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With such a direct assault on the Bellamy claim, the Bellamy family countered with David Bellamy issuing a public request through a 1956 letter to the Christian Science Monitor that the controversy be elevated to a still-higher authority—the Library of Congress. “The issue should be settled soberly and calmly by a study of the prima-facie evidence on both sides,” he wrote.

The Library of Congress accepted the appeal. A further, even more exhaustive study was undertaken. After a year and a half of work, a thirty-five-thousand-word report was issued with the following conclusion:

Unless one is prepared to believe that Francis Bellamy was a deliberate and conscienceless liar, the mass of his testimony is overwhelmingly in his favor.

We, for our part, do not believe that Francis Bellamy did lie. . . . We are therefore constrained to pronounce in his favor.

Congressman Kenneth Keating (R.-N.Y.) delivered the document to Congress on August 8, 1957, saying that he “hoped that this definitive report will end once and for all any dispute as to the pledge’s authorship.”

The Upham family would never again directly challenge the actual authorship attribution. But the group, now called the Upham Family Society, Inc., with its membership headquarters in the 1703 Upham home and family homestead in Melrose, Massachusetts, continues to maintain that without Upham there would be no Pledge. At the minimum, an Upham Family Society spokesperson says, Upham “wrote something like ‘I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands’ and turned the matter over to Francis Bellamy and maybe a whole committee.” And while the organization has put the issue to rest as far as the Library of Congress determination of official authorship, the membership card of the Upham Family Society reads in part: “Pledge originated by James Bailey Upham, Malden, MA.”

*The Times not only got Bellamy’s middle initial wrong—it is “J” for Julius—but also his age; he was seventy-six.

*The book is packed with documents, but the problem was its subtitle: The Life Story of the Author of the Pledge of Allegiance as Told in His Own Words. This was odd since there is no evidence that Miller ever met Bellamy. Adding to the problem, Miller’s research papers were given to an upstate New York businessman who has so far refused to share them with researchers.

8. THE COURTS AND THE CONSTITUTION

While the battle over authorship kept the Bellamy and Upham camps busy for decades, another set of conflicts over the Pledge raged with greater and greater intensity. They were not about wording or authorship, but about the use of the Pledge as a universal American expression of national loyalty and whether you could force people to say it. Detractors of the Pledge insisted that one aspect or another of what had become an unofficial national oath contradicted the Pledge’s promise of “liberty and justice for all.” Mandatory recitations, quickly common in schools and town halls throughout the land, according to these critics, violated freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the very Republic for which the flag stood. So far, and some scholars don’t think we’re done, legal challenges to the Pledge have taken our national oath to the U.S. Supreme Court three different times.

An ever-present backdrop to all the legal fights is the Pledge’s overwhelming and broad-based support and acceptance by Americans. In virtually every poll of adults conducted over the years, the oath gets almost universal approval. No matter how the question is posed, between 80 and 95 percent of Americans consistently judge the Pledge perfect. The wording is perfect. The manner in which it is observed is perfect. The loyalty promises expressed when saying the Pledge are perfect. The emphasis on instructing schoolchildren in universal patriotism through the ceremony of the Pledge is perfect. The legal requirement in many states to recite the Pledge is perfect.

But, this being America, the minority, however small, has rights. And it can express