The Pledge of Allegiance has long been a way both to affirm one’s patriotism and to test those whose patriotism is suspect. After the Civil War, flag salutes offered residents of the defeated Confederacy the chance to publicly re-dedicate their loyalty to the Union. Not surprisingly, these pledges provoked some resentment in the South.
Then, in the early twentieth century, patriotic groups promoted flag salutes to confirm the loyalty of immigrants. Taking the pledge would encourage newcomers to reject their country of origin and prove their attachment to their new American home. That meant pledging in English, not in an immigrant language.
Anti-immigrant feeling is strong again today, and hardly a week goes by without a report of someone being harassed, beaten, or shot for speaking the wrong language in public. And singing the Star Spangled Banner or saying the Pledge of Allegiance in anything but English is a sure way to bring out the trolls.
That’s why, in North Carolina in 2007, when José Velasquez was asked to lead his high school graduation in the Pledge of Allegiance, first in English, and then again in Spanish for the benefit of Spanish-speaking parents in the audience, he was attacked by critics who demanded, “Salute the flag in English or go back where you came from.”
That same year in Nampa, Idaho, a fifth-grader sat down to protest a recitation of the Pledge in Spanish and German (or possibly, Chinese). The English-only crowd promptly hailed her as the next Rosa Parks, the civil rights protestor who sat at the front of a bus to protest racial segregation, an actual injustice affecting millions of people.
Translating the Pledge of Allegiance is not against the law. Despite its prominence as a sacred civic text, the pledge is a relative newcomer, not a founding-era document. And even those—like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—were translated into French, German, and Dutch to gain support from French Canadians and the many 18th-century Americans who didn’t speak English. So there’s no real reason not to translate the pledge, unless of course you don’t like other languages or the people who speak them.
Plus there are serious questions about the authorship of the Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy, who said he wrote the first version of the pledge we use today, may have actually plagiarized another writer’s words. Surely stealing a text is worse than translating it.
The pledge we’re familiar with appeared in 1892, but it wasn’t the only flag salute on offer. Yes, it beat out the competition, but it took fifty years before the winning pledge was incorporated into federal law. A translated pledge just adds one more text to the rich corpus of flag salutes.
Finally, the text of the “official” pledge has always been fluid. It was edited multiple times, and there’s nothing to prevent it from changing in the future. Unlike the ten commandments, the pledge isn’t carved in stone. And most people read the ten commandments in translation. If they can read a sacred text in translation and understand its message, then they can deal with translating the Pledge of Allegiance as well.
Let’s look at the issues behind the pledge in more detail.
Who wrote “the” pledge?
An early version of the pledge we use today appeared anonymously in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion on Sept. 8, 1892. It was not until the 1920s that Francis Bellamy swore in an affidavit that he and he alone wrote that pledge.
Bellamy, a former Baptist minister and socialist, had been working in the magazine’s marketing department, selling flags to schools and creating a program to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America.
Bellamy insisted that he wrote the pledge in a single, two-hour session. The opening words of his “how I wrote it” tale read like a cross between Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler: “It was on a warm evening in August 1892 in my office in Boston that I shut myself in my room alone to formulate the actual pledge.”
The first few words, “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” came to him immediately. He then proceeded at a slower pace, trying out and rejecting multiple ideas until he had a waste basket full of discarded “experiments at phrasing.” Finally, the words “with liberty and justice for all . . . came with a cheering rush.” His boss promptly approved the text, and the rest is history.
Or maybe not. It turns out that Bellamy’s story may be a lie. The word sleuth Barry Popik has found an almost identical pledge that appeared, anonymously, in a Victoria, Kansas, newspaper, a good three months before the steamy August night when Bellamy insisted that he wrote the Youth’s Companion pledge.
And there’s a third wannabe author. Frank Bellamy (no relation to Francis), of Cherryvale, Kansas, claimed he wrote the pledge in 1890, when he was thirteen, for an essay contest on “The Patriotic Influence of the Flag when Raised over the Public Schools,” a contest run by none other than The Youth’s Companion.
Unfortunately, neither Francis nor Frank offered their rough drafts or any other concrete proof to support their claim. In addition, the evidence of the newly-discovered Victoria pledge suggests that both Bellamys could be lying. That’s not a good look for such a patriotic text.
The Victoria pledge and Youth’s Companion pledge differ by one word:
I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands; one nation inseparable with liberty and justice for all. Ellis County News Republican, May 21, 1892, p. 4 (the pledge was used by the Victoria schools on April 30, three weeks earlier).
I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The Youth’s Companion, vol. 65, September 8, 1892, p. 446 (composed, according to Francis Bellamy, some time in August).
The Youth’s Companion—despite its title it was a widely read family magazine in 1892—combined patriotism and capitalism to sell flags to public schools. Patriotism and capitalism continued to go hand-in-hand when, three weeks after the United States entered World War I, the following ad ran in the Cherryvale Republican (April 28, 1917, p. 3), offering a flag pin (only 5 cents) and a free card “with Frank Bellamy’s Pledge” (a ten cent value). Frank had died in 1915, and despite the lack of evidence, until the 1930s Kansans continued to celebrate Cherryvale’s home-town hero as the author of the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Other Pledges
The Victoria / Youth’s Companion pledge was not the first flag salute. Around 1885, George Thacher Balch, a Union Army officer who committed himself to the Americanization movement after the war, wrote a pledge with six exclamation points demonstrating loyalty to an explicitly god-fearing, monolingual nation:
We Give Our Heads!—and Our Hearts!—to God! and Our Country! One Country!—One Language!—One Flag! [Balch, A Patriotic Primer for the Little Citizen, 3e., 1898, p. 16]
In 1896, the Educational Alliance School, a progressive school for immigrant children on New York's Lower East Side (it's still in existence) used a text combining elements of the Balch and Youth’s Companion pledges:
I pledge allegiance to my flag, and the republic for which it stands. I pledge my head and my heart to God and my country. One country, one language, and one flag.
That same pledge also appears in 1906 in the more-conservative American Monthly Magazine, a publication of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
In 1901, New York City’s Daily People, the newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party, reported that the Educational Alliance School was now using a more verbose pledge, one which included the archaic pronoun thee:
Flag of our great Republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes, whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we salute thee. We, the natives of distant lands, who find rest under thy folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives and our sacred honor to love and protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people forever.
The Daily People complained that this mandatory display of patriotism was too complex for the children, most of whom had been in the country only a few weeks and spoke little or no English. Worse still, the paper charged, such salutes were a blatant ploy to recruit “an army to maintain the capitalist policy of territorial and commercial expansion.”
Around the same time, this floral variation on the Balch pledge was used by an unnamed San Francisco school:
We turn to our flag as the sunflower turns to the sun. We give our heads and our hearts to our country. One country, one language, one flag.
Versions of the “official” pledge
Like the other flag salutes, the language of what is now the official pledge was never static. Here are the versions of the pledge, with their differences highlighted:
May, 1892, the Victoria pledge:
I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands; one nation inseparable with liberty and justice for all.
September, 1892, the Youth’s Companion pledge replaces inseparable with indivisible:
I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
In 1923, the National Americanism Commission changed my flag to the flag of the United States, ensuring that the speaker wouldn't salute the wrong flag. It added to as well, for parallel structure--to the flag ... and to the republic:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands....
In 1924, the Americanism Commission added of America, in case there were other united states:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands....
George Thacher Balch had emphasized both God and “one language” in his 1885 pledge, but Francis Bellamy—a former minister—kept those ideas out of the pledge that he either wrote or stole in 1892. In 1954, during the heat of the Cold War, Congress added under God to the official pledge as a way to distinguish pious Americans from godless Communists:
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....
It remains to be seen whether the current Congress, in response to Donald Trump’s proclamation of English as the official language of the United States, will revise the pledge in order to echo Balch’s enthusiasm for “one nation! one language! one flag!” But even if Congress injects official English into the pledge, translating the pledge into any other language--whether it's Spanish or Latin or Klingon--won't dilute either the meaning of its words or the symbolic act of saluting the flag.
