The Pledge: A History of the Pledge of Allegiance

The cultural and political history of the Pledge of Allegiance, how it came to be, what it means to Americans, and why we have battled over it for generations. On a summer evening in Boston in the year 1892, a thirty-seven- year-old former clergyman named Francis Bellamy sat down at his desk and began to write I Pledge allegiance to my flag. Neither Bellamy nor anyone else could have imagined at the time that the single twenty-three-word sentence that emerged would evolve into one of our most familiar patriotic texts. Who could have suspected, though, that the simple flag salute would become a lightning rod for bitter controversy? Congress' 1954 decision to add "under God" to the Pledge has made it the focus of three U.S. Supreme Court cases and at least one other landmark appellate decision. The debate continues today, but along with it exists a widely held admiration and support for this simple affirmation of our shared patriotism. As Jeffrey Jones and Peter Meyer show in their illuminating history, this brief salute to the flag has had an almost magical power to galvanize people's deepest feelings and beliefs about who we are and ought to be as a nation. In that sense, the story of the Pledge of Allegiance is the story of America and the American people.