Supreme Court Upholds Compulsory Flag Salute – But Soon Reverses Itself
In a challenge to the mandatory flag salute law in Pennsylvania, Minersville v. Gobitis, decided on this day, the Supreme Court upheld the law, ruling against members of the Gobitas family. Soon after, however, three members of the Court had second thoughts, and said so publicly.
(The name of the family that challenged the law was actually Gobitas, but was incorrectly spelled as Gobitis and never corrected.)
In the late 1930s, as Europe and Asia headed toward war, a wave of patriotism swept over the United States. One manifestation was a number of state laws requiring school children to salute the American flag each morning. Members of the religious sect, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, argued that a compulsory salute would violate the religious prohibition against graven images. Because of their beliefs, including strident anti-Catholicism, and proselytizing tactics, (door-to-door canvassing) and parading that many found obnoxious, the Witnesses became the most hated religious group in the country. They were the target of vigilante attacks, and many state and local laws were designed to restrict their activities.
The second thoughts of the three Supreme Court justices (which remains an unprecedented event in this history of the court), lawyers for the Jehovah’s Witnesses brought a second case to the court. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnett, decided on June 14, 1943, the Court reversed itself and affirmed the rights of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. One of the striking aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision in Gobitis was the stridently patriot rhetoric of Justice Felix Frankfurter in the majority opinion (see below). It contrasts sharply with the generously tolerant opinion by Justice Robert Jackson in the Barnette decision.
Justice Frankfurter: “The preciousness of the family relation, the authority and independence which give dignity to parenthood, indeed the enjoyment of all freedom, presuppose the kind of ordered society which is summarized by our flag. A society which is dedicated to the preservation of these ultimate values of civilization may, in self-protection, utilize the educational process for inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty, whatever may be their lesser differences and difficulties.”
Learn more: Shawn Peters, Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (2000)