Beverly Gage: Under God ... or Not
[Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale, is writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover.]
Today’s conservatives often describe themselves as strict constructionists, seeking the “original meaning” of the nation’s founding texts. In the case of the Pledge of Allegiance, a much fetishized if not legally binding document, this approach is unlikely to yield the desired political result. As Jeffrey Owen Jones and Peter Meyer note, the original author of the pledge was a former Christian Socialist minister who hoped to redeem the United States from its class and ethnic antagonisms. Interpretations of its meaning have been growing more conservative, not more liberal, ever since.
The author in question was Francis Bellamy, cousin to the novelist Edward Bellamy, whose “Looking Backward” offered the 19th century’s most popular vision of a future welfare-state utopia. In 1892, after abandoning the ministry, Francis was working at The Youth’s Companion, a mass-market magazine aimed at schoolchildren. For promotional purposes, the magazine planned a national youth pageant to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s American landfall. Bellamy was assigned to rally the necessary political support and, at the last minute, to compose a few words appropriate to the occasion. He came up with a statement of what he later called “intelligent patriotism,” designed to counteract some of the nation’s most divisive and reactionary impulses....
Read entire article at NYT
Today’s conservatives often describe themselves as strict constructionists, seeking the “original meaning” of the nation’s founding texts. In the case of the Pledge of Allegiance, a much fetishized if not legally binding document, this approach is unlikely to yield the desired political result. As Jeffrey Owen Jones and Peter Meyer note, the original author of the pledge was a former Christian Socialist minister who hoped to redeem the United States from its class and ethnic antagonisms. Interpretations of its meaning have been growing more conservative, not more liberal, ever since.
The author in question was Francis Bellamy, cousin to the novelist Edward Bellamy, whose “Looking Backward” offered the 19th century’s most popular vision of a future welfare-state utopia. In 1892, after abandoning the ministry, Francis was working at The Youth’s Companion, a mass-market magazine aimed at schoolchildren. For promotional purposes, the magazine planned a national youth pageant to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s American landfall. Bellamy was assigned to rally the necessary political support and, at the last minute, to compose a few words appropriate to the occasion. He came up with a statement of what he later called “intelligent patriotism,” designed to counteract some of the nation’s most divisive and reactionary impulses....