Matt Soniak
Who Wrote the Pledge of Allegiance?
by Matt Soniak - January 7, 2012 - 3:25 PM

© Bettmann/CORBIS

Various people had their hands on it, adding as little as a word or two, but the credit for the bulk of the pledge goes to Francis Julius Bellamy (May 18, 1855 – August 28, 1931), a Baptist minister from New York. Bellamy had some interesting political ideas — he was a Christian Socialist who believed in the equal distribution of economic resources in accordance with the teachings of Jesus, but not the distribution of voting rights to women or immigrants.

By 1891, Bellamy was tired of his ministry and accepted a job from one of his congregants, Daniel S. Ford, owner and editor of Youth’s Companion, a nationally circulated magazine for adolescents. Bellamy was hired to help out the magazine’s premium department, where he worked on a campaign to sell American flags to public schools as a way to solicit subscriptions. By the end of the year, the magazine had sold flags to some 26,000 schools. But there were still more than a few holdouts.

They gave the campaign a shot in the arm by arranging a patriotic program for schools to coincide with the opening of the 1892 Columbian Exposition in October, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World. Part of the program would be a new salute to the flag that schoolchildren would recite in unison. That August, just a few weeks before the exposition and mere days from his deadline, Bellamy sat down and composed the pledge. He approached it in part as a response to the Civil War, which was still fresh in the national memory, and decided to focus on the ideas of allegiance and loyalty.

Bellmay’s pledge was published in the September 8, 1892, issue of Youth’s Companion as follows:

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Initially, the pledge was accompanied with a salute (seen above). According to Bellamy’s instructions, “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.” The pledge would then be recited, and 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.”

After the pledge had taken root in schools, people started fiddling with it. In 1923 a National Flag Conference, presided over by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, decided that “my flag” should be changed to “the flag of the United States,” so newly arrived immigrant children would not be confused about exactly which flag they were pledging to. The following year, the Flag Conference refined the phrase further, adding “of America.”

By 1942, the pledge’s 50th anniversary, the pledge was ingrained in schools and many states required their public school students to recite it each morning. Around this time, people decided that the extended-arm salute looked a little too much like the Nazi salute, and began to simply keep the right hand over the heart throughout the whole pledge.

One Last Tweak

By the next decade, the Knights of Columbus — a Catholic fraternal organization — had adopted a modified pledge that mentioned God for use in their own meetings, and soon began lobbying Congress with calls for everyone to do the same. Other fraternal and religious organizations backed the idea and pushed the government hard. In 1953, Rep. Louis Rabaut (D-Mich.), proposed an alteration to the pledge in a Congressional bill. Congress approved the addition of the words “under God” within the phrase “one nation indivisible” in an Act of Congress, and President Eisenhower got on board the next year at the suggestion of the pastor at his church.

The act was signed into law in 1954. Its sponsors, anticipating that it would be challenged as a breach of separation of church and state, wrote a disclaimer into the act explaining that the new phrase was not, in fact, religious. “A distinction must be made between the existence of a religion as an institution and a belief in the sovereignty of God,” they wrote. “The phrase ‘under God’ recognizes only the guidance of God in our national affairs.” Of course, not everyone bought the line, and a succession of people all over the country have been challenging the language in the courts for the last half-century.

More from mental_floss…

The Great Gettysburg Reunion of 1913
*
September 11th and the Hospitable People of Gander, Newfoundland
*
How to Fly the American Flag
*
Dogs Welcoming Home Returning Soldiers
*
Andrew Jackson’s Big Block of Cheese
*
Glory Day: Lancaster’s Brief Stint as Our Nation’s Capital

twitterbanner.jpg

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (31)

  1. I just say “Under Canada” instead of “Under God” when I am coerced into doing the Pledge. Glad my kids go to a private school where they aren’t forced to do this undemocratic nonsense.

    posted by Rob on 1-6-2012 at 3:54 pm

  2. So the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Socialist?

    I wonder how many of the current batch of Republican candidates are aware of that…

    posted by Bert on 1-6-2012 at 4:27 pm

  3. This reminded me, when was the last time any of us said the Pledge of Allegiance? I couldn’t say…

    posted by Shannin on 1-6-2012 at 5:37 pm

  4. Shannin,

    For me, it was Wednesday night – at a Cub Scout meeting.

    posted by n2y2 on 1-6-2012 at 6:17 pm

  5. I sort of got in trouble in highschool when I was a senior for refusing to stand for the pedge. It earned me a phone call home. Which just caused more trouble. Of course this is what happens in a small town where the teacher went to high school with your parents. I had to lie at home and make up some stupid story about how I didn’t feel good and just put my head down because I couldn’t really talk to my parents about how I wasn’t growing up to follow their WASP ways.

    I think the whole thing is ridiculous. No one should be pledging an alliance unless they want to. Just think about how it really looks to start a school day off with government indoctrinated pledges of loyalty. Isn’t this what we wanted to avoid in the first place?

    posted by nihil on 1-6-2012 at 6:50 pm

  6. I only had to recite one year in school (2nd grade) Never before that and after that I was in private schools so it was never recited. I don’t believe that students are forced to recite it however the right to refuse is not well known and not told to them.

    posted by Austin on 1-6-2012 at 11:43 pm

  7. A socialist creating the pledge and religious lobbyists meddling with it. Couldn’t have written a more perfect microcosm of how the whole shebang is going down the hole.

    Wish the politicians knew the true history… dearest Republicans.

    posted by sprode on 1-7-2012 at 12:22 am

  8. When reciting the Pledge in school I didn’t say the “under God” bit, just kept my lips closed and resumed with “indivisible…” And guess what? Nobody noticed, nobody cared. And I didn’t give a crap that others said “under God,” either, much less agitate for court action.

    posted by VM on 1-7-2012 at 1:28 am

  9. Good article. The Pledge is even worse than you mentioned. The Pledge of Allegiance (1892) more than resembled the Nazi salute, it was often performed exactly as the Nazi salute, and it was the origin of Nazi salutes and Nazi behavior in the USA, adopted later by the National Socialist German Workers Party. See the discoveries of the historian Dr. Rex Curry. See the shocking old photos and videos of American children doing the nazi salute as part of forced robotic chanting daily on command in government schools (socialist schools). The gesture resulted because Francis Bellamy’s initial gesture was a military salute that was then extended outward to point at the flag. Bellamy was a self-proclaimed national socialists, as was his cousin Edward Bellamy, and they influenced German national socialists, their dogma, rituals (robotic chanting in unison on command with Nazi salutes) and symbols (swastikas used as crossed S-letters for socialism). The pledge is used to brainwash worship of government/socialism as god, supreme or as god-imposed. If the schools taught the truth about the pledge or showed the photos and videos, then no one would perform it. Remove the pledge from the flag. Remove the flags from schools. Remove schools from government. End the USA’s police state.

    posted by Tiffany Bell on 1-7-2012 at 9:58 am

  10. Right, Francis Bellamy was a former Baptist minister who preached that Jesus was a socialist and advocated income taxation, central banking, nationalized education, nationalization of industry, and other tenets of socialism. His challenge was how to replace the federalist view of the country (where states and individual rights were sovereign) with a nationalist one that would pave the foundation for a central socialist government.

    The “one nation, indivisible” wording was especially important to Bellamy for achieving his vision of socialism through a consolidated, monopoly government. He even considered adding the the socialist bywords, “fraternity and equality”, but knew that state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans.

    Re-education of the public would prove difficult. But if American youth could to be taught “loyalty to the state”, it would pave the way for the socialist utopia that was described in his famous socialist cousin Edward Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward”. The place to start would need to be primary education. The public schools could be used teach blind obedience to the central state.

    They planned a “National Public School Celebration” in 1892, which was the first national propaganda campaign on behalf of the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a massive campaign that involved government schools and politicians throughout the country. The government schools were promoted, along with the Pledge, while private schools, especially parochial ones, were criticized.

    Indoctrinating kids in socialist, nationalist concepts is as un-American as you can get, the opposite of patriotic.

    posted by Hifi on 1-7-2012 at 12:24 pm

  11. I recently saw National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and realized, for the first time in I can’t even count how many viewings, that when the elderly aunt recites the pledge, she omits the words “under God.” I had never noticed because everyone else has joined in by that point and they all say it.

    posted by Paul on 1-7-2012 at 1:10 pm

  12. Wow, what a bunch of snobs you guys are. I can imagine you all sitting around with fair trade organic teas talking about how stupid, ignorant, hatemongers in the Midwest shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Snobs with kids in private schools looking down on us serfs. Yawn.

    posted by Adix on 1-7-2012 at 2:35 pm

  13. Wheres the evidence for this??

    posted by reason on 1-7-2012 at 3:08 pm

  14. I just learned some interesting history. Thank you.

    I have before focused my attention on what I regard as the government’s mistakes in adding the words “under God” to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 and in adopting the phrase “In God we trust” as a national motto in 1956. Under our Constitution, the government has no business proclaiming that “we trust” “In God.” Some of us do, and some of us don’t; each of us enjoys the freedom to make that choice; the government does not and should not purport to speak for us in this regard. Nor does the government have any business calling on its citizens to voice affirmation of a god in any circumstances, let alone in the very pledge the government prescribes for affirming allegiance to the country. The unnecessary insertion of an affirmation of a god in the pledge puts atheists and other nonbelievers in a Catch 22: Either recite the pledge with rank hypocrisy or accept exclusion from one of the basic rituals of citizenship enjoyed by all other citizens. The government has no business forcing citizens to this choice on religious grounds, and it certainly has no business assembling citizens’ children in public schools and prescribing their recitation of the pledge–affirmation of a god and all–as a daily routine.

    But that’s just me talking. The courts, on the other hand, have sometimes found ways to excuse such things, for instance with the explanation that they are more about acknowledging tradition than promoting religion per se. Draining the government’s nominally religious statements or actions of religious meaning (or at least purporting to do so) and discounting them as non-religious ritual–sometimes dubbed “ceremonial deism”–is one way the courts have sometimes found them not to conflict with the First Amendment. Ordinary folks, though, commonly see things quite differently; when most read “[i]n God we trust,” they think the Government is actually declaring that “we” as a people actually “trust” the actual “God” they believe in. If they truly understood it as merely a ritualistic phrase devoid of religious meaning, they would hardly get as exercised as they do about proposals to drop it. As you can imagine, those more interested in championing their religion than the constitutional principle of separation of church and state sometimes seek to exploit and expand such “exceptions” even if it requires they fake interest only in tradition.

    posted by Doug Indeap on 1-7-2012 at 3:52 pm

  15. The timeline is off on this article, and a crucial fact has been omitted. The Chicago World’s Fair/Colombian Exposition was not ready to open in 1892 so the date was actually moved to April 1893. By then Benjamin Harrison had been voted out of office and Grover Cleveland was U.S. president. Harrison had wanted the Pledge of Allegiance to be adopted as the national oath of loyalty. Cleveland continued this effort and on the same day the fair opened in Chicago in the spring of 1893, the Pledge of Allegiance was made the official oath at a ceremony at the Twin Lights on the Navesink Highlands in New Jersey, with various dignitaries and patriotic business leaders in attendance. There are photos and newspaper articles covering the event, which was meant to “double” as the East Coast opening of the Chicago fair. An international naval flotilla sailed past the Twin Lights as the Pledge of Allegiance was recited. It included the last working Monitor-class ironclad vessel in the U.S. Navy. The next day the ships gathered in NY harbor for an event that was captured in several engravings by Harper’s Weekly. It was the greatest collection of ships in the harbor prior to the Tall Ships at the Bicentennial.

    posted by Mark on 1-7-2012 at 3:53 pm

  16. as a country, it is always amazing to me how much we have gained from our diversity. the original signers of the Declaration of I. as well as the Constitution agreed on something yet not on others. some of our greatest contributors in America over time have come from least likely sources. yes, disagree with pieces or all of the Pledge if you’d like; but, regardless, I am still grateful for all those whom have contribute to our great country and it’s liberties regardless of creed or background. amongst sooo many this gentlemen too meant well in his own way. thank you for this bit of history.

    posted by joe on 1-8-2012 at 1:39 pm

  17. Adix, what a random and unpleasant response. What exactly are you talking about? Do you have a point, or just an agenda?

    posted by Edward on 1-9-2012 at 4:11 am

  18. Interesting, I was just driving home from Niagara Falls yesterday and passed a sign in Mt. Morris, NY that said “Birthplace of the Pledge of Allegiance”.

    posted by Dan on 1-9-2012 at 8:46 am

  19. I, from the Midwest, not rich by any stretch of the imagination and never having set a foot in private schools, happen to agree with the other posters – the pledge is ridiculous and not needed. Let’s face it, as a kid, did you even understand what it meant? Did you even get the words right? It doesn’t mean anything if it is forced to be repeated. I didn’t say it in high school.

    posted by Anne on 1-9-2012 at 9:30 am

  20. I never understood exactly why I was reciting it when I was in grade school. As I got older and understood more what I was reciting, I was even more confused as to why little children in elementary school had to pledge their allegiance. Was the country really afraid that little first-graders were going to turn on their country? I can just imagine that upon his arrest, someone from the FBI saying to a traitor, “But you pledged your allegiance…how could you? You’re really in big trouble now, Mister!”

    posted by Jim in Va Beach on 1-9-2012 at 10:45 am

  21. One time I was walking along the sidewalk in a fairly seedy part of downtown (oldtown) Tacoma, Washington, there was a brass plaque next to the entrance to one building that stated the first time ever thatthe pledge was recited to open a meeting was at that location. I do not remember the details, but it gave the date (early 1900′s i think) and the group involved, etc. Was kind of interesting.

    posted by Andrew on 1-9-2012 at 1:59 pm

  22. United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

    I think some of you are forgetting this country went through a civil war.

    posted by Morris on 1-9-2012 at 6:29 pm

  23. DEC. 22,2012…Yesterday was indeed the end of the world, but only as we had known it before, most of the life has perished. I trek now to find the others of survival then to meet my brother and his family at point Laoghaire, I can only hope they made it. As bleek as the future looks, this is our time to start over, to build from the ground up. I can only hope the others can see with open eyes, open minds and open hearts that this is a time a grand opportunity…we failed at this once we must not fail again.

    posted by CJ on 1-9-2012 at 8:52 pm

  24. All of the intellectualizing aside, looks to me like the man did it to sell a few more flags. Ah, capitalism at its best.

    posted by Steph on 1-10-2012 at 12:15 am

  25. Wow. How sad to see that so many people who comment here at MF are so lacking in affection for the traditions of their own country.

    Have you never been to an event where everywhere puts their hands on their hearts and recites the pledge? It’s very moving and a rare moment of an act done in unison by sometimes large numbers of people.

    The same holds true for singing the national anthem.

    How you cannot savor such moments is beyond me.

    Your lack of affection and respect for American traditions tells us a lot about you…

    posted by valerie on 1-10-2012 at 8:59 am

  26. @Morris

    “I think some of you are forgetting this country went through a civil war.”

    Naw, we’re not forgettin’, Bluebelly.

    posted by Earl Swagger on 1-10-2012 at 2:24 pm

  27. I say it everyday with my 1st period class who I encourage to stand and say it with conviction (not forced, encouraged). I think of soldiers who fought and died for our flag and that is why I say it proudly. I do not care that it was written by Socialist (what fun trivia!), nor do I care if people feel that “under God” is inappropriate. You may keep tight lipped during that part. I do care about democratic principles and being proud of our roots- I think it is shameful to look at this piece of history or the actual words and tear it apart into pessimistic oblivion- it isn’t about you. And there are other countries other than America that will welcome you if you do not care for it here.

    posted by Courtney on 1-11-2012 at 1:50 pm

  28. Courtney, I agree with you completely. Yes, just like our government and certain laws are not seemingly just. However, this pledge has meaning to our troops, our country and those of us that enjoy our freedoms. How many other countries could you rant about how you don’t like certain aspects of the government and/or pledges and keep the status quo? We have the right to NOT say it if you don’t like it, to even complain about how things are run…without fear of military retaliation. Family members do not suddenly go missing because of something you said against Your Country. It is a pledge. A simple pledge that gives people, starting with elementary ages a basic feeling of pride in America. Just like all of the patriotic songs, it provides us with a sense of pride in being American. Some people have no clue what that means. Especially in 3rd world countries. I am a proud American. I love this country and will say the pledge, sing the songs and hope that others will simply respect my right to do so.

    posted by Dana on 1-14-2012 at 12:10 pm

  29. I think it is ironic that a socialist preacher created the Pledge of Allegiance for the most capitalistic of reasons – to sell more flags.

    posted by Joyce on 1-18-2012 at 10:07 am

  30. “Wow. How sad to see that so many people who comment here at MF are so lacking in affection for the traditions of their own country.

    Have you never been to an event where everywhere puts their hands on their hearts and recites the pledge? It’s very moving and a rare moment of an act done in unison by sometimes large numbers of people.

    The same holds true for singing the national anthem.

    How you cannot savor such moments is beyond me.

    Your lack of affection and respect for American traditions tells us a lot about you…”

    The way that the government lack affection so that it needed to tamper with the original words at the insistence of a catholic organisation?

    I’m sorry, I do not hold affection for a ritual that brainwashes children into jingoistic ideals and coerces them to make promises they can’t understand (you do understand that a pledge IS a promise, I presume?), AND to make reference to a deity they may or may not believe in?

    It may be my nation of birth, but that doesn’t mean I have to like or respect everything about it.

    posted by Patrick on 1-31-2012 at 9:53 am

  31. To everyone here who’s complaining about the pledge being written by a socialist, remember that political views change over time. This was before socialism was associated with communism. This was when capitalism didn’t feel like such a wonderful thing for this country. We all learned in school about how the workers in the industrial revolution, including children, had terrible conditions. In comparison, socialism, a relatively new idea, seemed the moral alternative for a very religious and charitable Christian family that was the Bellamys.

    I’m not personally a fan of socialism or even religion, but Francis Bellamy wasn’t a crazy evil person or anything like that. He definitely wasn’t a Nazi. Socialism is the opposite of fascism. The salute gesture obviously isn’t original to the Nazis anyway.

    As several people have said, the Pledge was meant to be a way to demonstrate patriotism, and it still represents that for most people. Bellamy was trying to put into words what he was proud of about his country.

    The point is, look at the historical context before you judge. My grandfather was an executive, inventor, and a staunch capitalist. I think he’s a good representative of what America’s about: innovation and hard work. His grandfather also stood for American values of loyalty, patriotism, and freedom. His grandfather was Francis Bellamy.

    (Most of my info comes from an introduction to “Looking Backward,” but I don’t have the book on hand and can’t remember what historian wrote it.)

    posted by Molly on 2-12-2012 at 2:46 pm

Comment

commenting policy