By Ed Staskus
After my parents emigrated from Sudbury, Ontario to Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1950s I first attended a public school for a year and after that a parochial school through 8th grade. Iowa Maple Elementary School’s first grade was full of strangers. St. George’s Catholic School was full of the progeny of Eastern Europeans, children like me. After I graduated I went to St. Joseph’s, a Catholic all boys high school. One thing we did, no matter the school, was recite the Pledge of Allegiance first thing in the morning, facing an American flag with our right hands on our hearts.
“I pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” When we were done we sat down and cracked open our books.
At first, I wasn’t sure I was duty bound to recite the pledge, There wasn’t any such thing in Canada, although we did sing “God Save the Queen.” Who doesn’t like breaking into song first thing in the morning? I mentioned my doubts to my second grade teacher. Our nuns belonged to the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God. She sent me to the principal. The principal set me straight. “You’re not in Canada anymore, young man,” she said. “As long as you’re here in the United States you’ll recite the pledge like everybody else.”
The pledge was officially recognized by the United States in 1942. Congress wanted all schoolchildren to recite it every day. The next year, 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring a person to say the pledge is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The court said students cannot be compelled to recite the pledge or salute the flag. The principal was in violation of the Constitution, although I didn’t bring it up to her. One reason was that I didn’t know there was such a ruling. The other reason was that the principal was a power unto herself. There was no sense in poking the bear with a stick.
The nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God were stern. They knew how to put the fear of God in us. They often reminded their charges we were sinners in the hands of an angry God. It was a parochial school, which meant it was a private school. They made the rules. It was their way or the highway.
Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, during the 1950s and 1960s states continued to require recitation of the pledge. To this day forty seven states still mandate the pledge be recited in public schools, with varying exemptions. The fine print allows students to opt out. In my day hardly anybody except atheists read the fine print. Everybody recited the pledge. Nobody wanted to be known as an atheist or a communist.
In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower added the words “under God” to the pledge. They hadn’t been in the original. The change was made at the urging of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization, and approved by a Joint Resolution of Congress. “From this day forward,” the president said, “the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty. To anyone who truly loves America, nothing could be more inspiring than to contemplate this rededication of our youth, on each school morning, to our country’s true meaning.”
Two years later President Dwight Eisenhower made the phrase “in God We Trust” the official motto of the United States. The phrase began appearing on currency in the early 1960s. The New York Times wasn’t impressed, saying “Let us carry our religion, such as it is, in our hearts and not in our pockets.” Others said the phrase should have been “In Gold We Trust.”
The Pledge of Allegiance was easy enough to memorize. Even with the addition of “under God” there are only thirty one words. By the time I graduated high school I had recited it more than two thousand times. After the first hundred-or-so recitations the speaking of it became routine. It was just something we had to do first thing in the morning. When I went to Cleveland State University I found out reciting the Pledge of Allegiance was not practiced there, not that it mattered. By then I had stopped believing in “My country right or wrong.”
I hadn’t thought about the pledge for decades when it unexpectedly cropped up one Christmas Eve over a Scrabble board. My wife and I were at my mother’s house for dinner. My parents grew up in Lithuania and celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve. The ethnic holiday is called Kucios. The meal is traditionally meatless. It consists of twelve dishes representing both the twelve months of the year and the Twelve Apostles. An empty place at the table is often set for deceased family members to signify their presence and remembrance. My father had died some years earlier. We kept the chair he had always sat in empty during dinner.
After dinner, and after opening our presents, my sister, Rita, my niece’s boyfriend, Dean, and I sat down in the living room to play Scrabble. My wife was not allowed to play because she was always breaking the rules by laying down foreign words – she spoke some French and German – and making up words. She felt it was her right, no matter what the rules said. She left the living room and by way of unintended consequences got buttonholed by my niece, Silvija, who was spinning her latest conspiracy theories in the kitchen. Once she got started she wasn’t going to be coming up for air any time soon.
Silvija and Dean had hooked up at Miami University. After graduating they moved to Colorado together and set up housekeeping. We hadn’t seen them for several years. There was an ill at ease vibe in the air between them, but nobody asked what it was about. Silvija could be a time bomb.
I was good at Scrabble. My sister was better. Dean had only played it a few times, but he was good with words. Halfway into the game I laid out the word ‘pledge.’ One of my tiles bridged a triple word score square on the game board. The move shot me into first place.
“Darn,” Dean said. “I had a word for that spot.”
“Sorry about that,” I said, even though I wasn’t sorry at all. Even though it is true that we learn more from losing than winning, everything is bright and shiny on the Scrabble board when you are winning. Winning is all you need to know in our day and age.
“Do you know the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist,” Dean said out of the blue.
“That’s hard to believe,” I said. “Americans hate socialists.”
Many Americans don’t see the social doctrine as the way to achieve social equality. They conflate it with communism. They think it means the government would take control of the means of production, throw tycoons in jail, and everybody would end up poor.
“Look it up,” Dean said. “All those kids who have been reciting the pledge all these years have been mouthing a socialist’s words.”
When I looked it up I discovered the Pledge of Allegiance was written 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian Socialist. The ideological movement flourished from the mid-19th century into the early 20th century. It endorsed socialist economics based on the Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Acts 4:32 comments on early believers sharing their assets and possessing everything in common. Matthew 6:24 and Luke 3:11 both advise against serving wealth and encourage sharing resources. Christian Socialists believed capitalism was idolatrous and rooted in greed. Unlike what prevails today among many conservative Christians, who believe avarice is good, they believed it was a sin. They saw social inequality as being caused by greed and capitalism.
An earlier pledge had been written in 1885 by Captain George Balch, a Union officer in the Civil War, who later wrote a book about teaching love for your country to children in public schools. Francis Bellamy adapted it, rewriting it, tightening it up, and making it more rhetorical. The reason he updated the pledge was because he had gotten a job in the premium department of the magazine Youth’s Companion. He had been forced from his Boston pulpit for his Bible-thumping sermons about the evils of capitalism and needed gainful employment.
The Youth’s Companion was trying to sell more American flags to schools than they had already sold. The magazine had half a million subscribers. They wanted more subscribers. They had already sold 26,000 flags since 1888 as a premium to solicit subscriptions but sales were flagging. They needed a new marketing approach. They began offering a free picture of George Washington with every flag. They became enthusiastic supporters of the schoolhouse flag movement, which aimed to see a flag flying above every schoolhouse in the country.
“The flag over the schoolyard makes the nation a real thing to the very ones who are most in want of that lesson,” Francis Bellamy said. “The daily ceremony of raising it and saluting it is a perpetual education.” Honor and venerate the flag was the order of the day.
In addition to the sales angle, there was an Americanization angle. The late 19th century was a boom time for immigration into the United States, fueled by famine, political unrest, and religious persecution. Many came for economic opportunity. Francis Bellamy was a true believer in the socialist movement and the nationalization movement. He believed that immigrants fed the country’s economic engine but that they could be harmful to the American way of life. He believed they needed to assimilate as quickly as possible. The pledge would act as daily reminder. It would foster solidarity and patriotism.
The pledge was published in Youth’s Companion in September 1892, dovetailing with flag salute ceremonies scheduled for Columbus Day the next month. The salute became known as the Bellamy Salute, stretching the arm out forward, palm downward, in line with the forehead, towards the American flag. It was practiced that way until World War Two, when the Nazi-like salute was replaced with a hand over the heart.
In spite of his belief that “Jesus was a socialist” and his jeremiads against capitalism, Francis Bellamy spent most of his working life in advertising, which is a cornerstone of capitalism. He spent nineteen years working in the profession in New York City and ten more years doing the same in Tampa, Florida, where he died in 1931.
My brother and his family, who were a fidgety, impatient family, had gathered up their presents and left early. My wife was still stuck in the kitchen with Silvija. It had started to snow on the other side of the windows. Rita, Dean, and I were on the last lap of our Scrabble game. Dean was out of the running. Rita and I were neck and neck. I had six tiles left. They included the letters ‘c’ and ‘h’ and ‘y,’ all three of them higher point tiles. If I could run my rack I would win the game.
It took a few minutes, my sister needling me to hurry up, hoping I wouldn’t run the rack, but I found the spot on the board I was looking for and put down the word ‘anarchy.’ I scored forty-some points, and since I had laid out all my tiles. I got to add on all the points on the tiles Dean and Rita were left holding. I won the game going away.
“You pulled away with the pledge word and now you finished us off with the anarchy word,” Dean said. “It’s like some kind of yin and yang.”
“You know what they say about those two peas in a pod,” I said.
“No, what do they say?” Dean asked.
“The way I’ve heard it, next to swearing an oath to anarchy, the next worst mistake in this world is pledging allegiance to a state, especially the state we’re in nowadays.”
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus
“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books
Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.
A Crying of Lot 49 Publication
Made in Cleveland 