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The Pledge of Allegiance Debuts in a Boston Magazine

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Christian Socialist minister who didn’t include “God” in the original version.

And for the first 50 years, people recited the Pledge with a Fascist salute.

The Pledge of Allegiance

In 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance, a staple in school classrooms for more than 100 years, made its debut in the Youth’s Companion magazine.

Students performing the Bellamy Salute

Francis Bellamy wrote it.

He was the son of a Baptist minister, born in upstate New York on May 18, 1855 in the Great Burned-Over District. His cousin, Edward Bellamy, wrote the popular novel Looking Backward. The book promoted a utopian vision of a society in which the state owned industry and eliminated war, poverty, crime and inequality. Beginning in 1888, it inspired Nationalist Clubs, which sought to realize that socialist ideal. They claimed 500 clubs, but then disappeared around 1896.

Francis Bellamy

Like his father, Bellamy trained as a Baptist minister. And like his cousin, he embraced the idea of a society in which government controls capital and spreads the wealth equally, known then as Christian socialism.

As a young man, Francis Bellamy traveled New England preaching. Then in 1891 he landed a job with the Youth’s Companion magazine in Boston, a popular family magazine that began publishing in 1827 by the Perry Mason & Co.

Americanization

At the time, the arrival of millions of immigrants alarmed citizens born in the United States. They thought foreigners should adopt American ways, and so campaigns for “Americanization” began. Schools began to teach patriotism and American values. Manufacturers found a lucrative market creating school supplies with patriotic images like flags, eagles and George Washington.

Youth’s Companion then jumped on that bandwagon. The magazine publisher, Daniel Sharp Ford, and its promotions man, James B. Upham, launched an effort to sell flags to schools, with the idea that every school room should have one as a way to revive patriotism. Youth’s Companion then sold flags to children at cost. In one year, the promotion resulted in 25,000 schoolhouses acquiring flags.

Pledge of Allegiance Becomes Official

It was 1892, the year of the wildly successful World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Ford and Upham sought to link their flag campaign with the fair. They wanted schoolchildren to participate in a flag-related ceremony on Oct. 12, 1892, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas.

Bellamy worked on the campaign, lobbying lawmakers, governors and even President Benjamin Harrison to support a flag-raising ritual on Columbus Day. It worked. Harrison issued a declaration that said on Columbus Day 1892, The Youth’s Companion had “an official program for universal use in all the schools.”

The magazine’s publisher pondered, however, once the flag was in the room, what should be done with it? And so the pledge was born.

Bellamy sat down and wrote 22 words.

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

Jeffrey Owen Jones, in The pledge: a history of the Pledge of Allegiance, called it a “clean, easy-flowing and pleasantly cadenced piece of writing.”

“The kind of compact prose that trips off the tongue as the Pledge does is deceptively difficult to craft,” wrote Jones.

Bellamy later said he wanted to find a way to express “intelligent patriotism.” That meant awareness of the nation’s ideals as well as love of country.

The Bellamy Salute

Southington, Conn., Schoolchildren reciting the pledge of allegiance in 1942. Photo by Fenno Jacobs, courtesy Library of Congress.

Along with the pledge came the Bellamy salute — right arm raised toward the flag with palms out. For 50 years, the Bellamy salute accompanied the Pledge of Allegiance.

But then during World War II, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler adopted the Bellamy salute. They incorrectly attributed it to an ancient Roman salute.

Congress officially adopted the Pledge in 1942, along with the instructions that it be recited “by standing with the right hand over the heart.” Then in 1954, amid the fear of “godless Communism,” Congress added “under God.” Francis Bellamy, who believed in the separation of church and state, would not have approved. He died in Tampa, Fla., on Aug. 28, 1931.

This story was updated in 2023.

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England Celebrates the American Holiday, 1850

The English people — at least some of them — celebrated the American Holiday in 1850, when Frederick Law Olmsted visited the country.

Olmsted, a 28-year-old Hartford native, spent five months in England checking out public gardens. He owned a farm on Staten Island, N.Y. , that his father helped him buy. He then got interested in landscape design, developing into the pre-eminent landscape architect of his day.

Olmsted later co-designed Central Park in New York. He also headed the first Yosemite commission and led the campaign to protect Niagara Falls. He designed the U.S. Capitol Grounds and planned both the Great White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” of green space.

Young Frederick Law Olmsted

But before all that, Olmsted wrote a book about his experiences in the British Isles. He called it Walks and Talks of An American Farmer.

In the book, he wrote the English people talked about the United States every day of his visit. And he wrote that most Englishmen let bygones be bygones.

The American Holiday

I do not recollect ever to have heard any expression of hostile feeling (except from a few physical-force Chartists, with regard to slavery) towards our government or our people, and only from a few stanch church-and-state men against our principles of government.

He noted that the English Lord Brougham put into words the highest eulogy ever on Washington. And, he wrote, the Duke of Wellington lately took part in a banquet in honor of American independence. He himself attended a Fourth of July dinner in one of George III’s old palaces.

[I] saw there a member of Parliament, and other distinguished Englishmen, drink to the memory of Washington, and in honor of the day.

Olmsted wrote that he often saw the American flag flown in England “without exciting remark.” He also wrote that he knew one gentleman who regularly set it over his house on the Fourth of July. He saluted it with gun-firing and festivities. His neighbors “kindly regarded” the day as “the American Holiday,” wrote Olmsted.

This story was updated in 2021.

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The Tragedy of the Iwo Jima Flag Raising

An order to carry a radio battery and a flag up a hill involved Rene Gagnon in one of the most famous photographs ever taken: the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima.

Rene Gagnon

Gagnon, in hindsight, may have preferred to stay out of the picture.

Rene Gagnon was born on March 7, 1925 in Manchester, N.H., the son of French-Canadian parents. He worked with his mother as a millhand and as a bicycle messenger. Still a teenager, he was drafted to serve in World War II in 1943.

Gagnon joined a military police company of the Marines and ended up at Camp Tarawa in Hawaii to train for an assault on Iwo Jima. The five-week Battle of Iwo Jima was one of the fiercest and bloodiest of the War in the Pacific.

On Feb. 19, 1945 Rene Gagnon landed with the Marines on Green Beach. Four days later he participated in the most celebrated flag-raising in history.

Marines had already raised a small flag on Mount Suribachi, a sight so inspiring that some of the troops wept upon seeing it. The battalion adjutant ordered a bigger flag raised. He sent a patrol to raise the larger Stars and Stripes, but they had faulty radio communications. Gagnon received an order to take the bigger flag and the radio battery to the men.

Rene Gagnon, Celebrity

When he arrived at the summit, he saw their difficulty in raising the flag. The problem was the pole: It was a heavy Japanese water pipe. The men then asked Gagnon to lend a hand.

“So I just got into it,” he said.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the flag-raising made Gagnon famous. He and the two others who survived the battle – Marine corporal Ira Hayes and Navy corpsman John Bradley — were sent home to appear in war bond drives. Gagnon then appeared in two films and a Rose Bowl halftime event, though he didn’t enjoy the limelight. He was promoted to corporal and honorably discharged in 1946.

Raising the flag, from a color film by Bill Genaust.

Life after the war didn’t work out for him. Jobs promised never materialized. He opened a travel agency and did some accounting, but Rene Gagnon ended up working as a janitor in Manchester.

Like fellow flag raiser Ira Hayes, he became an embittered alcoholic. He died young on Oct. 12, 1979 at the age of 59. (Johnny Cash tells the story.)

According to Flags of Our Fathers, he kept an inventory of promises unkept.

“I’m pretty well known in Manchester,” he told a reporter. “When someone who doesn’t know me is introduced to me, they say ‘That was you in The Photograph?’ What the hell are you doing working here? If I were you, I’d have a good job and lots of money’.”

Investigation

The U.S. Marine Corps subsequently conducted several investigations to confirm the identities of the flag raisers. Gagnon was thought to be third from the left, with his right hand visible holding the flag. In 2019, the Marine Corps determined Cpl. Harold Keller, not Rene Gagnon, appeared in the photo.

Gagnon, though, did participate in the lowering of the first flag, and he returned the first one for safekeeping.

Rene Gagnon, forefront, retrieving the first flag.

His body now lies in Arlington National Cemetery. A monument to him in Manchester’s Victory Park includes something else he said:

Do not glorify war. There’s nothing glorious about it.

Click here for a video of the flag raising: http://bit.ly/1hzTXgV. Image of the lowering of the flag, By USMC Archives from Quantico, USAPhotograph by PFC Robert Campbell, credited in Leatherneck magazine, August 2016, page 31 – Moments after the second flag raising, February 1945, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83922564. This story was updated in 2022.

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