Written by Todd DePastino
The history of the Pledge of Allegiance begins with the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), the nation’s first veterans organization, and winds through World War II, when the hand-over-heart salute was mandated, and the Cold War, when “under God” was added. The goal, always, was civic unity. But under what conditions? That was the problem.
The Grand Army of the Republic was made up of 410,000 members, all Civil War Union Army and Navy veterans. Together, they formed a powerful lobbying force that that could craft legislation at will and make or break Republican political candidates, including about every President from Grant to Teddy Roosevelt.
In the late 1880s, the G.A.R. launched the Schoolhouse Flag Movement that aimed to put an American flag in front of or atop every public school in the nation. A flag in every school, the veterans thought, would help knit together a nation still healing from the Civil War and assimilate the strange newcomers arriving in ever increasing numbers from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Spearheading the flag movement was Civil War veteran and G.A.R. member, Colonel George T. Balch. In 1887, Balch penned a simple Pledge to accompany the flag installations. It went like this:
We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!
In 1890, the Schoolhouse Flag Movement received an enormous boost by the most popular weekly magazine in the country, The Youth’s Companion. Over 60 years old in 1890, The Youth’s Companion cost $1.75 a year ($62 in today’s money) and featured writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Emily Dickinson. Advertisers paid fortunes to appear in its pages. And the magazine had an expert marketing chief, James B. Upham, who figured out a way to wed The Youth’s Companion to the Schoolhouse Flag Movement in a way that would increase subscriptions.
For a $10 “premium” subscription ($355 in today’s money), you would receive a nine-by-fifteen foot American flag suitable for flying outside your school. The Companion encouraged students to raise the $10 through 100 10-cent donations. After remitting payment, the student would receive a flag for their school and a magazine subscription for their family.
The magazine also held an essay contest as part of the campaign. Students were asked to submit a 600-word essay on “The Flag and the Public School.” The deadline was April 1, 1890. A 13-year-old Kansas boy named Frank E. Bellamy apparently submitted an essay with his own version of the Pledge in it. He never heard back, but was stunned to see his own words printed in The Youth’s Companion two years later. That’s a separate story.
The results of Upham’s flag drive were spectacular: in 1891 alone, the magazine mailed flags to 25,000 schools and raise $250,000 in subscriptions.
James Upham then hatched an ingenious idea to expand the campaign further: in conjunction with the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, October 12, 1892, The Youth’s Companion would orchestrate a grand nationwide celebration at all American public schools centered on the flag. Teachers and community volunteers would conduct the ceremony, and students would enact it. The day would be the living embodiment of E Pluribus Unum: out of the thousands of schools around the country would come one great uniform and simultaneous ritual drawing them together.
To lend this ambition the weight of official sanction, Upham lobbied Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to declare “Columbus Day” a national holiday and promote The Youth’s Companion‘s program as an exercise of civic unity.
This was an extraordinary undertaking, and Upham needed an expert point man to pull it off. It so happened, he knew the perfect candidate: his own minister at Bethany Baptist Church in Boston, Rev. Francis Bellamy.
Bellamy was an eloquent speaker, good writer, and forceful advocate for his beliefs. But what Bellamy believed was controversial in Gilded Age Boston. An early proponent of “Christian Socialism,” Bellamy argued that Jesus was a Socialist and capitalism was evil. Bellamy’s theology wasn’t as eccentric then as it sounds today. Lots of Americans believed that the nation’s path lay in a socialist future. Bellamy’s flock largely disagreed, and by 1891, the good reverend was eager to take a new job before his congregation booted him to the street.
Bellamy joined The Youth’s Companion and got busy lobbying educators around the country for the Columbus Day event. He spoke at the national conventions of school superintendents and the National Education Association. He chaired a national committee and began designing the ceremonial program for the big day.
(In a misguided attempt at chronological accuracy, the Columbus Day committee wanted to schedule the celebration for October 23. Columbus had landed in the Bahamas on October 12 on the Julian calendar, which translated to October 23 on the modern Gregorian calendar. But October 23 was a Sunday, not a school day. So the planners settled for October 21, the closest Friday.)
Bellamy wanted the centerpiece of the schoolhouse ceremony to be the presentation of the Stars and Stripes “over every Public School from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” with children reciting a Pledge.
There was already a Pledge, of course, Colonel George T. Balch’s “We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!” But Bellamy thought this Pledge “too juvenile and lacking in dignity.” So he and Upham began casting about for a better one.
Thirty years later, in 1923, Rev. Bellamy would spin a detailed yarn about his creative process in crafting the Pledge. Late in the day on a hot August afternoon in 1892, Bellamy said, he cocooned himself “alone” (Bellamy stressed this) in his Boston office with a pencil and stack of scratch paper. Then, he started brainstorming. He took as his starting point the word “allegiance” and decided to use the first-person-singular mode of address. He fell to the word “pledge”–better than “swear” or “vow” for schoolchildren–and then began working on a word for what the flag signified. He chose “Republic” instead of “nation” or “country” because, Bellamy said, “it distinguished the form of government chosen by the fathers and established by the Revolution.”
Bellamy described laying down his pencil and passing in imaginative review of the pantheon of American heroes, from Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton through Webster and Lincoln. He scratched furiously in his papers, tossing them away as quickly as he wrote, trying to come up with a short phrase for the sacred glue of nationality. Finally, with an overflowing trashcan at his feet, he struck upon three words: “One Nation, Indivisible.”
One more step remained. He needed one last layer of fealty, one more abstract object of devotion. The Pledge, after all, was to a flag that symbolized a Republic that embodied . . . what?
At first, Bellamy thought to use the old French Revolution slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Equality, the Christian Socialist reasoned, was too divisive. So, too, Fraternity. That left Liberty, which Bellamy considered an “undebatable” American value. Couple that with Justice–a concept rich in Socialist connotations–and Bellamy had his “clincher,” a final line “with a cheering rush.”
Bellamy claimed he then called Upham into his office, read the 22 words verbatim, and Upham immediately approved it all.
It now appears that this whole story of Bellamy’s composition was fabricated. He made up in 1923 as part of his effort to claim authorship of the Pledge.
On September 8, 1892, The Youth’s Companion used a full page to outline the program Bellamy had crafted. After the reading of a Presidential Proclamation came the order that “the Flag of the Nation be unfurled above this School.” Military Veterans on hand were then to “lead the assemblage in Three Cheers for ‘Old Glory.'” The culminating event was a formal flag salute and Pledge by the students:
At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute — right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.
This was the first iteration of the Pledge of Allegiance, as we know it.
Note the extraordinary Bellamy Salute: right arm extended palm facing down. This was a popular way of saluting the flag until 1942, when war with Nazi Germany forced Congress to mandate a hand-over-the-heart.
Note, second, that, unlike Colonel Balch’s Pledge, Bellamy’s makes not mention of God. This was deliberate. As his son would later explain, though a preacher, Bellamy believed strongly in freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.
The October 21, 1892, Columbus Day Celebration was a success by any measure. Bellamy claimed to hear 5,000 Boston schoolchildren proclaim the Pledge in unison across the city. But in a country with over 150,000 schools, only a fraction of America’s schoolchildren actually participated. It would have been impossible, as legend has it, for this one day’s ceremony to have given the whole country a new civic ritual embraced by millions of students every day thereafter.
In fact, the Columbus Day program of 1892 was quickly forgotten by most. Those who promoted the Pledge in schools continued to do so but, interestingly, Colonel Balch’s Pledge remained the most common. But there were several other Pledges circulating, each different from the other.
When the New York State Public Schools published a Manual of Patriotism in 1900, for example, it offered six different Pledges to choose from, none of them Balch’s. There wasn’t one Pledge, there were many. And the vast majority of Americans never uttered one, in or out of school.
Six Patriotic Pledges from New York State Public Schools’ “Manual of Patriotism” (1900)
The surge of patriotism accompanying the US entry into World War I prompted states and the US Congress to pass laws protecting the American flag and requiring schools to include some kind of patriotic activity in the daily classroom routine. Again, the Pledges, songs, oaths, and salutes were varied.
It was only after the war, at the behest of another veterans’ organization, the new American Legion, that efforts to create a uniform Flag Code took shape.
The First National Flag Conference, which convened in Washington, DC, on June 14, 1923 under the auspices of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution was a Who’s Who of Americanism, featuring the American Federation of Labor and the Boy Scouts of America, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Klu Klux Klan.
The conference had its work cut out for it. Not only did the nation not possess a uniform Pledge of Allegiance or Flag Code, it didn’t even have a uniform flag. The last Flag Act had been passed in 1818, and it offered only broad brushstrokes of a design, specifying numbers of stars and stripes but omitting details like the flag’s shape, proportions, or how the stars should be arranged. By the early 20th century, there were at least 66 different star patterns in use on US flags. The Army had its version of the flag, and the Navy another version.
When the National Flag Conference adjourned, the nation had a detailed and authoritative US Flag Code, which rapidly swept the country. The code included a definitive new Pledge of Allegiance based on the old Youth’s Companion‘s Pledge with one edit:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Note the conference changed Bellamy’s “my Flag” to be changed to “the Flag of the United States.” This was meant to ensure foreign-born Americans didn’t mistakenly pledge themselves to Old World flags. The next year’s Flag Conference added the words “of America” to “United States.”
This would remain our Pledge until 1954, when a Joint Resolution of Congress added the words “under God” to the US Flag Code’s Pledge, as part of a Cold War emphasis on the country’s religious foundation.
The Pledge was say today are the same words finalized over seventy years ago.
Has it brought us civic unity? Probably, at least to some degree. But unity has always been a problem in the United States and other New World countries with long histories of receiving migrants from across the globe. In Old World “ethno-states,” dominated by overwhelming majorities of people speaking the same language, worshiping in the same churches, and eating the same food, pledges of allegiance aren’t necessary. History, rather than civic ritual, binds them.
Here in the United States, even something as simple as the Pledge has the power to divide. Can schools require it? Should “under God” be included? Is it really “indivisible”? These questions and more make up a whole section of Constitutional case law that demonstrates how contentious the whole subject of national identity has always been in America.
