Antipledge

It was an issue of great personal importance to young men who thought they might be drafted, and possibly killed, in a war they regarded as immoral. Janis and Rausch (1970) tested for selective exposure to propledge and antipledge communications among four different kinds of Yale students: those who immediately refused to sign the , those who refused after some deliberation, those who favored the pledge and said they might sign, and those who had already signed it.

Supporters of the pledge took a two-to-one lead over their opponents, although the contest was closer in Flint and Detroit, where antipledge votes reached almost 45 percent of all those cast.

In the antebellum years, both temperance opponents, in their antipledge writings, and reformers themselves, in their drunkard narratives , expressed deep concern about the nature of influence and worried that it could potentially interrupt its object's volition and become coercion.

This bloc of "real brothers" engages in a struggle with antipledge movements for the hearts, minds, and bodies of entering members.

In the 1970s, white antibusing activists in Boston recited an antipledge: “We will not pledge allegiance to the order of the United States District Court, nor the dictatorship for which it stands; one order, under Garrity, with liberty and justice for none.”