The Bellamy Boys Pledge Allegiance
By Bill Kauffman

If one man's heaven is another man's hell, what do we call Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward?

Back in 1887, Bellamy imagined an America of the year 2000 in which all residents have been drafted into an "Industrial Army." Individual liberty has been extinguished. Toil is compulsory, as "every able-bodied citizen [is] bound to work for the nation, whether with mind or muscle." Cooking is done only in public kitchens, music is performed only by conscripted professionals, and even rain is a thing of the past, as cities are guarded by enormous tarps. "In the nineteenth century," explains one character, "when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads."

Under the One Big Umbrella, separate states have disappeared, for "state governments would have interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army." Bellamy called his philosophy "Nationalism." Historian Arthur Lipow notes that "Bellamy's authoritarian socialist views were an historical precursor of totalitarian collectivist ideological currents."

This seems as close to a prescription for mass slavery as has ever been written. But to Edward Bellamy, it was utopia. 

Looking Backward sold more copies in America than any novel since Uncle Tom's Cabin. Its message was spread by 150 Nationalist Clubs, whose members were dedicated to regimenting their countrymen.

In an 1889 Nationalist manifesto, Bellamy stated that patriotism must be co-opted in order to achieve Nationalist goals. He urged his followers to "identify themselves with National traditions and aspirations." Enter cousin Francis Bellamy.

Francis Bellamy, born in Mount Morris, New York to an itinerant Baptist preacher, was in the process of losing his faith. He had been a minister and Prohibition Party speaker before turning to "Christian Socialism" and delivering such sermons as "Jesus the Socialist."

Francis was a charter member of the First Nationalist Club of Boston, and promoted the Nationalist creed in the populist magazine Arena (whose editor Benjamin Flower wrote scornfully of Nationalism: "All individualism would be surrendered to that mysterious thing called government"). Looking for practical ways to advance his causes, Francis Bellamy became an editor with Youth's Companion, a popular children's magazine.

Bellamy took a lead role in promoting the National Public School Celebration of Columbus Day in October 1892. His address upon the Columbus quadricentennial, among other things, dismissed religious schools. "The training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the state," he argued.

The centerpiece of Columbus Day was to have been the flying of U.S. flags above every schoolhouse in the land. But a 23-word oath written by Bellamy for the September 8, 1892 edition of Youth's Companion stole the glory.

Bellamy called it a "Pledge of Allegiance," probably choosing the word "pledge" because it was redolent of the temperance movement. His single felicitous sentence--"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all"--was published anonymously, which enabled various liars to later claim the Pledge as theirs.

For an editor, Bellamy hated to be edited. He was indignant when in 1923 and '24 the National Flag Conference expanded "my flag" to "the flag of the United States of America." In 1929, he ridiculed an effort to add a line to the Pledge vowing adherence to Prohibition. A lapsed Baptist, he would have opposed the 1954 addition of "under God."

In later years, the editors of the Youth's Companion spitefully denied Bellamy's authorship. Bellamy spent the decade before his death in 1931 ferociously promoting his claim. Ratification came, tardily. In 1939, a panel of distinguished historians convened by the U.S. Flag Association determined that Francis Bellamy was the true author of the Pledge of Allegiance. A 1957 Library of Congress investigation concurred.

And so, looking backward, we end our tale with a twist. The Youth's Companion, in asserting that the Pledge was written collectively by its staff, was positively Bellamyite. Francis Bellamy, proudly asserting his sole authorship, was the individualist heretic.

The author of the Pledge of Allegiance would have made a very poor member indeed of the Industrial Army.

—Bill Kauffman