11 Things You Might Not Know About the Pledge of Allegiance

Photo: iStock/Steve Debenport

On this day in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance — you know, “I pledge allegiance to the flag …” — went live, making its first appearance in the popular kiddie magazine The Youth’s Companion. Here’s how the Pledge went from a flag-selling scheme to a celebration of Christopher Columbus to the touchstone for violent riots to the source of a bunch of court skirmishes, with a Nazi salute along the way.

1. The Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t the first pledge of allegiance. That honor rightly belongs to a simple version created by Civil War veteran Colonel George Balch, who composed it in 1885. Balch, who worked for the New York Board of Education and for a time served as governor of the Philadelphia Naval Asylum, was dedicated to teaching immigrant children loyalty and devotion to their new country. His pledge read: “We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag.” His version was adopted by a number of schools, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Grand Army of the Republic, (whose museum is in Philly), and persisted until the National Flag Conference of 1923.
2. Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist, deemed Balch’s pledge “too juvenile and lacking in dignity.” Besides, he worked in the premium department of The Youth’s Companion, a kiddie mag that had embarked on a campaign to mount a flag atop every school in the nation — flags, incidentally, that the magazine was selling to those schools. By 1892, they’d sold 26,000 of them, and the market was pretty well flooded.
3. That’s when Bellamy’s co-worker, James Upham, came up with the idea of using the forthcoming 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America to sell more flags. The Youth’s Companion called for a national Columbian Public School Celebration in conjunction with the kickoff to the World’s Columbian Exposition (a.k.a. the Chicago World’s Fair), which was set to open in October 1892. Bellamy created an official ritual for schools to follow and successfully promoted it at a national convention of school superintendents. His original Pledge? “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
4. James Upham invented a nifty salute to accompany the pledge: Kids would place their right hands over their hearts, then stretch out their arms and raise them, palm downward, toward the flag. During World War II, the second part of this salute was dropped like a hot potato because of its resemblance to the Nazi salute.
5. Bellamy toyed with the idea of incorporating the slogan of the French Revolution — “Liberté, egalité, fraternité” — in his pledge, but dropped the idea, reportedly because too many state superintendents of education opposed equality for women and blacks. Of course, he also warned against “corruption to the stock” of the nation by “alien immigrant[s] of inferior race.” Indivisible, yeah.
6. In 1923, that National Flag Conference changed Bellamy’s original wording, “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” to “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States,” so that immigrant kids wouldn’t get confused as to which flag they pledging. This wording was further expanded the following year to “the United States of America,” just to make it crystal clear to Padriac and Antonio and Casimir that they were in America now. Congress officially recognized this form of the Pledge in June of 1942: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Bellamy hated the revisions, which he thought injured “the rhythmic balance of the original composition.”
7. A few years later, in 1948, Illinois attorney Louis Albert Bowman, chaplain of the Illinois Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, added the words “under God” to the version used by that body, claiming they were taken from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Starting in 1951, the Knights of Columbus also included “under God” in the version they recited at meetings. The change spread quickly throughout the Catholic fraternal organization and set off a campaign to have Congress make the new wording official. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had only recently been baptized Presbyterian, favored the change, and Congress passed into law a bill adding the phrase to the Pledge on Flag Day of 1954.
8. Kevin Kruse, a history prof at Princeton, has argued that the insertion was an effort by corporate America to bolster the notion that capitalism is favored by the Almighty. It’s also been argued that the change resulted from angst about communism and atheism during the Cold War.
9. Those two little added words set off a cascade of court cases. The trouble actually started with a lawsuit, Minersville School District v. Gobitis (originally argued in Philadelphia), that resulted in a 1940 Supreme Court ruling that public schoolchildren who objected to the Pledge on religious grounds could be compelled to recite it. The case had been brought by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who considered the Pledge idolatrous; the plaintiff’s son’s teacher had tried to physically force him to salute the flag. The Supreme Court ruling resulted in a wave of mob violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses; a crowd of 2,500 burned the Kingdom Hall in Kennebunkport, Maine; all 60 Witnesses in Litchfield, Illinois, were put in jail; across the country, Witnesses were driven out of their homes, beaten, and even tarred and feathered. Three years later, the Supreme Court reversed its decision, holding that the First Amendment protected the right of students not to recite the Pledge. A later court decision by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals held that students should not be required to stand for the Pledge, since standing (or not standing; hello, Colin Kaepernick) is a form of free speech.
10. In 2004, the Supreme Court heard an appeal of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the words “under God’ constituted an unconstitutional endorsement of monotheism and overturned that finding on a technicality. (The man who brought the ruling wasn’t the custodial parent.) There have since been a flurry of similar suits on this subject and other aspects of the Pledge, in, among other states, Florida, Maryland, California, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey. The results, generally: “under God” is “ceremonial and patriotic” rather than religious, but student participation in the Pledge must be voluntary.
11. The Pledge continues to have political consequence more than a hundred years after its introduction. In the presidential election of 1988, George W. Bush challenged Michael Dukakis over the latter’s veto of a bill that would have required schoolchildren to recite the Pledge. And in the election of 2012, when Democrats controversially (though temporarily) left the word “God” out of their party platform, Mitt Romney hastily developed a strategy of using the words of the Pledge to criticize President Barack Obama and to lay out his opposing vision for the nation — somewhat ironic, considering that Francis Bellamy was kicked out of the Baptist ministry for preaching that Jesus was a socialist.