One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (29 page)

For the Gideons, it was a stunning blow. Bewildered by the objections to what they saw as a selfless act of kindness, they were doubly shocked that the New Jersey Supreme Court had sided against them. (Searching for an explanation forty years later, the head of the Gideons could only surmise that “Satan has been and still is vigorously opposed to this particular program.”) The organization's leaders instructed local Gideon camps to hold prayer meetings to determine if they should appeal to the US Supreme Court. The Gideons' leaders ultimately decided God wanted them to do so, but the justices refused to revisit the case in the fall of 1954. Though disheartened, the Gideons later realized the development had been a “blessing in disguise” because it meant the lower court's ruling
would be limited to New Jersey. And so they continued to distribute their edition of the New Testament in public schools across the country, discovering that legal and educational responses to their work varied considerably. In Pennsylvania, the attorney general ruled that the Gideons' work was clearly unconstitutional; in Minnesota, his counterpart found nothing wrong. A suburban school board in Connecticut reported it had “successfully resisted” the Gideons' efforts; in Dade County, Florida, officials believed there was nothing to resist.
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By the late 1950s, the Gideons' campaign provided vivid evidence of the varied legal landscape on issues of church and state. A survey of school systems across the forty-eight states showed that roughly 43 percent of districts allowed the distribution of Gideon Bibles. Small towns were most likely to accept the Gideons' gifts, with 50 percent of communities with populations under twenty-five hundred doing so. In contrast, larger cities tended to reject the offer, with only 32 percent of districts in areas of twenty-five thousand people or more allowing it. There were regional differences as well. The more rural South and Midwest proved most amenable to the program, with 55 percent and 50 percent of school systems, respectively, allowing it. In the West, 40 percent of districts sanctioned the practice, while in the more urbanized Northeast, only 26 percent did so. Regardless of location, there was always some degree of protest. In districts in the Northeast, West, and Midwest that allowed the Gideons to distribute their literature at schools, 33 percent, 32 percent, and 25 percent, respectively, still reported some form of organized objection. Even in the overwhelmingly Protestant South, 8 percent of school districts with Gideons' programs faced protests of some kind.
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As the controversies made clear, public schools became a contentious site in the postwar rise of religious nationalism. In the eyes of those seeking to link piety and patriotism, schools were the obvious place to begin. Many already employed some type of traditional daily prayers or organized Bible readings, and often both. In the postwar era, new practices—such as the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance recited by millions of schoolchildren each morning—had been adopted with little objection. But as the religious revival moved from the national level, where vaguely defined ceremonial deism held sway, to individual schools and districts, it necessarily took forms that were at once more concrete
and more complicated. Educators at the state and local level required religious programs to be as detailed as the rest of their curricula, and as a result, they soon found themselves involved in controversies that national leaders had managed to avoid. While prominent voices in political and popular culture had encouraged a return to prayer in general, state-level administrators felt the need to choose or compose specific prayers for all schoolchildren to recite as one. Likewise, while religious leaders had urged Americans to turn to the Bible of their choosing, local educators had to pick a particular version, invariably offending one sect or another. And so, as they attempted to channel the “very vague religion” of the Eisenhower era into specific programs, school officials across the country sparked local controversies that, in turn, had national ramifications. The concept of “one nation under God” had seemed a simple, elegant way to bring together the citizens of a broadly religious country, but at the local level, as the Gideons had discovered, Americans were anything but united.

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1951,
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Board of Regents, a thirteen-member body that oversaw all public education in the state, issued a statement on “Moral and Spiritual Training in the Schools.” The formal proclamation, passed unanimously, began with a claim that had become increasingly common as the postwar revival swept across the country: “Belief in and dependence upon Almighty God was the very cornerstone upon which our Founding Fathers buil[t].” The regents reasoned that New York public schools were obligated to teach students how faith had informed American history and culture in the past and how it still influenced US politics and civics in the present. Studying America's “moral and spiritual heritage” would ensure that schoolchildren were “constantly confronted with the basic truth of their existence.” To underscore the idea that all things in America originated with religion, the regents recommended that each school day likewise begin with prayer. But rather than leave religion in the realm of generalities, as most national leaders did, the board composed a new prayer they hoped would be said during the daily flag ceremonies in New York schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our Country.”
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The board members believed this prayer—commonly known as the “Regents' Prayer”—was merely the beginning. “These troubled times,” the board announced in 1954, “call for the teaching of ‘Piety and Virtue' in the schools, and of that dependence upon Almighty God so clearly recognized in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of the State of New York, and in the pronouncements of the great leaders of our country.” (“Just where the Federal Constitution so clearly recognizes dependence on Almighty God, the Regents did not say,” noted the theologian William Lee Miller, “but in these troubled times that may not be the kind of question one should ask.”) In March 1955, the regents urged the state's schools to make students study documents that emphasized American traditions of freedom, individual rights, and “liberty under God” in general. As examples, they suggested the Declaration of Independence, several speeches made by President Eisenhower, and the new dollar bill with the motto “In God We Trust.”
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The regents' recommendations were simply that. They had no power to impose the prayer or their other proposals but hoped that local authorities would adopt them. To their delight, many did. In June 1955, for instance, the New York City superintendents drafted a “guiding statement” meant to detail both how and why its teachers should foster “moral and spiritual values” in their classrooms and thereby help “identify God as the ultimate source of natural and moral law.” These administrators offered specific suggestions for spreading religion into every corner of the curriculum. Science and math teachers were told that “consideration of the vastness and the splendor of the heavens, the marvels of the human body and mind, the beauty of nature, the mystery of photosynthesis, the mathematical structure of the universe . . . cannot do other than lead to humbleness before God's handiwork.” Even in mechanical shop classes, the administrators argued, “the composition of metals, the grain and the beauty of wood, the ways of electricity and the characteristic properties of the materials used, invariably give rise to speculation about the planning and the orderliness of the natural world and the marvelous working of a Supreme Power.”
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The reactions to the proposals of the New York City superintendents demonstrated how seemingly benign efforts at “strengthening belief in God” could instead foment religious tensions. The Catholic archdiocese of
New York offered enthusiastic support for the superintendents' statement. The Protestant Council, meanwhile, found itself divided on the matter and ultimately issued mixed comments that, on balance, were fairly critical. The New York Board of Rabbis was solidly opposed. Some teachers, it warned, would doubtlessly be “missionaries for their own religious convictions,” while others, perhaps worse, would “become advocates of a watered-down, meaningless ‘public school religion,' glossing over differences among religious groups that stem from vitally important convictions.” Civil libertarians echoed these arguments. The New York ACLU complained that the superintendents' statement “substitutes for the belief in God a vague theism to which, it implies, we all subscribe. The fact is, we do not. Adherence to denominational beliefs is not casual or incidental. It is fundamental—including markedly different beliefs as to the nature of the godhead. To obscure this fact is to intrude secular misinterpretation of a matter that lies at the very heart of religious faith.” Stung by the criticism, the superintendents withdrew their original statement and substituted what reporters called a heavily “diluted” version the following year.
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Elsewhere in the state, local school officials showed less ambition than the New York City superintendents. Rather than offer schools their own guidelines for religious instruction, they simply adopted the Regents' Prayer. Within a year of the regents' call to action, more than three hundred school districts had already implemented the prayer in their schools. Most of these districts were fairly small, containing just one or two schools, but large metropolitan systems in Syracuse, Rochester, and Utica also took part. In a state with three thousand districts in all, however, the number employing the prayer represented a distinct minority. Most local officials, according to one reporter, saw it as a “hot potato” that invited trouble. In the suburbs of Long Island, for instance, the Board of Education for Great Neck found that that the regents' statement on “moral and spiritual training” had stirred up such “strong differences of opinion” that the board felt compelled to produce a six-page, single-spaced report detailing at great length all the rationales presented both for and against the proposal. The arguments in favor tended to be little more than sweeping generalizations about America's religious heritage and reliance on majority rule. The arguments against, meanwhile, showed a more lawyerly attention to specific details in the state constitution and recent rulings
of the Supreme Court. The pro-prayer camp in Great Neck dismissed such objections. “The board should act in accordance with the dictates of its moral, rather than legal, conscience, and decide the question upon its merits,” they insisted. “The courts, if called upon, can be trusted to pass upon the legal question.”
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In neighboring Herrick Union Free School District, parents and educators found themselves similarly torn, but in a struggle that ultimately wound up changing the nation. The boundaries of their district, like most on Long Island, had been set almost arbitrarily, well before the postwar surge in development. Rather than representing a cohesive community, the district encompassed disparate parts of Albertson, New Hyde Park, Roslyn, Roslyn Heights, and Manhasset. It contained only two elementary schools and a single junior high at the start of the 1950s, though a senior high was soon added. As the student population soared, board member Mary Harte became worried about the lack of prayer in the district's curriculum. A devout Catholic, Harte was a longtime resident of the area whose children had attended Herrick public schools. She believed religious instruction was essential to education and repeatedly urged her colleagues to adopt the Regents' Prayer. In 1956, the proposal failed in a 3–2 vote; in 1957, her motion couldn't even win a second. When new members joined the board in 1958, Harte brought the matter to a vote again. It passed by a margin of 4–1.
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As had happened in nearby New York City, the Regents' Prayer, intended to unify members of different faiths, only served to drive them apart. The board's vote broke along sectarian lines, with three of the four votes in favor coming from Catholics, and the fourth from a Christian Scientist married to a Catholic. The vote against, meanwhile, came from the only Jewish member of the board. These divisions repeated in the general population, as Catholic families who had lived there for generations voiced resentment about recent Jewish arrivals, grumbling about “these people who are coming out here and trying to run our schools.” As the Regents' Prayer widened rifts in the district at large, it caused problems in personal relationships as well. Harte had won her first election to the school board thanks largely to the hard work of campaign manager Dan Lichtenstein and publicity director Lenore Lyons. But when Harte used her position to put prayer in the public schools four years later, she
found both of her former allies lined up on the other side, as two of the five plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the board.
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Complaints against the board's actions had arisen immediately. When the district newsletter reported its decision, Ruth Lichtenstein and her husband, Dan, were “horrified.” Prayer was a private matter for them. “It was a reversal of everything I had ever thought,” Ruth remembered. “We never had prayers in my school.” Another Jewish mother, Frances Roth, recalled that the news sparked a “spontaneous reaction” across the district. Several parents objected at the school board's next meeting but found officials “resistant, even obstinate.” The issue was settled, declared board president William J. Vitale Jr., and would not be subject to any public referendum. In response, Larry Roth decided to act. The vice president of a small plastics manufacturer and a man with “a passion for left-wing causes,” he placed an ad in the local paper announcing a lawsuit against the school board and inviting other parents to join. Fifty expressed interest, but when it came time to file, only five remained—Lenore Lyons, a Unitarian; Monroe Lerner, an Ethical Culturist; and Larry Roth, Dan Lichtenstein, and Steven Engel, all Jews. Because his name came first alphabetically, the case was called
Engel v. Vitale.
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