When was pledge of allegiance made

In a marketing gimmick, the Companion offered U. Bellamy, a former Baptist preacher, had irritated his Boston Brahmin flock with his socialist ideas. The pledge itself would prove malleable, and by World War II many public schools required a morning recitation. Today, 46 states require public schools to make time for the pledge—just Vermont, Iowa, Wyoming and Hawaii do not. Senate and House of Representatives.

And hundreds of thousands of newly minted citizens pledge allegiance each year during the U. 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. I first struggled with "under God" in my fourth-grade class in Westport, Connecticut.

It was the spring of , and Congress had voted, after some controversy, to insert the phrase into the Pledge of Allegiance, partly as a cold war rejoinder to "godless" communism. We kept stumbling on the words—it's not easy to un learn something as ingrained and metrical as the Pledge of Allegiance—while we rehearsed for Flag Day, June 14, when the revision would take effect. Now, nearly five decades later, "under God" is at the center of a legal wrangle that has stirred passions and landed at the door of the U.

Supreme Court. The case follows a U. Outraged by the ruling, Washington, D. Amid the furor, the judge who wrote the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court, based in San Francisco, stayed it from being put into effect. In April , after the Ninth Circuit declined to review its decision, the federal government petitioned the U. Supreme Court to overturn it. At the core of the issue, scholars say, is a debate over the separation of church and state.

Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister's son from upstate New York. Educated in public schools, he distinguished himself in oratory at the University of Rochester before following his father to the pulpit, preaching at churches in New York and Boston. But he was restive in the ministry and, in , accepted a job from one of his Boston congregants, Daniel S. Ford, principal owner and editor of the Youth's Companion , a family magazine with half a million subscribers.

Assigned to the magazine's promotions department, the year-old Bellamy set to work arranging a patriotic program for schools around the country to coincide with opening ceremonies for the Columbian Exposition in October , the th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World. Bellamy successfully lobbied Congress for a resolution endorsing the school ceremony, and he helped convince President Benjamin Harrison to issue a proclamation declaring a Columbus Day holiday. A key element of the commemorative program was to be a new salute to the flag for schoolchildren to recite in unison.

But as the deadline for writing the salute approached, it remained undone. The idea was in part a response to the Civil War, a crisis of loyalty still fresh in the national memory. As Bellamy sat down at his desk, the opening words—"I pledge allegiance to my flag"—tumbled onto paper.

Then, after two hours of "arduous mental labor," as he described it, he produced a succinct and rhythmic tribute very close to the one we know today: 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" for better cadence.

Millions of schoolchildren nationwide took part in the Columbus Day ceremony, according to the Youth's Companion. Bellamy said he heard the pledge for the first time that day, October 21, when "4, high school boys in Boston roared it out together. But no sooner had the pledge taken root in schools than the fiddling with it began. In , a National Flag Conference, presided over by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, ordained that "my flag" should be changed to "the flag of the United States," lest immigrant children be unclear just which flag they were saluting.