How the Pledge got God post-gazette.com
The local rag picked this one up. It's all a bit ironic.
He was a Scotsman come to America, just 3 1/2 years removed from his homeland. So, unlike his schoolboy son, George Docherty didn't have The Pledge of Allegiance stamped deep in memory.
The Rev. George Macpherson Docherty, 91, proposed inserting the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance to President Eisenhower in February 1954.
As Docherty recalls it almost 49 years hence, the exchange between father and son, went something like this:
"What did you do in school today?"
"Well," second-grader Garth Docherty obliged, "we started with The Pledge of Allegiance."
So, the junior Docherty repeated it for his father -- the 1953 version, the next-to-the-current revision that read, in part, "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
"It struck me that it didn't mention God," George Docherty recounted yesterday from his home in Alexandria, Huntingdon County. "I was brought up in Scotland, and in Scotland, we sang, 'God save our gracious king.' It was everybody's belief that God was part of society." . . .
It's understandable that a recent immigrant from a country with an established church, the very country we declared our independence from, didn't quite have a handle on the establishment clause, but I don't know what Ike's excuse was. Godless commies, I suppose. |
