Originally, the Pledge of Allegiance had a lot fewer words.
When it was first written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, the Pledge was simply, “I pledge allegiance to the flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The Pledge was part of a campaign by The Youth’s Companion, a popular children’s magazine, to start a new wave of patriotism among school children by selling flags to public schools. The occasion was the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, and it coincided with the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair.
Francis Bellamy was a cousin of the novelist Edward Bellamy, who wrote the utopian novels Equality and Looking Backward. Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister, who had been forced out of his Boston church the previous year because of the socialist slant of his sermons. He designed the Pledge as something that could be recited quickly: 15 seconds was the goal. He toyed with the idea of including something about “equality” and “fraternity” into it, but ultimately decided against it. He had worked enough with the state superintendents of education to know better; they were all adamantly opposed to equality for women or African Americans.
Bellamy and his boss, James B. Upham, the marketing director for The Youth’s Companion, successfully enlisted the National Education Association in their cause. Together, they influenced Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to make the school flag ceremony the focus of the celebration. All in all, it turned out to be a pretty successful campaign: patriotism was revived, and along the way 26,000 flags were sold — allegedly at cost — and the magazine increased its circulation from 400,000 to 600,000.
Almost immediately, the Pledge got its first revision. The words were changed from “to the flag and the Republic for which it stands” to “to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands.” It was a minor change, but it was only the first. In 1923, the phrasing was changed to “to the flag of the United States,” presumably so that recent immigrants wouldn’t be confused as to just which flag they were pledging their allegiance to. To make it even clearer, in 1924 the words were changed again, this time to “to the flag of the United States of America.” We just didn’t want to take any chances.
In 1948, the Pledge of Allegiance got its most controversial makeover yet. Louis A. Bowman, Chaplain of the Illinois Society for the Sons of the American Revolution, led the Society in the Pledge on February 12, 1948, Lincoln’s birthday. He added the words “under God.” His inspiration for the amendment, he said, was Lincoln’s own Gettysburg Address, where the great man had said, “that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom.”
It’s not absolutely certain that Lincoln did use those words; reporters’ accounts of the speech differ. It’s perfectly possible that he did that phrase, however, since it was a frequently used by one of Lincoln’s favorite authors — Parson Weems. Weems was the author of The Life of Washington, a book that Lincoln was known to have read many times. He claimed it was a great source of inspiration to him.
Interestingly, Weems in turn may have gotten the phrase some of Washington’s own writings, since it was a phrase used by him, as well. Lincoln, Weems, and Washington, however, invariably used “under God” as an adverbial phrase; it was Bowman who turned it into an adjectival one. According to the prominent linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, in Lincoln’s time (and earlier) the phrase had a meaning somewhat along the lines of “God willing.”
There were apparently no linguists present on that February 12th in 1948, however, and Bowman was lauded for his revision, even receiving an Award of Merit from the Daughters of the American Revolution. By 1951 the Knights of Columbus were also saying “under God,” and urging Congress that the change be made official. Nothing really happened, however, until the President got involved.
It was another Lincoln’s birthday commemoration that did it. On February 7, 1954 (the Sunday closest to Lincoln’s birthday) President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended services at the New York Presbyterian Church. He sat in the same pew that Lincoln had frequented, and listened to a sermon by George MacPherson Docherty. The subject was “A New Birth of Freedom,” and it was based on the Gettysburg Address. Docherty mentioned the Pledge of Allegiance, and noted that the one thing that was missing was any reference to God, “the characteristic and definitive factor in the American way of life.”
These were the Cold War years, and we were eager to set ourselves apart from the “Godless Russians,” as I used to hear them called in my childhood. The sermon struck a chord with Eisenhower, and the next day a bill was introduced in Congress to make such a change. It went into effect on Flag Day, June 14, 1954.
The Pledge of Allegiance has been a subject of controversy on many levels. To some, the salute of the flag is an act of idolatry, prohibited by their religion. To others, the act of requiring others (as in school or government offices) to recite the Pledge is a violation of First Amendment rights. The Pledge has been particularly problematic in that the ones most likely to be required to recite it every day are small children, who are not capable of giving their consent to the Pledge, or even of actually understanding what they are saying. Probably most numerous are those who object to the phrase “under God,” claiming that it violates the prohibition against the establishment of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment.
Sources: Chase’s Calendar of Events, 2011 Edition: The Ultimate Go-To Guide for Special Days, Weeks, and Months, Editors of Chase’s Calendar of Events; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October 12; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Pledge_of_Allegiance; http://www.oldtimeislands.org/pledge/pledge.htm; http://www.post-gazette.com/nation/20020628undergod0628p3.asp; http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist10/lange2.html; http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/grace-kelly/pledge-allegiance-was-just-ad-sell-magazines?print=1; http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001089.html; http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=3418.