Paul Schmidt: A Workingman's Tenacious Pursuit of Religious Liberty
Paul Schmidt "came to work uneasy about what might happen." To avoid losing his job, he had done as much as his conscience would allow. Now on December 19, 1941, faithful to his beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness, Schmidt refused to salute the flag in order to keep his well-paying job. He...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2000
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| In: |
Journal of law and religion
Year: 2000, Volume: 14, Issue: 2, Pages: 559-578 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Paul Schmidt "came to work uneasy about what might happen." To avoid losing his job, he had done as much as his conscience would allow. Now on December 19, 1941, faithful to his beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness, Schmidt refused to salute the flag in order to keep his well-paying job. He was a journeyman window-glass cutter at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Works No. 12 in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The day before, workers at the plant had conducted a flag-salute ceremony at the end of the workday, and the company's managers encouraged all employees to attend. Schmidt and five other Jehovah's Witnesses, in an effort to avoid a conflict, left work before the ceremony started. Schmidt was first of those workers to lose his job for adhering to his beliefs; over the next several days, the other Jehovah's Witnesses were fired or resigned under pressure because others in the plant refused to work with them. On December 24, Schmidt's son, Bernard, was the last Jehovah's Witness to be fired.The firing of Paul Schmidt and his struggle to defend his religious liberty provide a valuable case study of a citizen pursuing his rights in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Schmidt, a journeyman glasscutter and a factory worker, was clearly intelligent, but not an intellectual. He was not a theologian or philosopher pondering the meaning of religious doctrine; he was an ordinary working man striving to practice his beliefs in daily life. His efforts to regain his job demonstrated how legal rights can be expanded by a non-lawyer, by someone who was concerned not with points of law, but with the pursuit of justice. He aggressively sought legal protection for his right to freely exercise his beliefs and was undaunted by the ineffectiveness of most of the avenues he pursued. Schmidt's insistent, unflagging demands resulted in an unprecedented use of administrative law to expand protection for religious liberties. |
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| ISSN: | 2163-3088 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3556580 |