For many of us, the Pledge of Allegiance was something we knew by heart and recited each morning in school.
With our right hands over our hearts and our eyes cast upward at the flag on the wall, we were taught to show our patriotism.
The history of the Pledge is long and fraught with controversy in recent years, so no individual American’s experience with it is universal! Today, the Pledge of Allegiance goes as follows:
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
The first iteration of a patriotic Pledge of Allegiance was penned in 1885 by Civil war veteran Colonel George Balch, but it shares almost no similarities to the Pledge of Allegiance many of us learned in grade school!
It wasn’t until 1892 that Francis Bellamy, an editor at the children’s magazine “The Youth’s Companion”, was asked to write a patriotic verse to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus touching down on the continent that the official original version of the Pledge was written.
Bellamy, who was both a former Baptist minister and a Christian socialist, was inspired by the French concepts of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” while writing the Pledge. What he came up with is similar to what is recited in schools today, excluding the phrase “under God” — but we’ll get around to explaining that.
Over the late 1800s and early 1900s, the pledge was widely adopted in schools, and Balch’s Pledge was dropped.
Small tweaks were made in the text, but the meaning remained unchanged. For example, today we say “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America,” which wasn’t always the case!
The National Flag Conference added the phrase “of the United States of America” in 1923 and 1924. Congress formally adopted the Pledge in 1942, declaring that it should be recited with one’s right hand over one’s heart.
One of the more significant changes occurred in 1954 when President Eisenhower asked Congress to add the controversial phrase “under God” to the text. This was an effort to differentiate the American way in communist times.
There has also been great debate over whether schools should require children to recite the pledge — even before the religious addition. One 1940 ruling, which compelled children to say the pledge, was quickly overturned by a 1943 ruling.
Jehovah’s Witnesses presented significant challenges to the mandatory pledge in the 1930s and 1940s, as they found it to be a form of idolatry and went against their religious beliefs.
In 2004, there was a ruling that children did not have to stand for the pledge.
This followed a 2002 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case in which an atheist, whose daughter would soon start school, argued that the pledge was an unconstitutional endorsement of monotheism.
Between 2006 and 2015, there have been over 5 significant court cases challenging- or somehow related to the phrase “under God” — the most recent 2015 ruling stated that the phrase did not violate any atheist rights.
