Patriotism is Alive and Well - What Patriotism means to me as an American

[redcliffsw]

[Wilma]

Thanks, Jo.  These youngsters just don't remember anything, do they?   I e-mailed my sister, who is several years older than we are and she agreed with me and if I were absolutely going to have to, I was going to telephone my brother.  I wish these old people would get with the times and get e-mail.

[Catwoman]

 

[Wilma]

I started school in 1936.  If you don't mind, Diane, when did you start school? Maybe we can figure out when the change was made.

[Wilma]

OK, anybody start school between 1936 and 1950?  I have a feeling that the change to placing the hand over the breast during the flag salute was done sometime during WWII.

[larryJ]

I found this in Wikipedia.

The initial civilian salute was replaced with a hand-on-heart gesture, followed by the extension of the arm as described by Bellamy.

In the 1920s, Italian fascists adopted the Roman salute to symbolise their claim to have revitalised Italy on the model of ancient Rome. This was quickly copied by the German Nazis, creating the Nazi salute. The Nazi salute was therefore similar to the Bellamy salute, as they were both ultimately based on the Roman salute.[citation needed] This similarity led to confusion, especially during World War II. From 1939 until the attack on Pearl Harbor, detractors of Americans who argued against intervention in World War II produced propaganda using the salute to lessen those Americans' reputations. Among the anti-interventionist Americans was aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh. Supporters of Lindbergh's views would claim that Lindbergh did not support Adolf Hitler, and that pictures of him appearing to do the Nazi salute were actually pictures of him using the Bellamy salute.[1] In his Pulitzer prize winning biography Lindbergh, author A. Scott Berg explains that interventionist propagandists would photograph Lindbergh and other isolationists using this salute from an angle that left out the American flag, so it would be indistinguishable from the Hitler salute to observers.

In order to prevent further confusion or controversy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the hand-over-the-heart gesture as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in the United States, instead of the Bellamy salute. This was done when Congress officially adopted the Flag Code on 22 June 1942. [2] There was initially some resistance to dropping the Bellamy salute, for example from the Daughters of the American Revolution,[3] but this opposition died down quickly.

I believe the finger salute was just done by the scouts.

Larryj

[Wilma]

That was very nice.  Thank you, Larry.  I suspected something like that.  I didn't have any idea that it had anything to do with the Nazi, though.  Actually, I think the hand over the heart is more of a pledge than the salute was.  A pledge of devotion and allegiance.