The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [27]
Then he stopped. “I’ve said enough on this subject, Mr. Bellamy,” he abruptly concluded, advising the magazine man to “present the matter to me in writing or printing so that I can see it before me easily, and I will call in my stenographer and dictate a few sentences which will cover the ground you want.”
As the president tendered a farewell handshake, Bellamy stuck a verbal foot in the door. “I thank you, Mr. President,” said the cheeky former preacher, “but I was going to ask you if you wouldn’t issue a proclamation making the day a national holiday and recommending the people to observe it in the public schools.” The president stiffened and Lodge glared at Bellamy. “Why sir,” said Harrison, “that is impossible without congressional authority.”
Lodge hustled Bellamy out. “That was going too far after the president showed you such consideration,” Lodge scolded. “You almost tipped over the apple cart.” Bellamy was contrite, but only momentarily. “I’m sorry if I made a bull,” he said. “Now we’ll have to get Congress to give him the authority.”
“That is absolutely impractical,” Lodge sputtered. He reminded Bellamy, with what patience he could muster, that the Democrats, who controlled the House, would never allow Harrison to hand voters an extra day off from work during an election year. “But I didn’t know any better than to try,” Bellamy later reminisced.
And so Bellamy began to haunt the halls of Congress, interviewing, or trying to, dozens of Capitol Hill solons. Some legislators sidestepped the issue completely. Senator David B. Hill (D.-N.Y.), harboring presidential fantasies, declined comment. Senator John Sherman (R.-Ohio), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, said he was too busy worrying about external affairs to have an opinion. With others, though, Bellamy found success. Rather than arm-twist the lawmakers, he asked for “interviews,” ostensibly to gather their assessments of the proposed Columbus Day commemoration. How would it be received in the West? he asked a senator from South Dakota. What was the view from Texas? he asked another. What would a Southern senator think about including Civil War veterans, “both the Blue and the Gray”? One by one, influential lawmakers embraced the idea of a national Columbus celebration in public schools as if it were their own. Congressman William Holman (D.-Ind.) called the plan “an admirable one,” and was much impressed that the event “is calculated to sweep the whole country. Nothing can withstand the force of it.”
“Where do you think, Judge Holman, that the Celebration will be most successful?” Bellamy asked.
“It will prevail most among the country schools,” replied Holman, “in the real country schools at the crossroads and in the back country. . . . The country people are almost as quick to read the news of the day as the people in the cities who have the daily papers, but there is this difference; what they read in their weekly papers certainly makes a deeper impression upon them.”
It is clear from reading Bellamy’s transcripts of these interviews that he had a list of questions—at least, subjects—that he wanted to cover. But the language of his subjects is far from pat, with clear and oftentimes remarkably trenchant comments from the country’s “leading men” at an important period of American history.
One common theme, which seems almost quaint today, is the significance of Columbus and his “discovery.” “The voyage of Columbus was made in the name of enlightenment and progress, in spite of ignorance and conservatism,” said Congressman Durborow (D.-Ill.). “It is also peculiarly appropriate because our free educational system is the direct product of what Columbus stood for,” added Lodge. “Whatever may be said of Columbus, he certainly stood as a protest against ignorance. He achieved his discovery in spite of all that ignorance could do to defeat