By Robert Azzi
In 1850, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Hester Prynne, after being seduced by the local pastor, becomes pregnant and bears a child out of wedlock. Prynne is convicted of adultery and sentenced to wear a scarlet letter, an “A,” for the rest of her life.
In 2021, New Hampshire’s Department of Education posted an online form for parents or interested parties to drop a dime to report “sinners” who might possibly be teaching the truth, teaching students, consciously or unconsciously, concepts about America’s conflicted history, about white privilege and identity, about Critical Race Theory, about any concept with which they might not agree.
Teaching truth to power.
In support of Commissioner Edelblut’s search for such sinners, Hillsborough’s Moms for Liberty New Hampshire has offered a $500 bounty for outing truth-tellers, outing them with a scarlet “E.”
In “A Talk to Teachers” in 1963, James Baldwin told educators, “It is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. . .”
Baldwin continued: “On the one hand, he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes. . . on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization. . . that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only — his devotion to white people.”
As these issues roil New Hampshire politics a local politician caught my attention when they argued: “I guarantee that most people do not even know about [New Hampshire’s] law regarding the teaching of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner. . .”
The law they referenced, 189:18 Patriotic Exercises, reads: “In all public schools of the state one session, or a portion thereof, during the weeks in which Memorial Day and Veterans Day fall, shall be devoted to exercises of a patriotic nature, which shall include a discussion of the words, meaning, and history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner.”
Great idea. I agree. As long as they discuss the whole story!
I think it’s time for all Americans to learn, from childhood, that the pledge was written in 1892 by an American Baptist Socialist minister Francis Julius Bellamy, a man once fired for preaching that Jesus was a socialist.
Students should learn that in 1943 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in one of our most important freedom of religion cases, West Virginia v. Barnette, supported Jehovah’s Witness children who declined to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because they believed that allegiance should be pledged only to God.
Most importantly, students should learn that in Barnette the Supreme Court held, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”
Nor should occur to us today.
Students should learn that the phrase “under God” was incorporated into the pledge in 1954 not because anyone was being particularly religious but because the Eisenhower Administration thought it was a clever way to help distinguish themselves from “godless” Communism.
I think it’s time for all Americans to learn, from childhood, that on March 3, 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed into law a congressional resolution that designated the “Star Spangled Banner” as our National Anthem, as long as they also learn it was written by a trader of enslaved peoples, Francis Scott Key, who in the 3rd stanza wrote, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”
Students should learn, too, that Key believed that Black people were “a distinct and inferior race” and he supported emancipation only if the enslaved were immediately shipped to Africa.
They should learn, too, as Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in “Barnette” that, “The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.”
Jackson didn’t say “except for teachers” or “except for journalists” or “except for people we don’t like or agree with” or “except for the First Amendment.”
“You must understand,” Baldwin warned educators, as they must be warned today, “that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.”
It has never stopped happening and is unrelenting, dangerous, un-American and unconstitutional.
Together, today, let us wear a scarlet letter “E” in solidarity with embattled truth-tellers.
It’s our struggle, too.
Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at [email protected].
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