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One hundred twenty-five years ago, a former minister turned advertiser published an oath that would become a hallmark of American schooling. Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance partly as a marketing scheme.
The Youth’s Companion, one of the first weekly magazines in the nation to target both adults and their children, hired Bellamy to develop promotional strategies for commemorating—and profiting from—the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to America.
He was an odd choice for the job. An outspoken supporter of workingmen’s rights, Bellamy was vice president of Boston’s Society of Christian Socialists and an avid participant in the social gospel movement: a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century crusade against social, political, and economic injustice.
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https://fortune.com/2017/09/08/pledge-o ... migration/
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/pa ... ry-324462/
This is one of those trivial facts that I only became aware of about 7th or 8th grade.
It should have been laughable to me.
But at the time I took it damn serious.
Because we were supposed to recite this every morning, standing, in unison.
Resistance to the practice finally erupted in my junior year of high school, when the growing opposition to the Vietnam debacle led to many of my classmates refusing to rise or recite it.
Instead, we all sat silently in protest.
There was disciplinary response at first.
But as our numbers increased, and our opposition became more fashionable, the faculty and administration had to yield and surrender the ground.
I also knew, in historical context, how absolutely essential it was, to help get the US population into “World War I” (“the war to end all wars”) AND to prepare future generations for future wars, through daily indoctrination in the public school systems across America.
At the same time, I discovered that the “under God” was inserted into the Pledge, as a fundamental rebuke of “Godless communism” (the Soviets).
And so daily recitation of the Pledge became a ritual incantation of enlistment in the "Cold War": The long slog through a twilight struggle against Soviet communism, to preserve freedom and democracy.