[September 8th
marked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the
Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this
complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then
moving into four new ones. Leading up to a weekend post on the very salient
question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]
How three 1890s contexts
help us think about the Pledge.
Francis Bellamy’s
Pledge was published in The Youth’s
Companion as part of a September 8th, 1892 National
School Celebration of Columbus Day. 1892 marked the 400th anniversary
of Columbus’s initial arrival in the Caribbean, and that quadricentennial thus
became a moment for significant national celebrations. But not necessarily
national commemorations—that is, as I analyzed at length in the Conclusion
to my first book, the World’s Columbian
Exposition in Chicago that exemplified this national occasion (although it
did so in 1893, as it took longer to plan than expected) focused far more on
celebrating America’s achievements and glories in the present than on
remembering its histories or figures from the past. Although, as I argued in
yesterday’s post, Francis Bellamy’s personal and familial contexts make it
unlikely that he intended the Pledge to be solely or simplistically celebratory,
there’s no doubt that it could and did serve such purposes. Take the word “indivisible,”
for example—defining the United States as indivisible required, in 1892 in
particular (although the point sadly holds true today as well), a thoroughgoing
amnesia about both recent and ongoing histories.
That celebratory
side to the Exposition did not go unchallenged, however. One of the most compelling
challenges was offered by the pamphlet The
Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The
Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature (1893). Edited by
the great Ida
B. Wells, featuring contributions from Frederick Douglass, Wells’ future
husband Ferdinand Lee Barnett, and Irvine Garland Penn, and distributed just
outside the Exposition grounds, The Reason
Why used this celebratory occasion to raise hard questions about race in American
society and history, and to offer alternative visions of a national community
than those presented at the Exposition. In so doing, it modeled a kind of
critical utopianism that could be productively compared to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and to the utopian
understanding of the Pledge of Allegiance for which I argued at the close of
yesterday’s post. Like both Edward and Francis, the pamphlet’s authors
understood all too clearly the realities of Gilded Age American society—but they
all used their words and voices to argue as well for a more ideal version of
the nation.
Those harsh Gilded
Age realities concerned class and work just as much as they did race and
culture, of course—and in May 1894, just six months after the Columbian
Exposition closed, another Chicago-area event illustrated and amplified those
issues. That event was the
Pullman Strike, which began with a May 11th wildcat strike at
the company’s Illinois factory but subsequently spread to Pullman workers and
lines around the country. The strike itself, and even more so the state
and federal governments’ use of soldiers to brutally break it in a series
of July 1894 events, provided another clear example of just how divided this
supposedly “indivisible” republic of ours was. Yet at the same time, the strike
could be paralleled to The Reason Why,
as another example of an oppressed American community using their voices and
activisms to highlight and challenge such realities and inequalities. The
strikers and labor leaders were agitating for nothing less than “liberty and
justice for all,” and I can’t help but think that the Christian Socialist
Francis Bellamy was in full solidarity with that activist push to produce a
United States closer to the Pledge’s ideal definition.
Last Pledge post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other takes on the Pledge you’d share?
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