The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [33]
Bellamy asked Upham to stay around to review what he came up with. He went to his desk, loosened his stiff collar, then took up a lead pencil and a piece of scrap paper. The evening was still sweltering, even though a breeze wafted in off Boston Harbor.
After what he later recalled was “two sweating hours,” Bellamy emerged from his office, called Upham, and read aloud to him the twenty-two-word draft he had settled on: I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
As Bellamy later recalled, “After the first phrase, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag,’ the rest was arduous mental labor.”
He described his thinking process in detail some thirty years later:
“Allegiance to the Flag”—Why? Because it stands for something concrete behind it. What is that concrete background?
“The Republic.” That word Republic, however, is perhaps too concrete, with little natural appeal to a child. What then is this Republic?
It is the whole Nation. We are still near the earlier days when the wholeness of the Nation had been disputed. So the words one and indivisible came to mind—words made familiar by Webster and Lincoln and made vital by the Civil War. That was the genesis of the phrase “and the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible.”
And what is the purpose and aim of this indivisible Nation? The first thought was of the phrase which Jefferson had brought back from the French Revolution, “liberty, equality, fraternity.” But that was discarded as too remote and too impossible of realization.
What then? Liberty and justice came as the answer, with a final for all.
In the hands of a less skilled and experienced writer than Francis Bellamy, the flag salute that we now know as the Pledge of Allegiance might have quickly disappeared into oblivion. That it came into common use is attributable at least in part to its being (in its original form) a clean, easy-flowing, and pleasantly cadenced piece of writing. The kind of compact prose that trips off the tongue as the Pledge does is deceptively difficult to craft. Once accomplished, it seems simple, which is a hallmark of effective composition.
Both the quality of the writing and the care that went into it were characteristic of Bellamy. As eager as he must have been to complete this final program element for the Columbus Day school commemoration and get out of the office on an uncomfortably hot night, we can be sure that there was nothing haphazard about Bellamy’s approach to composing the flag salute on that August evening. He was a conscientious wordsmith and no doubt weighed every word, scribbled and crumpled one draft after another until he was well satisfied with the content and the phrasing.
Conveying thoughts clearly, cleanly, and efficiently was a facility Bellamy would hone under the keen tutelage of Daniel Ford, publisher of Youth’s Companion. “Mr. Ford,” Bellamy remarked many years later, “was one of the finest masters of English I ever met. . . . His own blue pencil was my merciless censor.” But that night, having been with the Companion for barely a year, it was probably not Ford’s tutelage that had much effect, but the voices of preachers past.
The complete “Official Programme,” including the original wording of the Pledge, was published in the September 8, 1892, issue of the Companion.
In later years, Bellamy and the Companion claimed that thousands of local communities and millions of schoolchildren participated in the publication’s observance of its “Official Programme.” Certainly school participation picked up momentum following reports of the hugely successful Columbus Day events in New York City on October 12. Throngs of people lined the streets to watch the parade in New York and more throngs gathered to listen to speeches