The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [15]
The changing face of immigration, and the threat it seemed to imply to a traditional view of American identity, was one of the factors behind another, more benign phenomenon: a mushrooming growth in the number of patriotic organizations and a notable increase in public displays of national pride. The 1890s saw the birth of groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR), and other hereditary associations that sought to identify themselves with the heroic origins of American nationhood.
Beyond confirming that the forbearers of its members were longtime residents of the New World, these organizations saw fervent patriotism as a central part of their franchise. While the motivation for joining the groups was in part snobbery and in part a simple urge toward social affiliation, there was in the impulses behind their formation an implied circling of the wagons. In his book Patriotism on Parade, Wallace Evans Davies offers this observation:
What was happening was that an industrialized urbanized society was dissolving the standards, mores, and bonds of a simpler rural order and instead was producing a land more and more diversified in national origin, religion, and cultural inheritance, with no national church or royal family or other cohesive traditions and symbols, perhaps in the near future not even a common language, some feared. Consequently many turned to patriotism as a sort of secular religion to unite the American republic.
However much defensiveness may have motivated the surge in patriotism, there was a genuinely American exuberance to it as well. In his book Flag: An American Biography, Marc Leepson describes the growing popularity in those days of displaying and venerating the Stars and Stripes:
Flags flew from public and private buildings, ceremonies took place at city halls and other municipal venues, streetcars in big cities were decked out with flags and bunting, and flag commemorations took place in public schools.
In terms of size, a scheme for the grandest flag began to take shape in 1890 when William O. McDowell, a zealous and imaginative booster of all things patriotic, launched a campaign to get a gigantic flagpole constructed on the Navesink Highlands in New Jersey so that ship passengers bound for New York Harbor would see the American standard as they caught sight of shore. McDowell, a prominent Garden State financier, was instrumental in founding both the Sons and the Daughters of the American Revolution, the two most prominent heredity groups commemorating American patriots. Membership in both organizations required proof of being a direct descendant of someone who had aided in the independence effort. While some DAR chapters dated to 1890, Congress gave the group an official charter in 1896; SAR, begun by McDowell in New York City’s Fraunces Tavern in 1889 (the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration), received its congressional charter in 1906, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was also a member.
In 1891 the U.S. commissioner of education, William T. Harris, appointed to his post by President Benjamin Harrison in 1889, approved a proposal to fly flags over every public school building in the country, thus reflecting what author Wallace Evans Davies described as “a curious faith in the beneficial effect that the mere physical presence of the banner had upon youth.”
Soon there would come an opportunity to focus national pride on a national scale. With the approach of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage of discovery to America, the U.S. Congress authorized funds for a new world’s fair in Chicago.