The Pledge of Allegiance: History and Meaning for Students

From an early age, students are taught the Pledge of Allegiance to recite each morning at school. The Pledge of Allegiance is a brief patriotic oath of loyalty to the American flag and the United States. It is most commonly recited in schools, but has also been adopted as an official formality by certain political bodies and at ceremonies conferring citizenship. While many see this as a form of patriotism, there are some very problematic aspects of the Pledge. This article aims to dissect the history, evolution, and controversies surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance, encouraging students to understand its complexities and form their own informed opinions.

Origins and Evolution of the Pledge

The origins of the modern Pledge of Allegiance are disputed. Most sources officially credit Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist and former Baptist reverend who emphasized the humanistic values in Christianity, with developing it in August 1892. Francis Bellamy, who was a Baptist minister, a Christian socialist, and the cousin of Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), described the text of Balch's pledge as "too juvenile and lacking in dignity." His version was published the following month in the magazine the Youth's Companion 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." However, rumors long circulated that those words were derived from an earlier version, possibly written by an unrelated student in Kansas named Frank E. Bellamy for a contest organized by the same magazine.

In 1892, Francis Bellamy revised Balch's verse as part of a magazine promotion surrounding the World's Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas. Bellamy, the circulation manager for The Youth's Companion magazine, helped persuade then-president Benjamin Harrison to institute Columbus Day as a national holiday and lobbied Congress for a national school celebration of the day. Bellamy's version of the pledge is largely the same as the one formally adopted by Congress 50 years later, in 1942. According to author Margarette S. Miller, this campaign was in line both with Upham's patriotic vision as well as with his commercial interest. According to Miller, Upham "would often say to his wife: 'Mary, if I can instill into the minds of our American youth a love for their country and the principles on which it was founded, and create in them an ambition to carry on with the ideals which the early founders wrote into The Constitution, I shall not have lived in vain.'" In 1957, Kenneth Keating instigated a report by Congress' Legislative Research Service that it was Francis Bellamy, and not James B.

Regardless of its exact origins, it was Francis Bellamy's version that popularized the pledge. He later noted that he had been inspired to replace Balch's salute with a more formal vow of allegiance. Bellamy and Youth's Companion editor James B. Upham wanted to increase national pride ahead of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, an event for which the magazine was selling American flags to schools. This patriotic marketing effort had several layers of historical context, in addition to the growing wave of immigrants and efforts to promote assimilation. One was lingering tensions from the Civil War (1861-65); many southerners were required to take an "Oath of Allegiance" to the Union before they were given their political rights. The war also partly inspired the word "indivisible" in the pledge. Meanwhile, socialists like Bellamy worried that capitalism promoted the selfishness of the individual over the welfare of the group.

The Pledge was supposed to be quick and to the point. Bellamy designed it to be recited in 15 seconds. Francis Bellamy and Upham had lined up the National Education Association to support the Youth's Companion as a sponsor of the Columbus Day observance and the use in that observance of the American flag. By June 29, 1892, Bellamy and Upham had arranged for Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to announce a proclamation making the public school flag ceremony the center of the Columbus Day celebrations. This arrangement was formalized when Harrison issued Presidential Proclamation 335. In his recollection of the creation of the Pledge, Francis Bellamy said, "At the beginning of the nineties patriotism and national feeling was [sic] at a low ebb. The patriotic ardor of the Civil War was an old story … As the World's Columbian Exposition was set to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, Upham sought to link the publication's flag drive to the event, "so that every school in the land … would have a flag raising, under the most impressive conditions." Bellamy was placed in charge of this operation and was soon lobbying "not only the superintendents of education in all the States, but [he] also worked with governors, Congressmen, and even the President of the United States."

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Bellamy considered the words "country, nation, or Republic," choosing the last as "it distinguished the form of government chosen by the founding fathers and established by the Revolution. Bellamy considered the slogan of the French Revolution, Liberté, égalité, fraternité ("liberty, equality, fraternity"), but held that "fraternity was too remote of realization, and … [that] equality was a dubious word." Concluding "Liberty and justice were surely basic, were undebatable, and were all that any one Nation could handle if they were exercised for all. After being reviewed by Upham and other members of The Youth's Companion, the Pledge was approved and put in the official Columbus Day program. An alternative theory is that the pledge was submitted to an 1890 patriotic competition in The Youth's Companion by a 13-year-old Kansas schoolboy, coincidentally named Frank E. Bellamy. A May 1892 newspaper from Hays, Kansas reported on an April 30 school flag-raising that was accompanied by an almost identical pledge. This ceremony would have taken place months before Francis supposedly created the pledge during August of that same year, according to his own testimony. The discovery was made by the noted amateur lexicographer Barry Popik, who collaborated with Fred Shapiro, an associate library director at the Yale School of Law. Shapiro previously attributed the pledge to Francis Bellamy in The Yale Book of Quotations, which he edits, but now regards Popik's discovery as favoring Frank E.

Changes to the Pledge

Notably, this version of the Pledge of Allegiance did not mention God. The pledge did not immediately become a defining text in the American experience, but over time it was widely adopted in American public schools. It also evolved over the years.

1923: The National Flag Conference called for the words "my Flag" to be changed to "the Flag of the United States," so that foreign-born people would not confuse loyalties between their birth countries and the US.
1924: The words "of America" were added a year later.
1942: The US Congress included the Pledge to the Flag in the United States Flag Code (Title 36) for the first time.
1945: The codified Pledge to the Flag was officially renamed the Pledge of Allegiance.
1954: The Cold War subsequently drove another revision of the text. Aiming to underscore American opposition to the state-sanctioned atheism of the communist Soviet Union, groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Knights of Columbus began including "under God" in the pledge. Congress voted to add the phrase to the official text of the pledge in the Flag Code and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into law.

The Bellamy Salute

Swearing of the Pledge is accompanied by a salute. An early version of the salute, adopted in 1887, accompanied the Balch pledge and was known as the Balch Salute. In 1892, Francis Bellamy created what was known as the Bellamy salute to accompany his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance. It started with the hand outstretched toward the flag, palm down, and ended with the palm up. Many decades later, during World War II, controversy arose because of the similarity between the Bellamy salute and the Nazi salute, which was adopted in Germany in the 1930s (although, unlike the Bellamy salute, this one did not end with the palm up). As a result, the US Congress stipulated that the hand-over-the-heart gesture would instead be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem, thereby replacing the Bellamy salute.

Meaning and Significance

The Pledge of Allegiance is a staple of the American experience. Whether it be reciting it at the beginning of the school day or at a major league baseball game, our communities engage with it. The Pledge of Allegiance is a brief patriotic oath of loyalty to the American flag and the United States. It is most commonly recited in schools, but has also been adopted as an official formality by certain political bodies and at ceremonies conferring citizenship. Its purpose is to unify citizens around a cultural symbol, the flag, meant to encapsulate the country's ideals of unity, liberty, and justice, while demonstrating allegiance to the nation and the American way of life.

All states except Nebraska, Hawaii, Vermont, and Wyoming require a regularly scheduled recitation of the pledge in public schools. Many states give a variety of exemptions from reciting the pledge, such as California which requires a "patriotic exercise" every day, which would be satisfied by the Pledge, but it is not enforced.

Controversies and Legal Challenges

However, the pledge has been the focus of much public debate and numerous court cases. Groups have variously sought to remove the pledge from classrooms, to keep it, or to revise it. Even before the words "under God" were added, mandates that the pledge be recited in public schools (which became more common during World War I) incited controversy at times.

Controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance comes from several positions. One centers on the issue of patriotism. Proponents of the pledge often argue that the educational system is responsible for teaching patriotism to students, and that the pledge engenders a sense of belonging and loyalty as it prepares them to be full-fledged citizens. Some religious groups, however, refrain from saying the pledge because their first loyalty is to God rather than to a nation. Other opponents criticize the pledge on political grounds, protesting against what they see as overly nationalist sentiment or government hypocrisy, for example. An even more prominent aspect of debate centers on the invocation of God in the official text of the pledge. Critics argue that this represents a violation of the separation of church and state interpreted in the First Amendment, as enforcing the recitation of the pledge in public schools or government proceedings signifies state endorsement of religion. Proponents of the pledge and its invocation of God range in their opinions, from the argument that the issue has been blown out of proportion and that mentioning God, even for non-believers, is harmless, to open endorsement of greater integration between church and state.

Prominent legal challenges were brought in the 1930s and 1940s by Jehovah's Witnesses, a denomination whose beliefs preclude swearing loyalty to any power other than God, and who objected to policies in public schools requiring students to swear an oath to the flag. They said requiring the pledge violated their freedom of religion guaranteed by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The first case was in 1935, when two children, Lillian and William Gobitis, ages ten and twelve, were expelled from the Minersville, Pennsylvania, public schools that year for failing to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940): The Supreme Court ruled that students in public schools, including the respondents in that case-Jehovah's Witnesses who considered the flag salute to be idolatry-could be compelled to swear the Pledge.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943): The Supreme Court reversed its decision. Justice Robert H. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. The issue was finally settled in favor of the Witnesses by the 1943 Supreme Court ruling, West Virginia State Board of Education v.
Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004): In a 2002 case brought by atheist Michael Newdow, whose daughter was being taught the Pledge in school, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the phrase "under God" an unconstitutional endorsement of monotheism when the Pledge was promoted in public school. In 2004, the Supreme Court heard Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, an appeal of the ruling, and rejected Newdow's claim on the grounds that he was not the custodial parent, and therefore lacked standing, thus avoiding ruling on the merits of whether the phrase was constitutional in a school-sponsored recitation.

Other Legal Challenges

2005: District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled in favor of three unnamed families in District Court for the Eastern District of California.
2006: The Florida case Frazier v.
2009: A Montgomery County, Maryland, teacher berated and had school police remove a 13-year-old girl who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom.
2010: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance in the case of Newdow v. Rio Linda Union School District. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate court ruled that the words were of a "ceremonial and patriotic nature" and did not constitute an establishment of religion. Judge Stephen Reinhardt dissented, writing that "the state-directed, teacher-led daily recitation in public schools of the amended 'under God' version of the Pledge of Allegiance…
2015: New Jersey Superior Court Judge David F.

The Pledge Today

Congressional sessions open with the recital of the Pledge, as do many government meetings at local levels, and meetings held by many private organizations. The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag: "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," should be rendered by standing at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. When not in uniform, men should remove any non-religious headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart.

The controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance saw renewed attention in the twenty-first century. Other incidents involving disputes over the pledge of allegiance have also generated considerable public attention, if not new legal precedent. For instance, in 2019 there was high-profile controversy when a Black eleven-year-old student in Florida was arrested after arguing with a substitute teacher who confronted him for not standing during the pledge and reportedly suggested he should "go back to Africa" if he did not respect the flag. The case against the student was closed without any charges, but some activists highlighted it as an example of how pledge requirements could potentially create a hostile environment for dissenting students, and how the issue could overlap with problems of racial injustice and freedom of speech as well as freedom of religion.

Critical Analysis and Diverse Perspectives

Some view the pledge as a symbol for blind obedience, turning children into cogs in a machine without truly dissecting its meaning. The word "indivisible" can be interpreted as a threat, contradicting the foundational right to revolution if a government becomes abusive. The inclusion of "under God" raises concerns about the separation of church and state, particularly in taxpayer-funded schools, and can be seen as hypocritical if the nation's actions do not align with religious principles.

It is important for individuals to be aware and informed about the history and implications of the Pledge, allowing them to make smarter decisions about their participation. Families and individuals may choose to still say the pledge due to personal values, but it should be done intentionally and with open eyes.

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