Madison vs. the Pledge
Schooldays in the People’s Republic of Madison.

By Michael M. Uhlmann writes from Milwaukee.
October 15, 2001 2:20 p.m.

s Roger Kimball has repeatedly demonstrated (Tenured Radicals; The Long March), the Sixties Revolution didn't die; it just bunkered down in the universities, from which it has ever since launched a series of guerrilla raids against almost everything once held sacred in American culture. Most universities are thriving enclaves of Leftism, where a conservative is as common, and as welcome, as Socrates among the Taliban. Secured in their tenured redoubt — thanks to mindlessly generous benefactions from politicians and alumni — and attended by the ignorant flatteries of captive undergraduates, the professorate routinely indulge ideological fantasies that would get them punched out of any respectable saloon in America in 30 seconds flat. They claim superior (and contemptuous) knowledge of the country they live in, but in truth they have little contact with it. As in the case of the late Pauline Kael, who was astounded by Nixon's election in 1972 because everyone she knew had voted for McGovern, what university enclaves don't know about the Real America is a lot.

The fashions of the academies necessarily affect, and frequently dominate, the towns that house them. A case in point is Madison, Wisconsin, home to one of the most politically correct universities in the country. The natural political proclivities of the locale, to be sure, already reflect the progressive impulse that for a century or more has dominated Wisconsin. (While the rest of country gave us a photo finish in the 2000 presidential race, Madison gave 61 percent of its vote to Al Gore, and another 5 percent to Ralph Nader.) The University of Wisconsin's presence, however, adds a toxic dose of hard-core Leftism. And its mammoth size (41,000 students and 18,000 employees, plus their sisters, cousins, and aunts) ensures that it will infect even issues of strictly local import. Like the other university towns across the country bearing similar sobriquets, the city has earned its reputation as the People's Republic of Madison. Berkeley it ain't — but not for want of trying.

So it wasn't exactly surprising news when the Madison school board voted 3-2 on October 8 to prohibit schoolchildren from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or singing the "Star-Spangled Banner" — contrary to the mandate of a new state law. The board instead instructed schools to play an instrumental-only version of the national anthem. In offering the motion, board member Bill Keys invoked the mantra, so beloved of enlightened opinion, that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge would offend the delicate sensibilities of nonbelievers. As for the anthem, Keys was quoted as saying that "a number of people [were] opposed to the militaristic tone and phraseology" of the lyrics. Hence his fallback to the instrumental version. Just to give you a proper sense of the school board's sentiment, the two members voting against Keys did so because his motion didn't go far enough to protect "dissent."

This kind of high-mindedness, which brings deep satisfaction to the denizens of faculty clubs, is utterly incomprehensible to the inhabitants of Real America — especially since September 11. Public reaction to the Madison gag rule has been swift, fierce, and humiliating in its condemnation, both within Wisconsin and throughout the country. Calls, letters, and e-mails have been running about 100-1 against the board's action, and by Thursday the volume had overwhelmed the school district's switchboard. There is talk of a recall petition, and even Madison mayor Susan Bauman, a reliable liberal who knows how to count, distanced herself from the board's decision. Governor Scott McCallum's description of Keys and company as "oddballs" charitably understated the public mood.

In response, some board members have been struggling like drowning sailors in search of a life raft. Their action was "misinterpreted," and should not be read as reflecting their "personal opinion"; they were only "being sensitive to concerns raised by constituents"; the issue will be "reconsidered" at a special meeting scheduled for October 15; etc. School board president Calvin Williams, who originally supported the idea of eliminating the Pledge, but has been backing and filling ever since, took the prize for disingenuousness. "It was not the board's intent," he told the Capital Times, "to ban the Pledge of Allegiance from our schools. [The vote] was intended to protect our students' and staff's individual right to participate or not in the activity."

Uh-huh. The problem is that state law is already explicit about the voluntary character of the requirement. "No pupil," it reads, "may be compelled against the pupil's objections or those of the pupil's parents or guardians, to recite the pledge or to sing the anthem." One can't get much clearer than that, and in fact the Madison Metropolitan School District issued a press release on September 27 highlighting precisely that point. The school board's gesture, in short, was a gratuitous bow to the jealous idols of Leftism, who will have no patriotic gods before them.

The nation will see to it that such as these play the fool nowhere but in their own house. Roused by patriotic fervor of a sort not seen since Pearl Harbor, and led by a president who has risen magnificently to the occasion, it delivered its response last Friday: At 2:00 pm EST, schoolchildren across America rose together, placed their hands over their hearts, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. If Mr. Keys and his allies want to deny the right of children in Madison to participate in similar patriotic expression, let them; they will rue the day.

Ever since September 11, university enclaves throughout the nation have struggled in various ways, for the most part fecklessly, to revive the nostrums and slogans of the Sixties. It is increasingly apparent, however, that they speak for and to no one but themselves. Some, but not many, students will buy into the old propaganda. Vietnam was long ago and far away; but those towers came down here, our blood was shed here, on September 11. The more the left rants, the more the public will question why we're spending all that money on higher education, or for that matter on local schools that imbibe the reflexive anti-American sentiment of university common rooms. A letter to the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal put the question precisely: "Where did we dig up people capable of such mindless tripe?" A very good question indeed.