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By Root 390 0

the people will depend upon the stuff that people are made of. The people must guard, more jealously even than their liberties, the quality of their blood. A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth; where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another. Every alien immigrant or inferior race may bring corruption to the stock. There are races more or less akin to our own whom we may admit freely and get nothing but the infusion of their wholesome blood. But there are other races which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard, which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes.

Political scientist Richard Ellis, author of To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, argues that five anxieties loomed large “in the creation, propagation and amending of the Pledge of Allegiance”: immigrants, materialism, freedom, radicals, communism.

The most compelling concern for Bellamy and his contemporaries were the new Americans, those people who were arriving by the boatload each day. Although we celebrate this as a country of immigrants, Ellis argues, that sentiment “exists side-by-side with fear and sometimes loathing.” At almost the same time, 1883, Emma Lazarus composed her great sonnet for immigrants, a part of whose celebratory invitation was eventually attached to the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

It is no coincidence then that the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor was dedicated in 1886, just a few years before the Public School Celebration of the continent’s discovery and in the midst of an intense immigrant wave.

The Columbus Day celebration and the creation of the Pledge happened in the midst of an era that quite literally changed the complexion of America. The immigration anxiety continued, however, into the 1920s, when Bellamy’s original words—“I pledge allegiance to my flag”—were changed to “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America” to ensure that immigrant children were not referring to the flag of their country of origin. The change was made to eliminate any confusion in the minds of those children, as well as to impart to them identification with their new country. Though the “my flag” problem may not have been foreseen by them, Bellamy and his Companion colleagues did anticipate the importance of instilling habits of national identity at an early age.

“Our school’s [sic] great task,” announced the Companion, was to make each child into a “thorough going American.” And its editors had done their homework. They cited Census Bureau data showing that, in 1892, a third of all children in the country between the ages of five and seventeen had foreign-born parents or had themselves been born in another country. “It is the problem of our schools,” concluded the Companion, “to assimilate these children to an American standard of life and ideas.”

“The Pledge was a way of sending the patriotic message across America, bringing Columbus Day to the towns and the villages,” says Marilyn Paul, a curator at the National Archives. “It was really a very grassroots idea.”

Bellamy viewed the Columbus Day Celebration and the creation of the Pledge as a powerful moment for public education. The Pledge would, as Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks wrote in The Nation in 2002, “promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age, with its robber barons and exploitation of workers. Bellamy intended the line ‘One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all’ to express a more collective and egalitarian vision of America.”

Bellamy held that the capitalist individualism of the late nineteenth century was inconsistent