Francis Julius Bellamy

Francis Julius Bellamy (May 18, 1855 – August 28, 1931) was an American Christian socialist Baptist minister and author, best known for writing the original version of the US Pledge of Allegiance in 1892.

Early life

Francis Julius Bellamy was born on May 18, 1855, in Mount Morris, New York to Rev. David Bellamy (1806–1864) and Lucy Clark. His family was deeply involved in the Baptist church and they moved to Rome, New York, when Bellamy was only 5. Here, Bellamy became an active member of the First Baptist Church; which his father was minister of until his death in 1864. He attended the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, where he studied theology and belonged to the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

As a young man, he became a Baptist minister and, influenced by the vestiges of the Second Great Awakening, began to travel to promote his faith and help his community. Bellamy's travels brought him to Massachusetts, where he penned the "Pledge of Allegiance" for a campaign by the Youth's Companion, a patriotic circular and magazine. Bellamy "believed in the absolute separation of church and state" and purposefully did not include the phrase "under God" in his pledge.

Pledge of Allegiance

In 1891, Daniel Sharp Ford, the owner of the Youth's Companion, hired Bellamy to work with Ford's nephew James B. Upham in the magazine's premium department. In 1888, the Youth's Companion had begun a campaign to sell US flags to public schools as a premium to solicit subscriptions. For Upham and Bellamy, the flag promotion was more than merely a business move; under their influence, the Youth's Companion became a fervent supporter of the schoolhouse flag movement, which aimed to place a flag above every school in the nation. Four years later, by 1892, the magazine had sold US flags to approximately 26,000 schools. By this time the market was slowing for flags but was not yet saturated.

In 1892, Upham had the idea of using the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus reaching the Americas / Western Hemisphere in 1492 to further bolster the schoolhouse flag movement. The magazine called for a national Columbian Public School Celebration to coincide with the World's Columbian Exposition, then scheduled to be held in Chicago, Illinois, during 1893. A flag salute was to be part of the official program for the Columbus Day celebration on October 12 to be held in schools all over the US.

The pledge was published in the September 8, 1892, issue of the magazine, and immediately put to use in the campaign. Bellamy went to speak to a national meeting of school superintendents to promote the celebration; the convention liked the idea and selected a committee of leading educators to implement the program, including the immediate past president of the National Education Association. Bellamy was selected as the chair. Having received the official blessing of educators, Bellamy's committee now had the task of spreading the word across the nation and of designing an official program for schools to follow on the day of national celebration. He structured the program around a flag-raising ceremony and his pledge.

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.

The recital was accompanied with a salute to the flag known as the Bellamy salute, described in detail by Bellamy. During World War II, the salute was replaced with a hand-over-heart gesture because the original form involved stretching the arm out towards the flag in a manner that resembled the later Nazi salute. (For a history of the pledge, see Pledge of Allegiance).

In 1954, in response to the perceived threat of secular Communism, President Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words "under God," creating the 31-word pledge that is recited today.

Bellamy described his thoughts as crafted the language of the 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 last 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...

Bellamy "viewed his Pledge as an 'inoculation' that would protect immigrants and native-born but insufficiently patriotic Americans from the 'virus' of radicalism and subversion."

Francis Bellamy

May 18, 1855 - August 28, 1931 Francis Julius Bellamy, one-time Baptist minister and prominent member of the Christian Socialist movement (a group that would be called fascist if it existed today), wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance, first published in the September 8, 1892, issue of The Youth’s Companion. Bellamy, then a committee chairman of the National Education Association, structured a public school program around a flag raising ceremony and a flag salute, his "Pledge of Allegiance." This Pledge has since come under several, sometimes controversial, revisions. Bellamy’s original words were:

"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Bellamy considered adding the word "equality" to stand with "liberty and justice," but feared it would be too controversial. In 1924, against Bellamy’s wishes, the American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution pressured the National Flag Conference to replace the words "my flag" with "the Flag of the United States of America." In 1954, under pressure from the Knights of Columbus, Congress officially added the words "under God."

Note

It was not uncommon for citizens to salute the flag with a Roman Salute in those days, afterall America was largely based on Ancient Rome. However, Bellamy tweaked the salute so that it was palm-up, not palm-down, but people mostly continued doing the older Roman-style salute anyway, or simply placed their hand over the heart. With the onset of WW2 the Bellamy Salute was replaced with the hand over the heart.