The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [31]
Whether exasperated or convinced, Foster decided to put the ball back in Bellamy’s court. “I’ll send you right up to the Third Assistant Secretary, Mr. Creidler, and he will give you the form and you can write out the first draft yourself,” said the secretary of state. Bellamy set down a draft. Perfectly aligning the first national Columbus Day celebration to the Youth’s Companion vision, the declaration peaked with this pneumatic passage: “Let the National Flag float over every schoolhouse in the country, and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of citizenship.” The next day, newspapers carried the president’s official decree with Bellamy’s text intact.
And so, the first official national observance of Columbus Day fell on October 21. As we know today, subsequent decisions about the date to observe fell back to the traditional date of October 12. In the early part of the twentieth century a number of states started declaring official Columbus Day commemorative days—all on October 12. Then, in 1934, after strong lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, President Franklin Roosevelt declared Columbus Day a federal holiday—again, on October 12. All the scholarly precision that vexed Bellamy in 1892 became even more irrelevant in 1971 when the holiday was fixed to the second Monday in October—making a specific historic connection to a specific date less important than the convenience of a set three-day holiday weekend. (Coincidentally, the second Monday in October is celebrated in Canada as Thanksgiving.)
While the first national date for Columbus Day was set for October 21, the complex and elaborate festivities in New York City remained firmly committed for October 12. The organizers of the groundbreaking ceremonies at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, on the other hand, embraced the new October 21 date. They had been concerned that dignitaries who were scheduled to attend the events on October 12 in New York City would not come to Chicago. Now, however, with a nine-day separation between the two events, the same dignitaries could attend both, which they did.
With the first national Columbus Day commemoration now officially proclaimed, Bellamy had three months to attract enough local participation around the country to make the school event truly national in scope. The main vehicle for getting the word out was the Youth’s Companion itself. Ads ran for weeks promoting both the school celebration and the ongoing school flag campaign to its hundreds of thousands of readers:
Has your school yet obtained its Flag for this great Celebration? [One ad asked readers in large bold type.] Ask your Teacher to send for our Flag Certificates. By the sale of these Flag Certificates for 10 cents each to the friends of the pupils, your school can raise money for its Flag in one day.
Copy for another ad said:
$3.50 will buy a bunting flag of best quality, 6 feet long, just right for a “little country school,” and for $5.35 a flag 9 feet long. . . . The boys can cut the flagstaff.
In the weeks that followed, Bellamy led a juggernaut campaign of promotion and public relations. He inveigled governors to issue proclamations in their own states and urged the head of the Grand Army of the Republic, the fraternal organization of Civil War veterans, to get former troops from both sides involved. He sent brochures and personal letters to school superintendents. He sent streams of correspondence to newspaper editors offering ready-made editorials and news features already typeset and cast in boilerplate. (The promotional instincts, creativity, and resourcefulness he displayed would eventually come in handy during his later career in advertising.)
Meanwhile, Bellamy and James Upham were assembling a “programme” for the ceremony, to be published in the Companion and sent out in bulk to schools. The order of ceremony reflected an era when audiovisual technology had yet to make an appearance. There were no amps and loudspeakers, no theatrical lighting, no satellite hookups,