The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [29]
This 400th anniversary ought to be made more of than any other Centennial in history. The Discovery of America was the first step in the revolution of the whole world. It has already brought two Americas and Australia into the civilized world. It set in motion the chain of energies which has opened up Asia and Africa to civilization. The Old World civilization clustered around the Mediterranean Sea; in the Middle Ages civilization centered in Europe; but now civilization is world-wide. No other one thing has been so important in the history of our race, as we know it, as the Discovery of America. It has made possible this world-wide civilization.
The part the Flag is to play, in this Celebration of the 12th of October, appeals to me tremendously. We are all the descendants from emigrants, but we want to hasten the day, by every possible means, when we shall be fused together in an entire and new race, or rather the new races of a new world. Consequently, by all means in our power we ought to inculcate, among the children of this country, the most fervent loyalty to the Flag.
The Common School and the Flag stand together as archtypical of American civilization. The Common School is the leading form in which the principles of equality and fraternity take shape; while the Flag represents not only these principles of equality, fraternity and liberty, but also the great pulsing nation with all its hopes, and all its past, and all its moral power. So it is eminently fitting that the Common School and the Flag should stand out together on Columbus Day.
I am particularly pleased with this Celebration by the Public Schools when I look at it from the national standpoint. It will mean that we are all one people. The South, as well as the North, will join heartily in it. It will signalize as no local observance could do, and as no general observance base on any other institution could do, the fact that we are a solid nation.
Within a few weeks, Bellamy’s Capitol Hill lobbying paid off. Congress approved a joint resolution empowering the president to proclaim a national holiday “with suitable exercises in schools.” Despite that victory, though, the White House proved maddeningly slow to issue a proclamation. President Harrison’s reputation for fretting and dawdling over even minor administrative details seemed to be accurate. Bellamy needed the official proclamation to begin convincing state governors to follow suit with decrees of their own.
The real hold up, however, came from Capitol Hill and not from the White House. An argument had surfaced within Congress centering around whether the proclamation should set the date for Columbus Day as October 12 or October 21.
Though there was a scholarly question over the historically correct date for the actual Columbus landing, some observers believed that politics had something to do with the reconsideration as well, as the number of VIP speakers for events on October 12 was limited. And for a brief moment the tempest in the teacup grew into a maelstrom that almost sucked the school celebration down.
The scholarly argument revolved around the change in worldwide calendar use from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar beginning in 1582, some ninety years after the Columbus landing. While the original written entry in Columbus’s log set the landing date in 1492 as October 12, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar prompted many people to revisit historical dates. The change, based on sixteenth-century recalculations, improved on the Julian calendar because it accommodated for the actual length of the solar year, which is not a perfect 365 days. The Gregorian calendar introduced the leap year every four years, adding a day into the year, to keep the counting of days almost nearly accurate. In 1582 the Catholic church literally made up for lost time by readjusting the calendar in that year and declaring