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Francis Bellamy (1855-1931) wrote the original Pledge in August 1892. The Pledge was published in the September 8th issue of "The Youth's Companion", the leading family magazine and the Reader's Digest of its day. In 1892 Francis Bellamy was chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education in the National Education Association. As its chairman, he prepared the program for the public schools' quadricentennial celebration for Columbus Day in 1892. He structured this public school program around a flag raising ceremony and a flag salute - his "Pledge of Allegiance".

The original Pledge read as follows: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and (to*) the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".
He considered placing the word, "equality", in his Pledge, but knew that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans.
* ['to' added in October, 1892.]

In 1923 and 1924 the National Flag Conference, under the leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the Pledge's words "my flag", to "the Flag of the United States of America". Bellamy disliked this change, but his protest was ignored.

In 1954, Congress, after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus (and in response to McCarthyism), added the words, "under God" to the Pledge. The Pledge was now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer. 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. And its future?
Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, "Liberty, equality, fraternity". No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all."

These excerpts (with some modification) have been taken from "The Pledge of Allegiance: A Short History" by Dr. John W. Baer.
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