Complex Numbers

Loyalty Ad

Even as a kid, I had issues with this.

How the Pledge of Allegiance Went From PR Gimmick to Patriotic Vow  
Francis Bellamy had no idea how famous, and controversial, his quick ditty would become

My biggest issue was expecting second-graders to know what words like "allegiance" meant.

On the morning of October 21, 1892, children at schools across the country rose to their feet, faced a newly installed American flag and, for the first time, recited 23 words written by a man that few people today can name. “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands—one nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.”

While this article (actually an ad for a book but it still contains interesting information) is from 2015, I note that this month marks the 130th anniversary of that day. That's a bit more than half of the country's existence.

Francis Bellamy reportedly wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in two hours...

What did he do, laboriously engrave it into granite? Hopefully it was American granite.

In a marketing gimmick, the Companion offered U.S. flags to readers who sold subscriptions, and now, with the looming 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World, the magazine planned to raise the Stars and Stripes “over every Public School from the Atlantic to the Pacific” and salute it with an oath.

"A marketing gimmick."

I mean, really, can you think of anything more quintessentially American than that? Okay, anything that doesn't involve firearms?

Bellamy, a former Baptist preacher, had irritated his Boston Brahmin flock with his socialist ideas.

I just want to leave this part here for contemplation.

In a series of speeches and editorials that were equal parts marketing, political theory and racism, he argued that Gilded Age capitalism, along with “every alien immigrant of inferior race,” eroded traditional values, and that pledging allegiance would ensure “that the distinctive principles of true Americanism will not perish as long as free, public education endures.”

Okay, maybe rampant capitalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and jingoism are right up there with marketing gimmicks as true American values. We're trying to destroy free public education, though, so there's that.

In 1954, as the cold war intensified, Congress added the words “under God” to distinguish the United States from “godless Communism.”

Because clearly that's the only difference.

It's rare that I'm in a position to endure the Pledge these days, but when I do, I omit that part on general principle.

That it was a preacher who wrote the thing, and didn't include any references to any deity in it, should be cause for thought. But again, this is America; thought is for commies and pussies.

The snappy oath first printed in a 5-cent children’s magazine is better known than any venerable text committed to parchment in Philadelphia.

Oh, I don't know. The Schoolhouse Rock rendition of the Preamble to the Constitution is an earworm that's firmly etched in my memory.

Yet the pledge continues to have its critics, with some pointing out the irony of requiring citizens to swear fealty to a nation that prizes freedom of thought and speech.

On paper.

The historian Richard J. Ellis, author of the 2005 book To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, acknowledges that the oath is “paradoxical and puzzling,” but he also admires the aspirational quality of its spare poetry. “The appeal of Bellamy’s pledge is the statement of universal principles,” he says, “which transcends the particular biases or agendas of the people who created it.”

What universal principles? That a flag exists? "Republic," "indivisible," "liberty and justice" are all abstract concepts and hardly universal.

So is "nation," for that matter.

Bellamy did some transcending of his own. The onetime committed socialist went on to enjoy a lucrative career as a New York City advertising man, penning odes to Westinghouse and Allied Chemical and a book called Effective Magazine Advertising.

Ah, yes, the sure cure for socialism: money.

But his favorite bit of copy remained the pledge—“this little formula,” he wrote in 1923, with an ad man’s faith in sloganeering, which “has been pounding away on the impressionable minds of children for a generation."

Sure, he didn't invent indoctrination. But he nationalized it.

Despite my issues with making impressionable kids recite a loyalty oath, though, I can't fault the ideals of "liberty and justice for all." But I think we have to acknowledge that those ideals are something to work towards, not reflective of the current state of affairs. Especially knowing that the guy who wrote the words wasn't interested in the "for all" part, going by his statements on "inferior races." (Just to be clear, no, I'm not trying to "cancel" him. Sucks that I have to issue this disclaimer, but these days that's what some people will infer.)

I vaguely remember saying a while back that the Coca-Cola Santa Claus was the most successful marketing campaign of all time. I'm big enough to admit that I was wrong: the Pledge holds that title.