The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [20]
Even by today’s standards, it is hard to imagine a more resounding success than what the Youth’s Companion’s national Columbus Day school commemoration turned out to be. Beyond achieving high-profile promotion in schools around the country, the program even turned a profit. In an archive at the University of Rochester I found a simple accounting put together following the event. It reads:
$6,489.94
EXPENSES
$8,116.56
SALE OF FLAGS FOR THE EVENT
$1,626.62
PROFIT
Appended to the tally is an unsigned commentary exulting that the Companion had “conducted what has proved to be the most monumental piece of advertising ever attempted by a paper, without one dollar of expense to itself; rather, with an actual running profit from the incidentals created by the work.” (The sixteen-hundred-dollar net would be worth about forty thousand dollars today.) When I came across the financial tally, I remarked to Mary Huth, the librarian in charge of the archive, how surprising it was to find that the context of the Pledge’s creation was so commercial. “Yes,” she said cheerfully, “but how very American.”
Back in early 1891, when the event was still just a gleam in Upham’s eye, the Columbus anniversary pageant’s ultimate success was anything but certain. It was a stroke of good fortune that Charles C. Bonney, a key Columbian Exposition official, had also come up with the idea for some kind of school-based event. When he heard about Upham’s idea, he readily approved Upham’s proposal and anointed the Companion as the official sponsor.
With the Exposition’s imprimatur in hand, Daniel Ford next landed the crucial support of Education Commissioner Harris. A Yale dropout, leading Hegelian scholar, and founder of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Harris was a former superintendent of schools in St. Louis, where he established the first public school kindergarten in 1873. He was also “a tireless crusader for universal public education,” according to education historian Diane Ravitch, and “argued unceasingly that the purpose of education was to give the individual the accumulated wisdom of the human race, and that this was a public purpose fully deserving the support of the entire community.” Harris personally backed the Companion’s plan and lined up the National Association of School Superintendents and the National Education Association to take part. The backing of these organizations added another official stamp to the plan and provided a national network for promoting the ceremony among teachers, students, and school administrators.
To help the busy premiums director organize the program and move it forward, Ford appointed the newly hired Francis Bellamy. A Baptist minister, Bellamy, then thirty-six, had recently left his job as pastor of Boston’s Bethany Baptist Church, where Ford was a prominent member of the congregation. With Harris’s blessing, Bellamy was named chairman of a steering committee set up to oversee the event, cementing the Companion’s control. “It was a staggering commitment for a young man untrained in wide affairs,” Bellamy later wrote, “and I accepted it with trembling.”
4. THE REVEREND FRANCIS BELLAMY
The trajectory of Francis Bellamy’s life and role in American history may seem predestined. But in his time, it was an improbable journey from the far reaches and anonymity of western New York, where he was born and lived most of his first three decades, to Boston, where he would earn his lasting fame. It was an age of great quarrel and contradiction, of religious awakenings and heady materialism, as well as massive migrations and mergings of people and ideas. Bellamy may have seemed the unlikeliest of men to pull off an assignment to run a national marketing campaign, but in late-nineteenth-century America, he was also the perfect man for the job.