• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Of all the premiums the Companion offered, one stands out above all others: the American flag. Premium campaigns around the flag proved immensely successful for the magazine, in both financial and promotional terms. At the same time, the Companion’s efforts had a lasting impact on the place of the American flag in the life of the nation.

Today, public schools and flags go together like french fries and ketchup. Travel around any town or city in the United States and you can count on seeing the Stars and Stripes in front of, or atop, most public schools (and in many classrooms as well). It wasn’t always so. If any one person deserves credit for establishing this ubiquitous practice, it is James B. Upham.

Upham joined Youth’s Companion in 1886. A nephew by marriage to Daniel Ford, he signed on to lead a new department, one dedicated to developing the potential of premiums. Upham combined patriotic zeal with a genius for promotion—and he showed no hesitation in using the one in service of the other. There was nothing cynical, though, about Upham’s patriotism. A staunch New Englander, Upham as a schoolboy heard classroom declamations every Friday of Daniel Webster’s orations on the birth of the union. “We were brought up on the air of patriotism,” he recalled. As an adult, Upham was distressed to perceive that appreciation for the blessings of American democracy had gone into decline—taking a backseat in the Gilded Age to pursuit of the almighty dollar. He worried that a fading of patriotic awareness could lead to a citizenry that did not know enough nor care enough to defend democracy against erosion from within or attack from outside.

The arrival in New York Harbor and other American seaports of shipload after shipload of immigrants made the challenge all the more acute. To invigorate the national spirit and to advance civic consciousness, Upham believed in a need to instill patriotism at a popular level, especially among young citizens of the future. His uncle concurred.

Ford and Upham saw promoting national pride as part of the Companion’s mission—this at a time when the idea of “mission” in a business context was more than a pro forma statement of goals and principles. Like a substantial segment of educated churchgoers in late-nineteenth-century America, they embraced an activist view of religion along the lines of the “Social Gospel” approach that a few years later would come to be identified with Walter Rauschenbusch.

They took a similar view of their duties as citizens. They felt obligated to further the essential moral values and the philosophical principles they believed in. For Ford and Upham, these included the liberties and the egalitarian ideals they saw as the bedrock of American democracy. If this evangelizing complemented the periodical’s editorial franchise and helped increase profits, so much the better.

After a few months at the helm of the Premiums Department, Upham began to think about premium offerings that might support the Companion’s patriotic mission while also serving its commercial imperative. His thoughts turned to the American flag. What more readily identifiable symbol of the United States and its principles could there be? The red, white, and blue offered visual shorthand for a nation’s values that even the youngest schoolchildren could relate to.

Although patriotic activities and displays were on the increase at the time, the flag was not yet the ubiquitous fixture at schools and other public buildings that it is today. To reach the young, Upham decided, every public school should have a flag. Focusing on public schools would highlight their importance to society as crucibles of citizenship—a conviction not shared by a significant bloc of citizens who opposed using taxes to finance government-sponsored education. Spotlighting public schools would also help counter what Ford and Upham saw as a disproportionate influence of church-sponsored education. Both were active churchgoers but they were philosophically opposed