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By Root 393 0

’s flag salute having become an exercise in conformity. Bellamy himself was, from an early age, an independent-minded person, at times even a maverick. He was strong-willed with a robust intellect and the enterprise and initiative to chart his own course. While in Little Falls, according to John W. Bauer, a retired economics professor who has written a wonderful short history of the Pledge, he supported a presidential candidate of the National Prohibition Party against Republican James Blaine and Democrat Grover Cleveland. But while there, as Margaret Butterfield of the University of Rochester archives says, Bellamy “devot[ed] much of his time to work with laboring people.” Among everyday folk of the late nineteenth century, Bellamy would be as good a model as any of the “rugged individualist” whom historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously described in 1893 as the epitome of the American frontier experience. His “niece” Marian, the only daughter of his cousin Edward, described her “Uncle Frank” as a man with “rugged features to match his body. He was altogether charming and urbane, which qualities did not seem to fit his physical makeup.”

This may have been what attracted Harriet Benton, a Methodist, to him. The young couple married in 1881, in Newark, New York, a town not far from where Francis’s mother was born. Francis and Hattie would have two sons, John and David, and be together for thirty-seven years, until Hattie died in 1918. But just four years after they married the young couple moved to Boston, where Francis took up the pastoral reins of the Dearborn Street Church. As Ms. Butterfield points out, “again he distinguished himself as a leader in the movement to utilize the church as a means of social and educational as well as religious service.” John Baer says that Francis “felt it was his duty to bring moral and spiritual uplift to hard-pressed factory workers and their families. He liked the idea of a church service for the poor which emphasized charity, philanthropy, education, and spiritual uplift. Labor disturbances were prominent in the news, and Francis wanted to help solve their economic, social, political and religious problems.”

But though Bellamy was successful in building his flock at Dearborn Street, Irish immigration brought more Catholics to the neighborhood, and the young preacher was forced to move his congregation to a different part of the city and Bethany Baptist. His new congregants were not as sympathetic with Bellamy’s increasingly socialist views. He was an outspoken advocate of the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus. Bellamy became a charter member of the First Nationalist Club in Boston, formed to discuss and implement the ideas in his cousin’s bestselling Looking Backward, and was the vice president of education of the Society of Christian Socialists in Boston.

All of this was too much for Bethany’s business establishment, which reduced funding for the church in the spring of 1891. For his part, Bellamy arrived at the conclusion that the ministry required “a spirit, a versatility, a tirelessness of pastoral care which he had no longer to give,” and abruptly resigned. Years later, the congregation would remember him “as a man who brought to the service of communities a creative mind, a kindly heart and a just fame.”

Though it is unclear what the majority of the congregation thought of Bellamy, it could not have been an easy decision for him. In his four years at Bethany Church, he had baptized the young, comforted the sick, buried the dead, consoled the bereaved, and soothed many a troubled soul. He had found a new home for the congregation when the old neighborhood tilted too Catholic, and he had gotten a new church built. With that kind of investment, it could not have been a trouble-free resignation. At the same time, though, leaving the pastorate seems to have been a relief and a release for Bellamy. He had been restive in the ministry for some time—weary of shepherding a flock and