The Pledge of Allegiance, the one we all recited as school children (although mine most assuredly did not include under God* in the early grades) and still do at public events, was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. It started out as part of a marketing plan to offer flags to schools that subscribed to The Youth’s Companion, but quickly became a sincere patriotic effort. We all know how successful it was.
And Mr. Bellamy? Well.
Bellamy was a Christian Socialist[3] who “championed ‘the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus.'”[2] In 1891, Bellamy was forced from his Boston pulpit for his socialist sermons, and eventually stopped attending church altogether after moving to Florida, reportedly because of the racism he witnessed there.[4]
* The words Under God were added in 1954 to protect us from godless Communism – by our feckless Congress Critters who, in matters sacred (like American uteri), were just as vigilant then as they are now.
(h/t Crazycrawfish for the info.)
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
That is a terrific factoid. Imagine, the Pledge was written by a socialist. Hilarious!
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I hope Alan sees that!
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Alan?
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Our regular troll, Alan Scott?
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Ah.
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@Moe,
Not a troll, a dissenter.
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For nobly upholding up the views of the status-quo? Indeed. 🙂
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@Arbourist
Some of us like the status-quo, hence the reason there are so many of us out here who lament the fact we are fat. 😉
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Thanks for the nod. I thought you’d like that. 🙂
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Did indeed crazy, did indeed.
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Very interesting factoid, Moe. I appreciate the irony in a story like this. How human it is to pursue the unknowable, sometimes in defiance of reality.
This of course is not the only story of inspired writing taking on a life of its own. Consider the poem, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invictus"Invictus by William Ernest Henley, poet, critic, editor and friend of Robert Louis Stevenson’s. It is also a story of irony because, despite his courage, Henley’s illness brought him a premature death.
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Busted link – sorry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invictus
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Thanks for the reminder Jim – I’d quite forgotten those famous last lines!
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