The power of institutions

In Germany . . . Nazi officials banned the [Jehovah’s] Witnesses in 1933 on Hitler’s orders, for refusing to join the raised-palm salute to Nazi flags in schools and at public events. Ultimately, more than ten thousand German Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps. In response to this persecution, the leader of American Witnesses, Joseph Rutherford, denounced compulsory flag-salute laws.
. . .
Among the Witnesses who listened intently to Rutherford’s speech were Walter Gobitas and his family in [Pennsylvania]. . . . The two oldest Gobitas children, Lillian and William, were in seventh and fifth grades in October 1935.

—Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court

When Lillian and William refused to salute the flag in school, the school board expelled them for insubordination. Their father took the school district to court. The Supreme Court ruled against the Gobitas family in 1940.

Ultimately, the court reversed its decision a mere three years later, but not before its initial decision in the Gobitis case set off a wave of persecution across the United States:

Within two weeks of the Court’s decision, two federal officials later wrote, “hundreds of attacks upon the Witnesses were reported to the Department of Justice.” The Justice Department officials listed several of the most violent incidents. “At Kennebunk, Maine, the Kingdom Hall was burned. At Rockville, Maryland, the police assisted a mob in dispersing a Bible meeting. At Litchfield, Illinois, practically the entire town mobbed a company of some sixty Witnesses who were canvassing it, and it was necessary to call on the state troopers to protect members of the sect.” The federal officials reported that the “chief of police and deputy sheriff had forced a group of Witnesses to drink large doses of castor oil and had paraded the victims through the streets of Richwood, West Virginia, tied together with police department rope.” Equally horrifying, a Nebraska Witness was kidnapped, beaten, and castrated by vigilantes. The officials traced these terrorist acts directly to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Gobitis case. “In the two years following the decision,” they wrote, “the files of the Department of Justice reflect an uninterrupted record of violence and persecution of the Witnesses. Almost without exception, the flag and the flag salute can be found as the percussion cap that sets off these acts.”

—Ibid.

Never underestimate the power of institutions to unleash the bigotry of their citizens.

Photo: William and Lillian Gobitas in 1940 with their father, Walter.