Flag by Leepson Marc

Author:Leepson, Marc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

The “Official Programme for the National Columbia Public School Celebration of October 21, 1892,” which Francis Bellamy wrote under Upham’s direction, appeared in a page-and-a-half spread in the September 8 issue of The Youth’s Companion. The program called for a flag raising by a group of veterans, a prayer, a Columbus Day song, and several speeches. It also included a “Salute to the Flag.” Bellamy, John Baer said, built the program “around a flag ceremony and they built the flag ceremony around this new Pledge of Allegiance.”

The salute contained twenty-two words: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Bellamy looked for inspiration in choosing those words, he later wrote, in the Declaration of Independence and “the salient points of our national history,” including “the meaning of the Civil War.”

The “true reason” for allegiance to the flag, Bellamy said, “is the ‘republic for which it stands.’” Bellamy said he considered “the republic” to be “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.” As for “liberty and justice for all,” Bellamy said he was inspired by “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” the “historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends.”

Bellamy drew up specific instructions for the entire ceremony, including what later was dubbed “the Bellamy salute.” “At a signal from the Principal, the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the military salute: right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together slowly [the Pledge]. At the words ‘to my Flag,’ the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upwards, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side. Then, still standing, as the instruments strike a chord, all will sing AMERICA—‘My Country, ’tis of Thee.’”

The pledge was first recited at New York City’s ceremony on October 12, when some thirty-five-thousand schoolchildren took part in the first of three days of Columbus Day celebrations. The rest of the nation celebrated on October 21, which was believed to be Christopher Columbus’s true birthday. Millions of children all across the country took part. After Bellamy heard thousands of students in Boston recite the Pledge that day he added a twenty-third word, changing the Pledge slightly to read “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic …”

All forty thousand public school students took part in Bellamy’s special Columbus Day activities at their schools in Washington, D.C. The Pledge also was recited that day at a pomp-filled ceremony at the end of a three-day celebration in Chicago dedicating the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

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