Why do we pledge the Flag?

THE FLAG SPEAKS

I am whatever you make me-nothing more. But always I am all that you hope to be and have the courage to try for. I am song and fear, struggle and panic and ennobling hope. I am the day's work of the weakest man, and the largest dream of the most daring. I am the Constitution and the courts, statutes, and stature makers, soldiers and street sweepers, cooks, counselors, clerks. I am no more than you believe me to be. My stars are your dreams and your labors. For you are the makers of the flag and it is well that you glory in the making.

Francis Bellamy (1855 - 1931), a Baptist minister, wrote the original Pledge in August 1892. He was a Christian Socialist. In his Pledge, he is expressing the ideas of his first cousin, Edward Bellamy, author of the American socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897).

Bellamy's granddaughter said he also would have resented this second change. He had been pressured into leaving his church in 1891 because of his socialist sermons. In his retirement in Florida, he stopped attending church because he disliked the racial bigotry he found there.
What follows is Bellamy's own account of some of the thoughts that went through his mind in August, 1892, as he picked the words of his Pledge:


It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution...with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people...


The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the 'republic for which it stands.' ...And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation - the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches.

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