The Pledge by Jeffrey Meyer

Author:Jeffrey Meyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780312350024
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2010-10-12T05:00:00+00:00

Unless one is prepared to believe that Francis Bellamy was a deliberate and conscienceless liar, the mass of his testimony is overwhelmingly in his favor.

We, for our part, do not believe that Francis Bellamy did lie. . . . We are therefore constrained to pronounce in his favor.

Congressman Kenneth Keating (R.-N.Y.) delivered the document to Congress on August 8, 1957, saying that he “hoped that this definitive report will end once and for all any dispute as to the pledge’s authorship.”

The Upham family would never again directly challenge the actual authorship attribution. But the group, now called the Upham Family Society, Inc., with its membership headquarters in the 1703 Upham home and family homestead in Melrose, Massachusetts, continues to maintain that without Upham there would be no Pledge. At the minimum, an Upham Family Society spokesperson says, Upham “wrote something like ‘I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands’ and turned the matter over to Francis Bellamy and maybe a whole committee.” And while the organization has put the issue to rest as far as the Library of Congress determination of official authorship, the membership card of the Upham Family Society reads in part: “Pledge originated by James Bailey Upham, Malden, MA.”

*The Times not only got Bellamy’s middle initial wrong—it is “J” for Julius—but also his age; he was seventy-six.

*The book is packed with documents, but the problem was its subtitle: The Life Story of the Author of the Pledge of Allegiance as Told in His Own Words. This was odd since there is no evidence that Miller ever met Bellamy. Adding to the problem, Miller’s research papers were given to an upstate New York businessman who has so far refused to share them with researchers.

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