One nation under the state? intended by its socialist composer to advance the worship of the State, the Pledge of Allegiance was revised by patriots into a concise statement of the ideals of Americanism. (Cover Story: Pledge of Allegiance).

Militant atheist Michael Newdow "never had a problem reciting the Pledge of Allegiance when he was in elementary school," observed the June 30th San Francisco Chronicle. "He just didn't want to repeat the words 'under God.'" The lawsuit filed by Newdow illustrates his unwillingness to let the supposedly offensive words cross the lips of others, at least in public schools. In an interview with the AP, Newdow insisted that his intention was "to restore the pledge to its pre-1954 version." "It's my parental right to keep the government off my child' insists Newdow. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Newdow, ruling that Congress' 1954 insertion of the words "under God" was unconstitutional.

Defending the Ninth Circuit Court's ruling, Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff wrote that "American tradition" dictates that "there is no mention of God in the Constitution." But Hentoff's "tradition" fatally collides with the plain text of the Constitution itself, which records that the document was completed on "the seventeenth of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven, and of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth." (Emphasis added.)

This postscript to the Constitution, like the reference to "the laws of Nature and Nature's God" contained in the Declaration of Independence, is not an empty flourish. Those words embody the unique perspective called "Americanism" -- the understanding that our nation and its government are subordinate to God and His laws, and that government's sole purpose is to protect the rights of the governed. Newdow has spent too much time living in the dimly lit, poorly ventilated dungeon of his own conceit to recognize that if our government isn't accountable to any authority higher than man, he has no principled reason to expect that he can "keep the government off [his] child."

This point was made forcefully in 1954 in Congress' statement of legislative intent for adding the words "under God" to the Pledge:

At this moment in our history the principles underlying our American Government and the American way of life are under attack by a system whose philosophy is at direct odds with our own. Our American Government is founded on the concept of the individuality and the dignity of the human being. Underlying this concept is the belief that the human person is important because he was created by God and endowed by Him with certain unalienable rights which no civil authority may usurp. The inclusion of God in our pledge therefore would further acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon the moral directions of the Creator. At the same time it would serve to deny the atheistic and materialist concepts of communism with its attendant subservience of the individual.

While most Americans are familiar with the Pledge, relatively few know much about its origins or why Congress modified it. Most media accounts of the 1954 Pledge alteration focus on the fact that Congress in passing the measure was seeking to distinguish the American system from that of Soviet Communism. This description is true, but inadequate. The 1954 revision was the last of several undertaken by patriotic individuals and groups seeking to harmonize the Pledge with the fundamental concept of Americanism, as expressed in our founding documents: Liberty under law, rooted in an understanding of the divine origin of our rights, and protected by a government ultimately accountable not only to the people, but to God.

Francis Bellamy, the socialist clergyman who wrote the original Pledge, sought to subvert this concept by composing an "American creed" subtly transposing patriotic love for our country into adoration of the Total State. But Bellamy, like others devoted to the same objective, underestimated the resiliency of America's unique philosophy of liberty, and the influence of what has been called the "layers of strength" on which our society rests. Those "layers of strength" had the effect of filtering out the subversive elements of Bellamy's Pledge, ultimately transforming it -- contrary to what its author expected or desired -- into a usefully concise summary of Americanism.

Socialist Origins

When introduced by Francis Bellamy in 1891, the Pledge's text read as follows: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and [to] the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." That no specific flag was mentioned in the text was not an oversight. According to Dr. John W. Baer, author of The Pledge of Allegiance: A Centennial History -- 1892-1992, "Bellamy wanted it as an international peace pledge, so he hoped that all the republics [of the world] ... on their peace day, would put a white border around their flag, and recite it as a pledge."

Bellamy was a co-founder and vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists (SCS). By 1891 he was also a leading spokesman of the "Nationalist" movement, founded by his cousin, Edward Bellamy. Edward authored the 1888 novel Looking Backward -- 2000- 1887, a work of speculative fiction (now called "science fiction") that outsold every other 19th century American novel except for Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book describes the experience of a wealthy Bostonian named Julian West who somehow lapses into a hypnotic trance in 1887, awakening in 2000 to discover that America was part of a world union of socialist republics.

Looking Backward "popularized socialism, made it interesting, and started millions to thinking along lines entirely new to them," attested J.A. Wayland, a turn-of-the-century socialist newspaper editor in Kansas. "Thousands were moved to study the question [of socialism] by Bellamy and thus became Socialists and found their way into the Socialist movement' observed radical Marxist Eugene V. Debs. FDR and New Deal "Brain Trust" member Rexford Guy Tugwell also spoke reverently of Bellamy's novel. In 1935, Columbia University asked Marxist education "reformer" John Dewey and leftist historians Charles Beard and Edward Weeks to list the 25 most influential books published during the previous 50 years. The three lists, compiled independently, ranked Looking Backward as second only to Karl Marx's Dos Kapital in terms of social and political impact. *

The impact of Edward Bellamy's book was not a product of its literary merit, but rather a reflection of the author's success in putting legs under his literature -- specifically, through a nationwide network of hundreds of "Nationalist" clubs organized to popularize the novel's ideas. Even more important is that the Bellamys were wired into an existing international subversive network. According to Dr. Baer, both the SCS and the nationwide network of "Nationalist" clubs were American extensions of the Fabian Socialist movement, which began in Great Britain in 1889.

The Fabians sought the same objective as militant Marxists, but employed patient incrementalism, rather than violent revolution. Among the symbols used by the Fabians was the tortoise -- representing the "slow but steady" advance of socialism -- and the wolf in sheep's clothing. Baer insists that "the Bellamy type of Fabian Socialism [did] more to make the American middle class think seriously about [socialist] principles than any other force in the latter half of the nineteenth century."

Edward Bellamy's Nationalist network adopted the motto of the totalitarian French Revolutionary -- "liberty, equality, fraternity" -- and Francis Bellamy originally intended to incorporate that slogan as part of his Pledge. However, in keeping with the Fabian practice of stealth and deceit, Francis Bellamy chose a more subtle approach for evangelizing on behalf of the Total State.

Classroom as Battleground

In the struggle to bring about the future envisioned by the Bellamys and their cohorts, the schoolroom was the most important battleground. In 1892, Francis Bellamy was appointed by William Torrey Harris, president of the National Association of School Superintendents, to direct a National Celebration of the Public Schools for Columbus Day on behalf of the National Education Association (NEA). "In 1892," observes Baer, "the public school systems were still dominated by local school boards, but the National Education Association hoped to centralize education under the control of professional educators." Harris, writes Baer, was "the leading Hegelian philosopher in the United States [and] ... believed that the State had a central role in society. He believed youth should be trained in loyalty to the State and that the public school was the institution to plant fervent loyalty and patriotism."

"Patriotism," as understood by Harris and his ilk, requires that the individual look on the State as Hegel did -- that is, as the manifestation c)f "god" in the world. Hegelian disciple Francis Fukuyama notes that the German statist philosopher considered "the French Revolution [to be] the event that took the Christian vision of a free and equal society, and implemented it here on earth.... It constituted a recognition that it was man who had created the Christian God in the first place, and therefore man who could make God come down to earth and live in the parliament buildings, presidential palaces, and bureaucracies of the modern state."

This profane accomplishment was inspired by the "civil religion" devised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the "apostle" of the French Revolution. According to Rousseau, that religion is a purely civil profession of faith of which the sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject." All subjects would be compelled to profess the tenets of Rousseau's civil religion, and dissenters would be dealt with severely: "It [the sovereign] can banish from the state whoever does not believe them -- it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished to death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law."

The Rousseauist/Hegelian doctrine of the "civil religion" was the theology of the guillotine. Francis Bellamy sought to promote this same vision through his original Pledge. And the 1892 Columbus Day celebration afforded Bellamy and his cohorts an opportunity to make the Pledge part of the daily classroom ritual in government-run schools. The central theme of Columbus Day observances, records Baer, was that the embryonic government-run public school system was "the fruit of four centuries of our history and the institution most truly representative of American ideals." President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation for the occasion describing the public school system as "the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment" and making it the centerpiece of Columbus Day commemorations, which would "impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship."

The commemorations followed a script co-written by Francis Bellamy, which included his address "The Meaning of the Four Centuries." That speech designated "universal education" as embodying "the foundations of liberty, fraternity, and equality." "America ... gathers her sons around the schoolhouse today as the institution closest to the people, most characteristic of the people, and fullest of hope for the people," continued the speech, which denounced religious education in terms Rousseau and Hegel would applaud: "[T]he education of citizens is not the prerogative of church or of other private interest.... [W]hile religious training belongs to the church, and while technical and higher culture may be given by private institutions, the training of citizens in the common knowledge and common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State."

The conclusion of Bellamy's Columbus Day address foreshadowed the rhetorical style later used by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other totalitarian despots: "We, the youth of America, who today unite to march as one army under the sacred flag, understand our duty. We pledge ourselves that the flag shall not be stained; and that America shall mean equal opportunity and justice for every citizen, and brotherhood for the world."

Detoxifying the Pledge

Within a few years, public schools nationwide adopted Bellamy's Pledge, largely because it was seen as a useful way of "Americanizing" children of recent immigrants. By 1924, however, the Pledge was under devoted attack from an apparently unlikely source -- civic organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion. These intensely patriotic organizations, discerning the covert internationalism contained in Bellamy's Pledge, successfully lobbied to alter the phrase "my Flag" to "the Flag of the United States of America." "Bellamy disliked the change," records Dr. Baer, "but his protest was ignored." Congress codified the modified Pledge in June 1942.

Though Congress approved an official version of the Pledge, it did nothing to require any American citizen to recite it -- in school or elsewhere. In a footnote to his minority opinion in the Newdow v. Congress decision, Ninth Circuit Judge Ferdinand Fernandez observed: "Congress has not compelled anyone to do anything. It surely has not directed that the Pledge be recited in class." The matter was left in the hands of state and local authorities, where it belongs. The ritual of reciting the Pledge -- devised by one of the architects of a nationalized school system -- was not prescribed by law, but various school systems adopted it as a matter of social custom. This is another instance in which American institutions, in their treatment of the Pledge, worked against its author's intentions to replace a federated republic with a unitary state.

While Congress adopted an official wording for the Pledge, it did not impose it on school districts. However, it was understood that school districts across the nation would defer to any congressional modification of the official Pledge. This prompted a national movement, led by the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic lay organization), to insert the words "under God" into the Pledge.

The text of the 1954 bill that modified the Pledge into its current form asserted, "This is not an act establishing a religion.... The phrase 'under God' recognizes only the guidance of God in our national affairs." Nothing in the bill required that state governments, or bodies governing local schools, include the Pledge in the daily classroom schedule; nothing in the measure dictated that any American citizen recite the Pledge. This is not to say, however, that the measure's supporters were unaware of its likely impact. Congressman Louis C. Rabaut, the Pledge bill's chief sponsor, predicted that "the children of our land, in the daily recitation of the pledge in school, will be daily impressed with a true understanding of our way of life and its origins." The same could be said of daily recitation of the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, or of the closing lines of the U.S. Constitution.

According to Baer, Francis Bellamy's granddaughter "said he ... would have resented this second change." Given Bellamy's devotion to advancing the worship of the Total State, that assessment is almost certainly correct. As the Pledge now stands, it expresses exactly the opposite of what its author intended. By adding the words "under God," Congress not only acknowledged that God exists but recognized that our nation is subservient to Him and His laws. Pledging allegiance to "one nation under God" is not the same as pledging allegiance to a State that imagines itself, and not God, as the ultimate authority. Bellamy would doubtless approve of efforts by the likes of Michael Newdow to restore the Pledge to the pagan purity of its socialist origins.

* In our next issue, THE NEW AMERICAN will examine in detail Edward Bellamy's novel and its impact.

RELATED ARTICLE: SALUTE TO THE FLAG

by the Pupils.

At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the Flag the military salute--right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus all repeat together, slowly: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which, it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." At the words, "to my Flag," the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, towards the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side. Then, still standing, as the instruments strike a chord, all will sing AMERICA--"My Country, 'tis of Thee."