Francis Julius Bellamy (May 18, 1855 – August 28, 1931) was an author, editor, and Baptist minister born in Mount Morris, New York. He attended Rome Free Academy in Rome, New York, the University of Rochester (1872–1876) and the Rochester Theological Seminary (1876–1880).[1] He was an American Baptist minister and Christian Socialist[2] who wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. It was published in the Youth's Companion, which was a nationally circulated magazine for adolescents, and by 1892 was the largest publication of any type in the United States, with a circulation around 500,000. His cousin Edward Bellamy is the noted author of the socialist utopian novels Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897). Bellamy is buried in Rome, New York.[3]
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In 1891, Daniel Sharp Ford, the owner of the Youth's Companion, hired Bellamy to work with Ford's nephew James B. Upham in the magazine's premium department. In 1888, the Youth's Companion had begun a campaign to sell American flags to public schools as a premium to solicit subscriptions. For Upham and Bellamy, the flag promotion was more than merely a business move; under their influence, the Youth's Companion became a fervent supporter of the schoolhouse flag movement, which aimed to place a flag above every school in the nation. By 1892, the magazine had sold American flags to approximately 26,000 schools. By this time the market was slowing for flags, but was not yet saturated. The previous year, Upham had the idea of using the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus reaching the Americas to further bolster the schoolhouse flag movement. The magazine called for a national Columbian Public School Celebration to coincide with the World's Columbian Exposition. A flag salute was to be part of the official program for the Columbus Day celebration to be held in schools all over America.
The Pledge was published in the September 8, 1892, issue of the magazine, and immediately put to use in the campaign. Bellamy went to speak to a national meeting of school superintendents to promote the celebration; the convention liked the idea and selected a committee of leading educators to implement the program, including the immediate past president of the National Education Association. Bellamy was selected as the chair. Having received the official blessing of educators, Bellamy's committee now had the task of spreading the word across the nation and of designing an official program for schools to follow on the day of national celebration. He structured the program around a flag raising ceremony and his pledge.
His original Pledge read as follows:
The recital was accompanied with a salute to the flag known as the Bellamy salute, described in detail by Bellamy. During World War II, the salute was replaced with a hand-over-heart gesture because the original form involved stretching the arm out towards the flag in a manner that resembled the later Nazi salute. (For a history of the pledge, see Pledge of Allegiance).
In 1954, in response to the perceived threat of secular Communism, President Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words "under God," creating the 31-word pledge that is recited today.[4]
Bellamy commented on his thoughts as he created the pledge, and his reasons for choosing the careful wording:
Bellamy "viewed his Pledge as an 'inoculation' that would protect immigrants and native-born but insufficiently patriotic Americans from the 'virus' of radicalism and subversion."[5]
Bellamy was a Christian Socialist[2] who "championed 'the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus.'"[5] but he was forced to leave his Boston church the previous year because of the socialist bent of his sermons.
Bellamy's views on immigration and universal suffrage were somewhat less egalitarian. He wrote that "[a] democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth; where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another.”[5]