1892 For all Edward Bellamy’s success in making his name, fortune and a whole political movement out of his anti-capitalist utopian bestseller, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1886), the political impact of a 22-word affirmation penned by his cousin Francis was literally national in scope. The irony is that Francis Bellamy was a Christian socialist, a political designation that would be incomprehensible in America today.
He created the oath to the nation that all children in public (state) schools have to swear before lessons, all congressmen and other government officials at the start of their legislative sessions, all meetings of the Freemasons, the Boy Scouts, and many sporting events. It was on this day that he published his ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ in a popular children’s magazine, The Youth’s Companion.
In its first version the pledge said: ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.’ ‘Republic’ because not kingdom or empire; ‘indivisible’ because we weren’t about to revisit the traumas of the Civil War. And that was it.
There were later additions and emendations, like ‘the flag of the United States of America’ in case immigrants thought they were still addressing their old national banners, and ‘under God’ inserted after ‘one nation’ – this last a tribute to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which promised ‘this nation, under God, shall have a new birth in freedom’.
In other words, Americans revere the flag – not just respect it, fly it and wear it in their lapels. The British have a head of state, to whom peers in the House of Lords bow even on the 364 days in which she is in absentia. The American head of state is ‘The People’, the first two words of the Constitution.
The British national anthem ‘Send[s] her victorious / Happy and glorious / Long to reign over us’. And the American national anthem? Well, that’s about the flag, of course, the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ that continued to wave over the ramparts of Fort McHenry after a day and long night’s bombardment by British ships in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812:
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there:
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?