The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [19]
Despite growing numbers, their status as second-class citizens—by virtue of their assumed loyalties to spiritual Rome rather than secular Washington—was certainly on the minds of the creators of what would become the largest Catholic fraternal organization in the United States, the Knights of Columbus. Founded in 1882, the Knights were early supporters of Columbus Day celebrations at the local level, and the growing population of Italian-American immigrants, most of whom were Catholic, gave the organization increasing political clout. Thus the Knights of Columbus’s support for a nationwide quadricentennial observation of Columbus Day was not just an important part of what would become a groundswell of enthusiasm for Upham’s idea, but also a way of demonstrating Catholic loyalty to America.
The second part of Upham’s plan—to make public schools the center of the quadricentennial event—was equally well-timed, as the country was just emerging from a long and hard debate about the value of public education to the young nation, with the proponents, like W. T. Harris and Benjamin Harrison, winning the day and leading to the establishment of free public schools for everyone. “The public school is exactly the right institution to take charge of this celebration,” Chicago congressman Allan Durborow would tell Francis Bellamy. “There is a direct line of connection between the determination of Columbus to break through the limitations of the Middle Ages and the educational system which represents the modern spirit of enlightenment.”
Finally, unlike other commemorations, which honored individuals at their births or deaths, Upham could choose an October 12 celebration to mark the event that made the man famous rather than simply marking his birth or death. That event, of course, was the arrival of the three caravelles of Columbus’s first flotilla—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—as the initial step in a great chain of progress leading to the birth of American democracy, and free public education as one of democracy’s greatest fruits. Proposals to establish a similar celebration of Columbus’s discovery today would inevitably be more controversial, given the broadening awareness of the record of brutal mistreatment by Columbus and his successors of the native peoples of the Americas, and an understanding that the arrival of the Europeans represented a genocidal catastrophe for indigenous civilizations.
At the time, however, Daniel Ford recognized Upham’s idea as another inspired one, perhaps on a par with the Flag Over the Schoolhouse program. A Columbus commemoration in schools around the country would be an opportunity to nurture patriotic awareness among the young and, by piggybacking on the enormous publicity already being generated for the Chicago expo, to reap a promotional bonanza for the Companion. (More than twenty-seven million visitors would eventually pass through turnstiles at the Columbian Exposition grounds.)
Upham’s brainchild was an early example of a promotional gambit that today might be called “event marketing.” The goal of sponsoring organizations is to shine in the light of the prestige, the esteem, and the attention surrounding high-profile happenings, whether sports spectacles like the Olympics and the Superbowl, or more modest events like fund-raising walks and charity art shows. One example of event marketing written up in business school case studies is the campaign by the American Express Company around the 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty. In exchange for pledging money toward restoration of the statue, the company