Kulturkampf

[benji]

Most Americans don't know the Pledge was created by a socialist to sell flags in order to increase nationalism:

In 1891, Daniel Sharp Ford, the owner of the Youth's Companion, hired Bellamy to work with Ford's nephew James B. Upham in the magazine's premium department. In 1888, the Youth's Companion had begun a campaign to sell US flags to public schools as a premium to solicit subscriptions. For Upham and Bellamy, the flag promotion was more than merely a business move; under their influence, the Youth's Companion became a fervent supporter of the schoolhouse flag movement, which aimed to place a flag above every school in the nation. Four years later, by 1892, the magazine had sold US flags to approximately 26,000 schools. By this time the market was slowing for flags but was not yet saturated.

In 1892, Upham had the idea of using the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus reaching the Americas / Western Hemisphere in 1492 to further bolster the schoolhouse flag movement. The magazine called for a national Columbian Public School Celebration to coincide with the World's Columbian Exposition, then scheduled to be held in Chicago, Illinois, during 1893. A flag salute was to be part of the official program for the Columbus Day celebration on October 12 to be held in schools all over the US.

The pledge was published in the September 8, 1892, issue of the magazine,[4] and immediately put to use in the campaign. Bellamy went to speak to a national meeting of school superintendents to promote the celebration; the convention liked the idea and selected a committee of leading educators to implement the program, including the immediate past president of the National Education Association. Bellamy was selected as the chair. Having received the official blessing of educators, Bellamy's committee now had the task of spreading the word across the nation and of designing an official program for schools to follow on the day of national celebration. He structured the program around a flag-raising ceremony and his pledge.

In his recollection of the creation of the Pledge, Francis Bellamy said, "At the beginning of the nineties patriotism and national feeling was [sic] at a low ebb. The patriotic ardor of the Civil War was an old story ... The time was ripe for a reawakening of simple Americanism and the leaders in the new movement rightly felt that patriotic education should begin in the public schools."[26] James Upham "felt that a flag should be on every schoolhouse,"[26] so his publication "fostered a plan of selling flags to schools through the children themselves at cost, which was so successful that 25,000 schools acquired flags in the first year (1892–93).[26]

As the World's Columbian Exposition was set to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, Upham sought to link the publication's flag drive to the event, "so that every school in the land ... would have a flag raising, under the most impressive conditions."[26] Bellamy was placed in charge of this operation and was soon lobbying "not only the superintendents of education in all the States, but [he] also worked with governors, Congressmen, and even the President of the United States."[26] The publication's efforts paid off when Benjamin Harrison declared Wednesday, October 12, 1892, to be Columbus Day for which The Youth's Companion made "an official program for universal use in all the schools."[26] Bellamy recalled that the event "had to be more than a list of exercises. The ritual must be prepared with simplicity and dignity."[26]

Edna Dean Proctor wrote an ode for the event: "There was also an oration suitable for declamation."[26] Bellamy held that "Of course, the nub of the program was to be the raising of the flag, with a salute to the flag recited by the pupils in unison."[26] He found "There was not a satisfactory enough form for this salute. The Balch salute, which ran, "I give my heart and my hand to my country, one country, one language, one flag," seemed to him too juvenile and lacking in dignity."[26] After working on the idea with Upham, Bellamy concluded, "It was my thought that a vow of loyalty or allegiance to the flag should be the dominant idea. I especially stressed the word 'allegiance'. ... Beginning with the new word allegiance, I first decided that 'pledge' was a better school word than 'vow' or 'swear'; and that the first person singular should be used, and that 'my' flag was preferable to 'the.'"[26] Bellamy considered the words "country, nation, or Republic," choosing the last as "it distinguished the form of government chosen by the founding fathers and established by the Revolution. The true reason for allegiance to the flag is the Republic for which it stands."[26] Bellamy then reflected on the sayings of Revolutionary and Civil War figures, and concluded, "All that pictured struggle reduced itself to three words, one Nation indivisible."[26]

Bellamy considered the slogan of the French Revolution, Liberté, égalité, fraternité ("liberty, equality, fraternity"), but held that "fraternity was too remote of realization, and … [that] equality was a dubious word."[26] Concluding "Liberty and justice were surely basic, were undebatable, and were all that any one Nation could handle if they were exercised for all. They involved the spirit of equality and fraternity."[26]

This was the salute you were supposed to give and did give until 1942:

Controversy grew in the United States on the use of the Bellamy salute given its similarity to the fascist salutes. School boards around the country revised the salute to avoid this similarity. There was a counter-backlash from the United States Flag Association and the Daughters of the American Revolution, who felt it inappropriate for Americans to have to change the traditional salute because foreigners had later adopted a similar gesture.[2]

What's even weirder is that some people know about his socialist views but not his other progressive views:

On immigration and universal suffrage, Bellamy wrote in the editorial of The Illustrated American, Vol. XXII, No. 394, p. 258: "[a] democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth.”[6] And further: "Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock. There are races more or less akin to our own whom we may admit freely and get nothing but advantage by the infusion of their wholesome blood. But there are other races, which we cannot assimilate without lowering our racial standard, which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes."[13]

The only controversy about this thing is the "under God" shit.

One of the great Supreme Court cases regarding free speech was the Court overruling itself that you can't be compelled to give the Pledge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_Education_v._Barnette overruled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minersville_School_District_v._Gobitis which said that the proper path for anyone who dissents from the state is to accept being compelled and trying to change the voters minds.

The foremost progressive Justice was angered at the court overturning his opinion after just three years:

The Justice who had written the Gobitis ruling in 1940 – Felix Frankfurter – strongly disagreed with how that precedent was being overturned in the Barnette ruling. Frankfurter reinforced his holding in Gobitis that those who disagree with a law should attempt to change it through the political process, rather than break that law due to religious conscience. "Otherwise each individual could set up his own censor against obedience to laws conscientiously deemed for the public good by those whose business it is to make laws." Thus, Frankfurter believed that the Barnette majority overstepped in striking down the West Virginia law, which had been passed by elected legislators.[1]