Who Wrote the Pledge of Allegiance? New Evidence Points to a 13-Year-Old Boy Whose Words Were Plagiarized

New evidence disproves Bellamy’s claim to authorship. It now appears Bellamy plagiarized the words above from an essay written by a 13-year-old Kansas boy named — get this — Frank E. Bellamy.

That’s right. The two shared almost the same exact name. That confusion probably made the plagiarism harder to detect.

Frank E. Bellamy — the boy — would go on to serve his country in the Spanish American War and die at age 40 from a service-related illness.

Rev. Francis Bellamy would go down in history, falsely, as the author of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Here’s the short of it:

In early 1890, The Youth’s Companion challenged students across the country to submit a 600-word essay on “The Flag and the Public School.” The deadline was April 1, 1890.

One-thousand-five-hundred miles away from the magazine’s Boston office, in Cherryvale, Kansas, 13-year-old Frank took up The Youth’s Companion‘s call and submitted an essay. He never heard back.

Over two years later, Frank opened the pages of the September 8, 1892 issue and saw his own words printed as the magazine’s “Salute to the Flag” for the upcoming Columbus Day celebration. Frank wrote The Youth’s Companion, pleased that the Pledge he’d included in his essay had been selected, nearly word-for-word (save “inseparable,” which The Companion had replaced with “indivisible”). Frank only asked for credit.

The Youth’s Companion responded to Frank’s letter with a terse note that all submissions were the magazine’s property.

In 1896, Frank, now a senior in high school, was in class when a neighbor, Mrs. Lillian A. Hendricks, came to instruct students in patriotism. Hendricks was leader of the Kansas Department of the Women’s Relief Corps, which was an auxiliary of the Civil War veterans organization, the Grand Army of the Republic.

Hendricks asked students to submit their thoughts on patriotism in writing. Frank, once again, wrote the words he’d sent to The Youth’s Companion six years earlier:

I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands; one nation inseparable with liberty and justice for all.

Lillian Hendricks thought Frank’s Pledge the most eloquent expression of patriotism she’d ever heard. She kept it for later use.

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. Frank, now 21 years old, joined the Army and shipped out to the Philippines. Lillian Hendricks helped launch a nationwide contest, endorsed by President William McKinley, to write a unifying Pledge of Allegiance. She dusted off Frank’s 22 words, submitted them to the judges and, Lo and Behold, Frank’s entry won.

Hendricks congratulated Frank at the railroad station upon his return from the Philippines in 1900. Now wracked with tuberculosis, Frank seemed pleased with the honor and took off to Colorado for recuperation, where he would die in 1915.

In almost every later account of The Pledge of Allegiance’s origin, Frank E. Bellamy is described as a fraud and plagiarist, a kid who had hijacked The Youth’s Companion old Pledge from the September 8, 1982’s issue, and tried to pass it off as his own during the Spanish-American War. Indeed, that Frank could fool patriot Lillian Hendricks served as proof that the Pledge was not widely known in the 1890s.

Now, it appears just the reverse is true. Frank E. Bellamy was the true author of The Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy and the staff of The Youth’s Companion were the plagiarists.

This revelation comes from Barry Popik, whom the Wall Street Journal described as “the restless genius of American etymology.” In 2022, while working on newspapers.com. Popik stumbled upon a May 21, 1892 article in the Ellis County News Republican about a flag-raising ceremony at a Victoria, Kansas. school. Here it is below:

There’s no mention in this article about the Pledge’s author. Except for “inseparable,” this Pledge is identical to the one published in The Youth’s Companion four months later, the same one Rev. Francis Bellamy swore he’d written in August 1892, more than three months after this April 30 flag raising took place.

How in the world could this phrasing have appeared in May when Francis Bellamy didn’t draft it until August?

The answer can only be Francis Bellamy didn’t write it. Someone else did. And that someone else was probably a 13-year-old Frank E. Bellamy.

But Kansans seemed to have known that all along.