The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [41]
The Washington law appears to be the first to direct that a specific salute be required, and that salute was to be Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance. Failure to follow the law was a criminal misdemeanor.
Following passage of the Washington law, the Pledge became mandatory in schools beginning in the 1910s, until 1943, when the U.S. Supreme Court found the practice of forcing students to say the Pledge unconstitutional (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette).
Following the end of World War I, the American Legion’s National Americanism Commission—under the leadership of its director, Garland Powell—held two Flag Day conferences (over two years) and declared the U.S. flag “a living symbol of a living nation.” The conferences brought together the major private sector patriotic organizations of the time. Members of the government were also present, including the secretary of education; President Warren Harding opened the conference.
“They are invading our homes, our schools, our churches, and our very camps, our patriotic organizations, attacking our flag and our institutions,” roared Mrs. Reuben Ross Holloway, national chairperson of the U.S. Daughters of 1812 and chair of Maryland’s Correct Use of the Flag Committee. The “they” referred to were all the perceived critics of America and its institutions.
The commission’s primary objective was to create and implement one code of rules for “how to honor and revere the American flag.” The two-day meeting would produce rules for citizens to follow for the display, raising, lowering, saluting, and folding of flags and dispatched a seven-member committee—among them representatives from the American Legion SAR, DAR, Daughters of the Confederacy, PTA, and Boy Scouts—to draft the details. The committee was also assisted by members of the military.
The commission recommended that Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance be the nation’s official pledge. It did not specify the manner of the salute, but did amend Bellamy’s original wording: “I pledge allegiance to my flag” became “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States.”
Commission member Gridley Adams took credit for pushing the change. Adams defended that position years later, saying, “I did not like those words ‘my flag,’ believing that any alien or Hottentot could, and with all sincerity, pledge allegiance to whatever National emblem he held in his mind’s eye. I wanted the Pledge of Allegiance to be specifically American.”
Adams, a high-school dropout who claimed his great-great-grandfather was Nathan Hale’s roommate at Yale, went on to become chairman of the National Flag Code Committee and founder of the United States Flag Foundation. Though his language may not sit well with Americans today, he was an effective, if eccentric, patriot, advising Emily Post on flag etiquette and once chastising Franklin Roosevelt for improper use of Old Glory in the Oval Office.
“Of all the Americans whose eyes grow bright and whose pulses quicken at the sight of the Stars and Stripes and the sound of ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ none reacts to either patriotic stimulus more briskly than a retired advertising man named Gridley Adams, a chipper, outspoken, egocentric, and contentious old gentleman who for the better part of the last thirty years has carried on an impassioned, public love affair with the flag of the United States of America.” So wrote E. J. Kahn in one of the more notable New Yorker opening sentences—in length, if nothing else—for a wonderfully titled profile of Mr. Adams called “Three Cheers for the Blue, White, and Red.” Kahn was then writing, in