The Pledge Of Allegiance Corrected

The Civil War caused a radical power shift but it never resulted in the birth of a nation. However, there was a need to unify a post war America that welcomed and put to work 20 million immigrants. School children soon began pledging allegiance every school day to a nation. The Pledge of Allegiance expressed the altered state of the union thus: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” The 13 red and white stripes stretched across the flag represent the 13 original states of the union. The stars on the flag represent the 13 original states and all subsequent states admitted to the union by bills passed by the Congress. The stars and stripes express the union’s complexity. The Pledge of Allegiance simplifies it. It states that all the states taken together are a republic. And it states that this republic is one nation. Since it is impossible logically and practically to form a nation out of 50 sovereign states and so many immigrants coming from all parts of the world, the pledge should be seen as an effort to strengthen loyalty to Washington. Old Americans and new Americans had to learn that there could be no liberty and justice for all and no union without a powerful government in Washington. A corrected pledge, one in harmony with our true history and a more authentic basis for our loyalty to Washington, would be: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republics for which it stands, one perpetual union indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” By 1959, there were 50 states and, adding the government in Washington, 51 republics. The Federal Government, although it is not a state, is certainly, with its duties outlined in the Constitution and its great powers, one republic. In the future we hope it will be the central government of a worldwide union of states and then it will be the head of something much greater than one nation.

Daniel McNeill

The Work Ethic Is Born

   After the Civil War, Americans wanted as little to do with Washington as possible and most considered it a grave moral weakness, almost a sinful condition, if anyone expected anything from it. Protestants in the south lived for years under martial law and some Protestants in the north had sent their sons to their death in Washington’s armies. Both groups knew that nothing could arise in Washington except more power for Washington.The only power they had was the power they found in themselves. Native Americans were soon surrounded by vast numbers of immigrants speaking incomprehensible languages. Over 20 million Europeans came to America between 1870 and 1910. They came from nation-states or empires and understood little about the new radical political system in America. Most native Americans understood that they had never lived in a nation and had no reason to believe they lived in one simply because Washington had gained more power by a civil war.  A common saying passed among immigrants that was equivalent to not living in a nation, “America is a free country”. As America raced on through the most extraordinary industrial revolution ever witnessed on the planet, Americans were forced to take upon themselves a new identity that gave them power and purpose in the new America. Individuals discovered “the work ethic”.The new religion that thrived in the late nineteenth-century industrial jungles preached that poverty was shameful and sinful and riches blessed. People struggled to improve their lot by making money. They ascended if they could the stairs to the divine temples where the rich lived in bliss. On their way up, like the rich, they did not look down at the millions of Americans that the savage industrial development had defeated and held prisoners in the hell fire of poverty.  In the economic arena no one was united with anyone and this lack of unity made individual values the only solid weapons against defeat and produced ironically an overall unity as everyone searched for the American dream on their own. Extreme individualism fit well with a government at the top that was like an aloof imperial government that never left its lofty perch to aid the common man.  Rich men conveyed money to key officials in Washington to keep federal-government power out of the hands of the average American and the immigrants laboring in the dog-eat-dog industrial hell. Many Americans never again took anything Washington politicians said seriously. Historians went to work to discover in American history the “new nation” that Lincoln had spoken of in his Gettysburg Address. Americans kept silent and lived by the work ethic.

Daniel McNeill

The Constitution and the Two Party System

    After the Civil War, men hungry for power worked to weaken  the sovereign powers of the states. Washington had assumed enough sovereignty to defeat in war 11 of the states. The federal army held them under martial law for 5 years. The military power that the Federal Government possessed was something that every American now reckoned with and feared. Everyone knew that Washington could use its army against whomever it wished and that it was further solidifying its power with a federal police force and federal prisons. The radical Republicans in power in Congress after Lincoln’s assassination had supported the war and now did everything possible to further reduce state sovereignty. They tried to impeach Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president, who succeeded him to the presidency. He was against the movement towards expanded federal power and wanted to restore the Washington government and the union to their prewar status. He  survived his impeachment trial in Congress by one vote. In law and in fact, the federal government was no more sovereign now than it had been before the war, but the Republican party understood with fervor that something close to full sovereignty could at last be seized by a united group of men. They expanded federal power by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution. They used the court system to strike down state laws that opposed federal policies or tried to regulate business practices.  

    Everything worked against the sovereignty of the states and towards the sovereignty of the Federal Government. Everything except the Constitution. The Constitution does not assign full sovereign power to any state. Instead it takes sovereign powers away from all the states of the union and gives sovereign powers to a central government that is not located in a state. It not only refuses to the Federal Government the status of a state but also separates its power among three branches, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The Constitution makes no government completely sovereign and forces every one of them to be democratic. The Federal Government marched ahead after the Civil War towards the status of a national state without being a state and the states, weakened by the war, believed they had lost the status as states with nearly full sovereign power that they had had before the war. The rush towards the creation of postwar America as a nation was based on the fiction that the Constitution had created a national government located in Washington D.C.. At the same time, the states suffered from the fiction that the ratification of the Constitution had left them with nearly full sovereign power when in reality such a degree of power had already been taken away from them by the Constitution. The Constitution had limited the powers of all American governments to such a radical degree that they were all doomed forever to be capable of functioning only as democracies.

   But the radical Republicans had nonetheless discovered that a political party with branches and supporters in every state could wield sovereign powers from the top down if it could establish solid political centers of power in all the states from the bottom up. The Constitution could be amended but it could never award full sovereignty to any government. The two party system became the only route towards the exercise of something close to full sovereignty by Washington. The two party system is in full force today but so is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the entire legal system of the union, both state and federal, would be nullified. Without it, all the states would become fully sovereign and separate nation-states. The Washington government would still be a non-state agency located in a stateless district but its powers would be invalid because it would no longer have the supreme power and duty of organizing states into a just union. Two political parties can continue to fight for supreme central power but without the Constitution and the Union, no power would exist that they could seize.

Daniel McNeill