The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [46]
Bellamy found this response to be not only obstinate, but he labeled it maligning, dishonest, and hypocritical. Here was the magazine crediting a man who had been dead for eighteen years with something he had not accomplished, and then refused to correct the error because no credit to an individual should be given! “Absurd!” Bellamy could not contain himself. The Companion’s position was “grievously unjust,” a “palpable discourtesy,” and “a collusion to suppress the truth.” The publication refused to arbitrate further, and ceased responding to Bellamy’s letters after writing to Bellamy with one final heated letter:
Your third letter in regard to the Companion Pledge of Allegiance does nothing to change our convictions. We repeat that Mr. Mendell’s account of the origin of the Pledge was prepared with deliberate care soon after the event and that Mr. Mendell was a man beyond most men, exact and scrupulous in statement. We add that your intimation that Mr. Mendell was actuated by any “malignity” towards you to make a “dishonest” report of the facts is preposterous. Against the careful statement of this honorable man, you bring only your own unsupported and interested assertions. We believe Mr. Mendell’s account implicitly.
Bellamy died six years later, in 1931, at the age of seventy-six, in Tampa. Despite the firm brush-off by the Companion, he maintained his claim of authorship and repeated it to anyone who would listen. In a speech shortly before his death he said: “I have the happiness of realizing that I once, in my young manhood, contributed to my Country an easily remembered symbol of patriotism which has become historic and has been in many millions of individuals a spur to their love of Country and Flag.”
He was buried in his hometown of Rome, New York, without the acknowledgment he so desperately sought from the Companion. But since the magazine closed its doors in 1929, Bellamy at least enjoyed the satisfaction of outliving it. And though he couldn’t take pleasure in it, his friends and relatives must have been content to read the obituary headline in The New York Times on August 31, 1931: FRANCIS M. BELLAMY, PATRIOTIC WRITER, DIES; Author of “The Pledge to the Flag” Is Stricken in Florida at the Age of 75.*
The Upham Family Association of Malden, Massachusetts, a genealogical organization that included James Upham among descendants of the Upham clan in America, continued to press the issue of authorship to declare their family member the official author of the Pledge. And in 1930 the president of the U.S. Flag Association, Colonel James A. Moss, U.S. Army retired, approved the Upham claim based on the claims and evidence presented by the Upham family.
In 1936 the controversy resurfaced when it piqued the interest of a young woman from Portsmouth, Virginia. Twenty-two-year-old Margarette Miller, a self-described “wallflower type,” was deeply moved by the recitation of the Pledge on Armistice Day (which is observed today on November 11 as Veterans Day). She soon threw herself into the mission of solving the conflicts of the Pledge’s authorship.
Miss Miller (she never did marry) dispensed quickly with the lingering claim of Frank Bellamy, the Kansas schoolboy. She then moved on to James Upham, whom she discovered had descended from the original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She embraced him as the author. She even persuaded her hometown newspaper, the Portsmouth Star, to salute Upham with a headline edition on his birthday.
Further, the Order of Job’s Daughters of Portsmouth started plans to erect a $30,000 memorial to James Upham in Washington, D.C. Job’s Daughters, a Masonic youth organization for