Pledge of Allegiance

Red Skelton, a veteran comic who successfully plied his trade as a sentimental clown figure in vaudeville and radio, delighted television audiences for twenty years playing characters he had perfected on radio — Clem Kadiddlehopper, Freddie the Freeloader, and the Mean Widdle Kid — on his weekly variety television program, "The Red Skelton Show."

On 14 January 1969, Skelton offered his television audience his reminiscence of an incident from his schoolboy days in Indiana.  Mr. Lasswell, Skelton's teacher, felt his students had come to regard the  Pledge of Allegiance as a daily drudgery to be recited by rote; they had lost any sense of the meaning of the words they were speaking.  As Skelton related the story, Mr. Lasswell told his class: "I've been listening to you boys and girls recite the Pledge of Allegiance all semester and it seems as though it's becoming monotonous to you.  If I may, may I recite it and try to explain to you the meaning of each word?"

Skelton then delivered to his audience (accompanied by a background of string music) a stirring version of the explanation provided to his school class by their teacher so many years earlier (and a recitation of the pledge itself), as quoted above.  Skelton's explication and rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance proved to be quite popular and widely acclaimed, and in response to public demand it was issued in print and pressed into records as pictured above.  Click here for the text of his message.  Click on the graphic above to hear a recording of his presentation.

But in 1969, the Supreme Court decisions that eliminated compulsory prayer and Bible reading in public schools as unconstitutional, Abington School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, were still fairly recent (having been handed down in 1963), and protests over American military involvement in Vietnam had rendered the American flag as much a symbol of divisiveness as of unity. Skelton, a soft-spoken, sentimental personality who ended every program with the invocation "Good night, and may God bless," added a coda to Mr. Lasswell's explanation, a lamentation of the thought that the 1954 insertion of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance might someday cause it to be considered a "prayer" (and thereby eliminated from public schools as well), and given the recent appeals court ruling that teacher-led recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional, Red Skelton's words now strike many as remarkably prescient (and perhaps more prophetic than even he imagined).

The above message as well as links deleted from this message are available on the Snopes site  at http://www.snopes.com/glurge/skelton.htm .  This site (http://www.snopes.com) is very useful in verifying fact or fiction.

Last updated: May 29, 2006