impleri

The Pledge of Allegiance routinely taught to American schoolchildren is part of a daily patriotic ritual that gives the impression of great age and a scriptural solemnity that forbids tampering with the words. Yet the pledge is just one hundred years old.  As written by Francis Bellamy, who modified an earlier version by James B. Upham, it was established in 1892 in conjunction with the Chicago World’s Fair and a national school program to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. A 1954 congressional ruling further changed it by adding the words “under God.” Historical analysis suggests that the invention of this patriotic tradition around the turn of the century had a great deal to do with the enormous number of immigrants arriving in America and entering the school system. The 1954 addition occurred in the context of the cold war, when President Eisenhower heard a Presbyterian minister preach that the American Pledge of Allegiance “could be the pledge of any republic,” something even ”little Moscovites [sic]” could pledge to their flag. The Reverend George Docherty concluded that the pledge was missing “the characteristic and definitive factor in the American way of life” best expressed by the phrase “one nation under God.”

From Catherine Bell, Ritual, p 149.