"THEY'RE TRAITORS"
Attacks on Jehovah's Witnesses
Walter Gobitas, center, with his children, William and Lillian.
On October 22, 1935, Billy Gobitas, a 10-year-old student in an eastern Pennsylvania public school, refused to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the school day. The next day Lillian, his 12-year-old sister, did the same thing. The children were Jehovah's Witnesses and believed that saluting the flag was forbidden by the Bible. In a letter to the school board, Billy wrote: "I do not salute the flag because I have promised to do the will of God.” Two weeks later, the school board voted to expel Billy and Lillian.
The Gobitas family appealed the decision and two federal courts found that the board's requirement that the children salute the flag was unconstitutional. The board appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 3, 1940, in an 8-1 decision, the Court reversed the lower courts and upheld the school board’s expulsion of the two children. Justice Felix Frankfurter stated that the interests of "inculcating patriotism was of sufficient importance to justify a relatively minor infringement on religious belief."
Justice Harlan Fisk Stone was the sole dissenter. “The guarantees of civil liberty are but guarantees of freedom of the human mind and spirit and of reasonable freedom and opportunity to express them,” Stone wrote. “The very essence of the liberty which they guarantee is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say.”
Within days, violent attacks on Witnesses took place throughout the United States. On June 9, a mob of 2,500 burned the Kingdom Hall in Kennebunkport, Maine. On June 16, Litchfield, Illinois police jailed all of that town's sixty Witnesses. On June 18, townspeople in Rawlins, Wyoming brutally beat five Witnesses; on June 22, the people of Parco, Wyoming tarred and feathered another Witness. In other towns, Witnesses were lynched and one was castrated.
The American Civil Liberties Union reported to the Justice Department that nearly 1,500 Witnesses were physically attacked in more than 300 communities nationwide. “Nothing parallel to this extensive mob violence has taken place in the United States since the days of the Ku Klux Klan in the1920’s,” the ACLU stated. One Southern sheriff told a reporter why Witnesses were being run out of town: "They're traitors; the Supreme Court says so. Ain't you heard?”
Authorities in dozens of states and communities enacted new laws or applied little- used ordinances and statutes to suppress the Witnesses’ freedoms of religion, speech and assembly. Employers and co-workers often discriminated against Witnesses in their workplaces.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt appealed for calm. Newspaper editorials and many legal scholars condemned the Court’s ruling.
The Court reversed its decision in June, 1943 in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. In a 6–3 vote, the majority echoed Justice Stone's dissent. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote for the majority, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.”
The persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses subsided in the United States although thousands were arrested during World War II for seeking religious exemption from military service. Today, Witnesses are banned from many countries and imprisoned for extremism or for their conscientious objection to military service. The majority of these countries belong to the former Soviet Union but also include Eritrea, Singapore and South Korea.
Sources:
“Re-hearing ‘Fighting Words’: Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire in Retrospect,” Shawn Francis Peters, Journal of Supreme Court History, Volume 24, Issue 3, Dec 1999
“West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943),” Kristine Bowman, Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, January 1, 2009
“The Global Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Jason Morton, Keely Bakken, Mohy Omer and Patrick Greenwalt, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, November 2020