of North, Central, and South America are equally part of the Americas. However, the United States (and much of the world) takes for granted that the term refers to the United States. The very language we use is a marker of imperial pasts and presents. See Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978) for one of the early but still very cogent analyses of this.
6 Marcus Weaver-Hightower, The Gender of Terror and Heroes? (New York: Teachers College Record, 2002).
7 Michael W. Apple, Cultural Politics and Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).
8 William Greider, One World, Ready or Not (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
9 This is one of the reasons that, even though parts of the points may have been based on only a limited reading of parts of the critical pedagogical traditions, I have some sympathy with a number of the arguments made in Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore’s Feminism and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992)—and not a lot of sympathy for the defensive overreactions to it on the part of a number of writers on “critical pedagogy.” Political/educational projects, if they are to be both democratic and effective, are always collective. This requires a welcoming of serious and engaged criticism.
10 The reality was actually a bit more complicated than such a simple act of prohibition. The Madison School Board did actually comply with the law by having the music of the anthem played over the loudspeaker. Thus, if a school was determined to, say, have the anthem, only an instrumental version was to be played. This would eliminate the more warlike words that accompanied the music. Some members of the board felt that in a time of tragedy in which so many innocent lives had been lost, the last thing that students and schools needed were lyrics that to some glorified militarism. The solution was a compromise: play an instrumental version of the anthem. This too led to some interesting and partly counterhegemonic responses. At one school, a famous Jimi Hendrix rendition of The Star Spangled Banner was played over the loudspeaker system. This version—dissonant and raucous—was part of the antiwar tradition of music during the Vietnam-era protests. This raised even more anger on the part of the “patriots” who were already so incensed about the board’s vote.
11 See Apple, Cultural Politics and Education, and Michael W. Apple, Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2001).
12 See Michael B. Katz, The Price of Citizenship (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001); Apple, Cultural Politics and Education; and Apple, Educating the “Right” Way.
13 Stuart Hall, “Popular Democratic vs. Authoritarian Populism,” in Marxism and Democracy, edited by Alan Hunt (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980).
14 See Apple, Educating the “Right” Way.
15 See Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998).
16 Ibid., xiv.
17 Roger Dale, “The Thatcherite Project in Education,” Critical Social Policy 9 (1989–90): 4–19 and Apple, Educating the “Right” Way.
18 See Apple, Educating the “Right” Way; and Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wrong America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
19 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991).
20 Of course, the conservative groups that mobilized against the board’s initial decision would claim that they were exercising dissent, that their members were also engaged in democratic action. This is true as far as it goes. However, if one’s dissent supports repression and inequality, and if one’s dissent labels other people’s actions in favor of their own constitutional rights as “unpatriotic,” then this is certainly not based on a vision of “thick” democracy. I would hold that its self-understanding is less than satisfactory.
21 In this regard, it is important to know that the Pledge of Allegiance itself has always been contested. Its words are the following: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one Nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” Yet, the phrase “under God” was added during the midst of the McCarthy period in the early 1950s as part of the battle against “God-less communists.” Even the phrase “to the flag of the United States of America” is a late addition. The Pledge was originally written by a well-known socialist and at first only contained the words “I pledge allegiance to the flag.” In the 1920s, a conservative women’s group, the Daughters of the American Republic, successfully lobbied to have the words “of the United States of America” added as part of an anti-immigrant campaign. They were deeply fearful that immigrants might be pledging to another nation’s flag and, hence, might actually be using the pledge to express seditious thoughts.
22 I would like to thank James A. Beane for his comments and for his help on the material used in this chapter.