The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [16]
3. HOW IT HAPPENED
History, a teacher once told me, is a conjunction of institutions and ideas, individuals and events. In the case of the Pledge of Allegiance, the confluence seems almost magical—people and forces coming together at exactly the right moment to give life to something brand new.
The story begins with a long-lived periodical called the Youth’s Companion. Published in Boston, the Companion was born in 1827 as an offshoot for young readers of a religiously oriented digest. The Companion developed into one of the leading periodicals of its day, offering children in the preelectronic era a window on the world beyond the garden gate.
One reader, looking back on her mid-nineteenth-century girlhood in a small country town near Worcester, Massachusetts, recalled the excitement she felt awaiting her weekly copy of the Companion. Mary Davis and her sister had scrounged rags and collected chestnuts to raise the one-dollar cost of a subscription. The magazine reached them via the weekly market wagon: “With what eagerness did we often watch the slow approach over distant hills of that white-topped wagon, and on its arrival how carefully would we scan its contents till we discovered the much-desired paper!”
The rise of the Companion began in 1867 when it came under the control of an enterprising and creative businessman named Daniel Sharp Ford. Applying astute editorial instincts and innovative business practices, he transformed a pious provincial children’s digest into a national publication. From a circulation of forty-eight hundred when Ford took over, the Companion’s distribution had grown to nearly half a million by 1892—at the time one of the largest of any American magazine. (For reasons obscure, Ford named the umbrella organization that published the Companion the Perry Mason Company. The writer Erle Stanley Gardner later said that when he used the name for the protagonist of his popular courtroom book series, he probably subconsciously remembered it from his boyhood reading of the Companion.)
Daniel Ford retooled Youth’s Companion as a family magazine with appeal to adults as well as children. He attracted name writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, William James, and Mark Twain. Besides enriching the content, Ford used pioneering techniques to attract advertisers to its pages and he set up aggressive marketing and promotion programs. One of his most effective tactics was the use of premiums—products, cash bonuses, and other inducements to acquire subscribers—a harbinger of the toy in the Happy Meal today, or the million-dollar sweepstake offers from magazine publishers, or the bonus cell-phone minutes for referring another customer. For the Youth’s Companion, premiums proved a big success—stimulating subscriptions and generating new revenue streams beyond advertising and circulation.
At a time when delivering marketing messages in anything larger than tiny agate type was looked upon by traditionalists as unseemly, the Companion splashed its premium promotions across the page in big bold type. One ad promised readers who sold subscriptions to friends and relatives “An Equal Division of FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS IN CASH.” Readers who reached the sales quota could also choose from a profusion of merchandise—from watches to fountain pens to moonstone rings. (The practice of tapping existing customers to get new ones—the “friend get a friend” approach—is one of Ford’s techniques still favored by magazine publishers and other direct marketers.)
Through the Companion, premium items were also available for direct purchase. The magazine published an annual catalog issue offering products of an abundance and variety that Amazon.com might be proud to offer today—laying hens and singing canaries,