Pledge written by Socialist?

Francis Bellamy (1855 - 1931), a Baptist minister, wrote the original Pledge in August 1892. He was a Christian Socialist. In his Pledge, he is expressing the ideas of his first cousin, Edward Bellamy, author of the American socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897).

Francis Bellamy in his sermons and lectures and Edward Bellamy in his novels and articles described in detail how the middle class could create a planned economy with political, social and economic equality for all. The government would run a peace time economy similar to our present military industrial complex.

The Pledge was published in the September 8th issue of The Youth's Companion, the leading family magazine and the Reader's Digest of its day. Its owner and editor, Daniel Ford, had hired Francis in 1891 as his assistant when Francis was pressured into leaving his baptist church in Boston because of his socialist sermons. As a member of his congregation, Ford had enjoyed Francis's sermons. Ford later founded the liberal and often controversial Ford Hall Forum, located in downtown Boston.

In 1892 Francis Bellamy was also a chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education in the National Education Association. As its chairman, he prepared the program for the public schools' quadricentennial celebration for Columbus Day in 1892. He structured this public school program around a flag raising ceremony and a flag salute - his 'Pledge of Allegiance.'

His original Pledge read as follows: 'I pledge allegiance to my Flag and (to*) the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.' He considered placing the word, 'equality,' in his Pledge, but knew that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans. [ * 'to' added in October, 1892. ]

Dr. Mortimer Adler, American philosopher and last living founder of the Great Books program at Saint John's College, has analyzed these ideas in his book, The Six Great Ideas. He argues that the three great ideas of the American political tradition are 'equality, liberty and justice for all.' 'Justice' mediates between the often conflicting goals of 'liberty' and 'equality.'

In 1923 and 1924 the National Flag Conference, under the 'leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the Pledge's words, 'my Flag,' to 'the Flag of the United States of America.' Bellamy disliked this change, but his protest was ignored.

In 1954, Congress after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, added the words, 'under God,' to the Pledge. The Pledge was now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer.

Bellamy's granddaughter said he also would have resented this second change. He had been pressured into leaving his church in 1891 because of his socialist sermons. In his retirement in Florida, he stopped attending church because he disliked the racial bigotry he found there.

What follows is Bellamy's own account of some of the thoughts that went through his mind in August, 1892, as he picked the words of his Pledge:

It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution...with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people...

The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the 'republic for which it stands.' ...And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation - the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. And its future?

Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, 'Liberty, equality, fraternity.' No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all...

If the Pledge's historical pattern repeats, its words will be modified during this decade. Below are two possible changes.

Some prolife advocates recite the following slightly revised Pledge: 'I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn.'

A few liberals recite a slightly revised version of Bellamy's original Pledge: 'I pledge allegiance to my Flag, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with equality, liberty and justice for all.'

Yes, Edward Bellamy was a 19th century utopian socialist. But he was not a Marxist. To today's Left, his vision of 20th century America is insufficiently collectivist and egalitarian. And then there's the little matter of his having tribute to America's republican virtue tradition by penning a pledge of allegiance. They loathe that too. We all once belonged on the Left in our youth, fired by dreams of justice and equality. We slowly realized we had nothing in common with it, coming to the inevitable understanding that in fact it was truly reactionary in devaluing individual freedom, opposing the proven genius of the free market, and undermining the virtues necessary to the existence of a truly free society. We realized then we weren't any sort of socialists or even liberals, but conservatives. And from that point on we never looked back. And America today is the far better off for it.

There is a tendency to forget that Francis Bellamy was not working in a vacuum. His pledge was part of the much larger Progressive Movement that reached its zenith with the New Deal.

There was a belief among Progressives that government could manage the affairs of society in a scientific manner to produce the Liberty and Justice they so strongly desired. Among the practical political effects of the Progressive Movement were the secret ballot, primary elections, direct election of senators, and initiative, referendum and recall. (The Progressives also fathered Prohibition.) They felt that these tools would prevent the government they had so empowered from becoming a tyranny.

One thing stood in their way: the Constitution of the United States.

However, with the Civil War still in most people's memories, the Progressives moved to de-emphasize the states in favor of the strong national sovereignty that figures such as Hamilton, Clay, Webster and Lincoln had favored. Recognizing that the Constitution's taxation policy had been a factor in the events leading up to the Civil War, the Progressives put forward the 16th Amendment and the progressive income tax to permit the national government to tax people directly and avoid the states entirely. They put forward the 17th Amendment to end the role of the Senate as the House of the States because of their memories of how the states had started the Civil War.

But they needed a change in American culture, too.

In the early years of the Republic, every citizen who paid enough property tax to be allowed to vote carried around a copy of the Constitution in either red or blue binding. (White binding was not used because most Americans worked with their hands.) If a man standing for Congress wanted to spend federal money on something, people thumbed through their pocket Constitutions to see what clause might justify such an expense. The excuse that "it's for a good cause" didn't cut it.

To get people away from the Constitution it was necessary to find another icon that would get people to rally around their federal government. This would condition people to look to their government for solutions rather than to themselves, their churches or their voluntary associations. The flag fit the bill perfectly because it had been used as a rallying point in the Civil War rather than the Constitution.

Bellamy's pledge was a stroke of genius. People now venerated the flag, and the Constitution was forgotten -- especially after Franklin Roosevelt pushed it aside because it got in the way of what he wanted to do. To get the American people to support a socialistic view of government by getting them to pledge allegiance to a symbolic piece of cloth rather than to the Constitution has to be ranked as the single greatest success of Progressives and Liberals because it led to so much more over time.

The non-stop wars of the 20th Century helped because it was now soldiers and veterans who led the patriotic cause of the flag. (It was not the Constitution that had been raised on a pole at Iwo Jima.) The oath to the Constitution taken by all public officials and soldiers had now been subordinated to the flag and everything it represented. Dennis Miller's famous 1999 comment, "The Constitution is something a bunch of farmers scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin," epitomized the Liberal view of the Founding Document. That soldiers and veterans -- and now Conservatives! -- have placed the flag above the Constitution is the supreme irony that marks the total victory of Liberalism over our Founding Document.

It's time to take this entire "under God" flap and put it aside. Our Constitution has been stolen.

Stop living in the past. FDR subverted the constitution and you will not change that, at least not in the present political climate. That was yesterday's battle, and we lost. The enemy today is globalism: the attempt to undermine national soveriegnty and to subject all peoples to the rule of unelected, unaccountable global bureacracies like the EU and the WTO. I don't like the present corporatist state of affairs any more than you, but you can rest assured that a globalist bureacratic scheme would be far worse.

Things such as the pledge that emphasize our nationhood is the best weapon we have against this new enemey. When we defeat this enemey, then maybe we can focus our efforts on restoring federalism, but right now we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted from the worse of the evils.

I disagree, we must return and fix the errors of the past, or we will continually slide straight into the future of the EU, WTO, UN. The rights of the states to sucede has never been taken away, we just didn't fight long enough or hard enough, and we were beaten by force. We need to keep fighting, educating, etc...

We are already ourselves a banana republic, and whether it be by peace of by blood, we must reinstate and reenforce indivudual liberty, and state autonomy.

Strong states only mean a weak internal Federal Government. We can still remain a "super power" with the strength of our military to the rest of the world while living truely free internally.

Otherwise, what's the point, we might as well just go ahead and join up (further than we have so far) and go along with the NWO. Why not, it is just an extension of what we are already subserviant (slaves) to.

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