The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [8]
As in America today, waves of immigrants were helping to meet the country’s manpower needs—some of them fleeing conditions so wretched that they were happy to do the menial jobs American workers shunned. The country fretted about the impact these foreign-born masses would have on society, and there was much argument in Washington, in the communications media, and around the cracker barrel over what measures would be appropriate to control the influx.
At the ebb of the nineteenth century, as at the rise of the twenty-first, changes in the economy, changes in the makeup of the population, and a growing fear that the nation’s fundamental identity was in jeopardy had led to a surge in patriotic activities and public displays of patriotism.
For all its similarities to the present, however, the era when the Pledge of Allegiance came to life was a unique and pivotal moment in the life of the nation. In 1892, the year Francis Bellamy set the original words of the Pledge on paper, America was a brawny adolescent striding out of its frontier past toward a new era. In fact, in 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau had officially declared the frontier closed; the land of opportunity was now metropolitan, and people were streaming to American cities from farms and villages around the country and across the seas.
The country had grown from what had been a second-rank economic presence in 1865 to a full-fledged industrial powerhouse. By 1890, the value of goods manufactured in the United States nearly equaled that of England, France, and Germany combined. In 1892, the output of Carnegie Steel alone was more than half the total product of all the steel companies in Great Britain. Within the decade, the United States would begin to flex its muscles in the geopolitical arena with military adventures in Cuba and the Philippines that would prove to be the coup de grâce of the four-hundred-year-old Spanish empire.
As the nation hurtled toward the twentieth century, and the wonders and the horrors that awaited it, the legacies of the waning era still lived on in the national psyche—none more vividly than the Civil War. The treaty at Appomattox, twenty-five years before, still seemed recent to many, and the trauma of the conflict was in no way forgotten. Of a national population totaling thirty-four million when the shooting began, nearly four million men had served in the Union and Confederate armies. One in four of the combatants had died or was wounded. Everyone Francis Bellamy’s age or older remembered men marching off to war from their towns and cities never to return, or hobbling home on one leg and a crutch. The postwar Reconstruction was conceived in idealism, but despite some real accomplishments, rather than salve the internecine wounds it only rubbed them raw again. For many Americans in the 1890s, the country was still divided between Union blue and Confederate gray. And when Bellamy was planning the grand nationwide Public Schools Celebration, he took pains to ask congressional leaders for their opinions about including veterans groups from the north and south, for fear of reigniting sectional passions.
Along with the enduring pain of national schism and human loss, the postwar era brought fresh blows to the American self-concept. Lincoln had been assassinated, Andrew Johnson impeached, and the Union hero turned president Ulysses S. Grant had turned out to be a hapless dupe for fleecers and flimflammers. Meanwhile, civil rights advances achieved under Reconstruction