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I wonder what the man who composed the original pledge 111 years ago would make of the hubbub. Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister's son from upstate New York. Educated in public schools, he ...
After two hours of mulling over what it should say, he wrote, “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands—one Nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.”. Bellamy later added the “to” before “the Republic”, but that’s not the only difference from what we recite today. On October 21, 1892 ...
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The Pledge of Allegiance has been used in the United States for over 100 years, yet the 31-word oath recited today differs significantly from the original draft. The idea of a verbal vow to the American flag first gained traction in 1885, when a Civil War veteran named Colonel George Balch devised a version that read, “We give our heads and our hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag.”
The Pledge of Allegiance
Several schools adopted Balch’s pledge, but it was soon supplanted by a salute composed by Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist and former Baptist minister. In 1892, while working for a magazine called “Youth’s Companion,” Bellamy was enlisted to write a new pledge for use in patriotic celebrations surrounding the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. After puzzling over the project—he initially considered incorporating the French Revolution motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—he penned an oath that read, “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
The Bellamy pledge gained popularity in public schools during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it continued to undergo occasional tweaks and revisions. In 1923 and 1924, the National Flag Conference changed the wording to read, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” In 1942, meanwhile, Congress officially adopted the pledge and decreed that it should be recited while holding the right hand over the heart. Before then, the pledge had included a so-called “Bellamy salute”—extending the right arm toward the flag with the hand outstretched—but with the rise of fascism in Europe, many had noted that the gesture too closely resembled a Nazi salute.
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A USCIS official administering the Oath of Allegiance to a group of U.S. servicemembers during a naturalization ceremony at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan U.S. military personnel taking and subscribing to the Oath of Allegiance at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, California, in 2010 Lawful immigrants taking and subscribing to the Oath of Allegiance at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona ...
Apr 23, 2024 · The original text is: “I pledge of allegiance to my flag and the Republic. for which it stands – One nation indivisible – with liberty and justice for. all.”. Several minor changes to the text, including changing “my flag” to. “to the Flag of the United States of America,” were made over time, some. “official” and some less so.
Apr 2, 2022 · The article described a school ceremony several weeks earlier, on April 30, 1892 — more than three months before Francis Bellamy swore he wrote the pledge -— in which high school students in ...
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The Pledge of Allegiance is a patriotic recited verse that promises allegiance to the flag of the United States and the republic of the United States of America. The first version was written in 1885 by Captain George Thatcher Balch, a Union Army officer in the Civil War who later authored a book on how to teach patriotism to children in public schools.
