From time to time in United States history, various loyalty oaths have been foisted on groups of Americans, demanding that they pledge they are or they aren’t supportive of a particular idea or group.
As the Civil War wound down in 1864, for instance, a bill introduced in Congress said a majority of citizens of a Confederate state that sought readmission to the union would need to take an oath of loyalty to the United States. President Abraham Lincoln, who favored a less radical plan (but still loyalty oaths taken by 10% of voters of a state) pocket vetoed the bill.
Later, seeking to stem a rise in communism in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the federal government, state governments, unions and other professional organizations put in place rules that required employees or members to sign loyalty oaths.
Shortly after that era, political philosopher Howard B. White, discussing such oaths in the journal Social Research, said they might help those who put them in place but they were “useless.” He also called them “destructive,” “frivolous” and “fraught with pride and sorrow to so many people.”
John F. Kennedy, then a young senator from Massachusetts, had similar thoughts in a letter to an education journal.