The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [42]
Regardless of his quirks, Adams had an impact on the nation’s attitude toward its flag. And during the Americanism Commission’s second conference in 1924, the “to my flag” line was amended again, at Gridley’s insistence, to read, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.”
“[P]eople ought to be sure which United States they’re talking about,” Adams said in defense of the change.
Bellamy, then almost seventy but closely following the discussions from his retirement home in Tampa, Florida, disliked the changes—they were “needless,” he said, and “interrupt the rhythm and make the Pledge harder to say.” A wordsmith to the end, Bellamy had left Youth’s Companion in 1895, finding it hard to have any assignments matching the excitement of the Public School Celebration. After a four-month stint with Ladies’ Home Journal, the former minister settled in with The Illustrated American as an editor. Unfortunately, without the moderating influence of an uplifting goal—unifying America through a celebration of the flag—Bellamy fell under the sway of some of his darker tendencies. In an 1897 editorial for the magazine he wrote the line about men “not born equal.” This was the launching pad for his advice about the country being on guard against certain immigrants; not the “races, more or less akin to our own,” he had said, but the “other races which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard.”
When The Illustrated American was sold in 1898, Bellamy went to work for a book publisher (where he edited and published his cousin Edward’s last, posthumous book, The Duke of Stockbridge), then did some reporting for the New York Sun, then some writing for the Equitable Life Assurance Society.
He finally landed a job at Everybody’s Magazine, where he would stay for eleven years. And though Everybody’s had a muckraking reputation, with Lincoln Steffens on its editorial board, Bellamy stayed out of trouble, working as an advertising manager. Even at that, however, he found an “audience,” writing a well-received book called Effective Magazine Advertising. This landed him a job as an account executive at a New York advertising agency, where he stayed until his “semiretirement” in 1921. His wife Hattie had died in 1918 and in 1920 he married Marie Morin, with whom he moved to Tampa in 1922—and from where he would monitor the debate over his Pledge until his death in 1931 at age seventy-six.
Given his apparent lifelong fear of inferior races and places, one would have thought that Bellamy would welcome Gridley Adams’s 1924 concern about the “my flag” part of his Pledge. But pride of authorship prevented Bellamy from accepting the change. In any case, his objections were ignored—in large part, no doubt, because this was exactly the period that his authorship of the Pledge was being challenged (see Chapter 7)—and the American Legion’s Commission moved on to its other significant piece of work, during its second meeting that year: formalizing the salute. The group decided on one that was, essentially, a slight modification of what the Grand Army of the Republic had been suggesting for years: civilians were to stand with their “right hand over their heart,” as the Pledge was recited. At the words “to the flag,” the right hand was to be “extended, palm upward, toward the flag.” A member of the military, in uniform, was to use the standard, right-hand salute while reciting the Pledge.
A permanent National Flag Code Committee was also formed at that meeting and Adams was made its chairman, but as Kahn would point out, the committee never met again:
Those listed on his Flag Foundation