By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Contrary to tweets, the Pledge of Allegiance broadcast on each of the four nights of the Democratic Convention contained “under God” each night. What most listeners may not know is the origin of that pledge and when that phrase was added.
The American Pledge of Allegiance was written by Christian socialist minister Francis Bellamy in 1892 and formally adopted by Congress in 1942. Bellamy would later state that he “viewed his Pledge as an ‘inoculation’ that would protect immigrants and native-born but insufficiently patriotic Americans from the ‘virus’ of radicalism and subversion.” Bellamy’s version did not include the term “under God” insofar as he was very aware of the many different religious viewpoints for which the U.S. became a shelter from religious intolerance elsewhere.
The “under God” was added under President Eisenhower in 1954. This came at a time of Joe McCarthy fear-mongering and pressure to contrast the United States from the “godless” Soviet Union.
Advocates for the addition of this phrase pointed to Lincoln’s use of it in the Gettysburg Address. But in 2004, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg demonstrated that in Lincoln’s time, “under God” would have meant closer to “God willing.”
Today, adequately-trained school administrators know that they cannot compel public school students to pledge allegiance to the flag or stand during that time. Challenges from Jehovah’s Witnesses and others eventually resulted in a legal understanding that the phrase is not a promotion of religion. In the 2010 Newdow v. Rio Linda Union School District case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found the words “under God” were of a “ceremonial and patriotic nature.”
In 2014, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court also found the words “under God” represented a patriotic and not a religious exercise.
As much as politicians today want to argue over the Pledge of Allegiance, they seem totally clueless about the author of the Pledge being a Christian socialist minister. And so was his extended family. His cousin Edward Bellamy was a Christian socialist who wrote the utopian novel “Looking Backward” which was the third most-published book in America in the 1800s, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.
Although both Edward and Francis Bellamy were socialists, they recognized the knee-jerk response to the term “socialist” even back in the late 1800s. This was the so-called “Gilded Age” when railroad barons and bankers could charge exorbitant rates and ranchers and farmers who needed to get cattle and crops to market had no options. Edward Bellamy’s utopia would have stopped this capitalist extortion. It attracted a large number of followers, especially in the Great Plains. But Edward explained the problem with the term “socialist” to a colleague in 1888.
“Every sensible man will admit there is a big deal in a name, especially in making first impressions. In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed, I may seem to out-socialize the socialists, yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place it is a foreign word in itself, and equally foreign in all its suggestions.... [W]hatever German and French reformers may choose to call themselves, socialist is not a good name for a party to succeed with in America.”
Over 160 “Nationalist Clubs” were formed based on Bellamy’s socialist ideas (taken from his proposal to “nationalize” most companies). But he never used the term “socialist.” These clubs were eventually absorbed into the People's Party. For a while, they won elections in the Great Plains regions, but not at the national level.
Nevertheless, many of the ideas voiced by the Bellamy cousins and later socialists eventually made it into the mainstream: minimum wages, price supports, free public schooling, unemployment insurance, social security, an end to monopolies, an end to child labor and more. Indeed, without unemployment insurance and social security, this current pandemic would have resulted in a dramatic and long term Second Great Depression by now.
And without socialist Francis Bellamy, we would not have our Pledge of Allegiance.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.