Author of The Pledge of Allegiance

[Fulanito de Tal]

I learned something today.

The US Pledge of Alligiance that is recited by students throughout the country Monday-Friday was written by a....SOCIALIST!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bellamy


Francis Julius Bellamy was an author, editor, and publicity director born in Mount Morris, New York in 1855. He attended Rome Free Academy in Rome, NY, the University of Rochester (1872–1876) and the Rochester Theological Seminary (1876–1880).[1] He was an American Baptist minister (May 18, 1855 – August 28, 1931) and Christian Socialist[2] who wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. It was published in the Youth's Companion, which was a nationally circulated magazine for adolescents, and by 1892 was the largest publication of any type in the United States, with a circulation around 500,000. His cousin Edward Bellamy is the noted author of the socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897).

[Catmatic Leftist]

However, he also said this:


[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; where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another.

He sounds like a proto-fascist more than a genuine communist. Slight sympathies for economic egalitarianism, but ardent "patriotism" and nationalism.

And the pledge is utter nonsense. I never stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance anyways. It was even more hilarious because my parents forced me into my school's JROTC program and the class happened to be at the time of the morning announcements. Imagine the look on the instructor's face of a kid in uniform not standing up for the pledge. :)

[chegitz guevara]

He wasn't a Marxist, but a Utopian socialist. They tended to have all kinds of mixed up ideas.

[Fulanito de Tal]

I'm just trying to point out a contradiction. The US is the leader of the capitalist world. It has a history of oppressing communist movements. The media has made communism and socialism synonymous with fascism. We are told to be scared of socialism. Yet, the pledge of allegiance was written by a socialist.

[Nolan]

However, he also said this:



He sounds like a proto-fascist more than a genuine communist. Slight sympathies for economic egalitarianism, but ardent "patriotism" and nationalism.

And the pledge is utter nonsense. I never stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance anyways. It was even more hilarious because my parents forced me into my school's JROTC program and the class happened to be at the time of the morning announcements. Imagine the look on the instructor's face of a kid in uniform not standing up for the pledge. :)

He apparently was anti-immigrant, but that doesn't make him fascist. The problem is that he considered the US a "democracy" worth guarding and that he was a christian. No one ever mentioned communism, but "socialism" in the non-Marxist, incoherent sense.

He was a utopian socialist.

[Catmatic Leftist]

He wasn't a Marxist, but a Utopian socialist. They tended to have all kinds of mixed up ideas.


He apparently was anti-immigrant, but that doesn't make him fascist. The problem is that he considered the US a "democracy" worth guarding and that he was a christian. No one ever mentioned communism, but "socialism" in the non-Marxist, incoherent sense.

He was a utopian socialist.

Wow, I learn something new everyday. But seriously, that part in bold sounds like something a modern neo-Nazi bonehead would say.

[Public Domain]

Wow, I learn something new everyday. But seriously, that part in bold sounds like something a modern neo-Nazi bonehead would say.
Actually it sounds like what a modern-day conservative bonehead would say

[Red Commissar]

You have to understand the political climate when these were written. It's easy to write that off as Fascist, but it ignores what "fascism" is and what was going on in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

"Utopian Socialism" in many countries tended to take religious overtones and was more rooted in patriotic and white-centric nonsense. They tried to imagine a system rooted in strong morals and hard work, and tried to appeal to people who might share that. The Bellamy brothers came from this tradition and tried to imagine this system, something different from Marxism. It's worth noting that the author's brother, Edward Bellamy, wrote a book called "Looking Backwards". While it wasn't really a radical socialist tract, it excited the imagination of many people then and was for awhile one of the top selling books in the US, and helped with the growth of Socialism in the US at the turn of the century.

To jump on the bandwagon they attacked immigrants and others to try and get cheap support, like Francis Bellamy did. Unfortunately this issue with immigrants was not limited to scatterbrains in religious socialism but within trade unions and even "socialist" groups too, some of which had restrictions on who could join and segregated between whites and everyone else. I remember reading a statement by a trade-union linked leader in California (I believe it was Denis Kearney) complaining about the "Yellow Peril" (Chinese), whose rounds was important in making sure the severe immigration restrictions on Chinese in the Chinese Exclusion Act were passed. The Knights of Labor lined up behind it too.

What I find more interesting really when I first learned this is despite all his personal views, the whole bit about God was never put in there by Bellamy.

[Jose Gracchus]

As an aside:

Interestingly enough, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards was, according to Simon Pirani, one of the most popular books of Civil War-era Communists in the Russian Revolution. It has been suggested Bellamy's authoritarianism, statism, and bureaucratism appealed to new recruits who were enamored of Civil War methods, and were not properly educated in Marxism, understanding Marxian socialism to be the collective democracy of the producers overcoming and superseding the individual capitalists, and the state form.

[khad]

"I pledge my allegiance to the flag of the community of American, Soviet, and United Nations of the World, and to the principle for which it stands – a nation, indivisible with others of the Earth, joined in peace, and justice for all."

[khad]

To jump on the bandwagon they attacked immigrants and others to try and get cheap support, like Francis Bellamy did. Unfortunately this issue with immigrants was not limited to scatterbrains in religious socialism but within trade unions and even "socialist" groups too, some of which had restrictions on who could join and segregated between whites and everyone else. I remember reading a statement by a trade-union linked leader in California (I believe it was Denis Kearney) complaining about the "Yellow Peril" (Chinese), whose rounds was important in making sure the severe immigration restrictions on Chinese in the Chinese Exclusion Act were passed. The Knights of Labor lined up behind it too.
Opportunism doesn't even begin to describe it. You are looking at this from a presentist lens, since you are assuming that there was some kind of genuine politics divorced from racial antagonism, xenophobia, and eugenics.

Until the 1960s and 70s, it was the consensus of mainstream American labor historians was that the immigration restrictions on Asians was what saved American labor - "The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes." (Selig Perlman, A History of Trade Unionism in the United States, 1922) You had certain immigrant groups speak out on it,* but as far as white anglo saxons were concerned, they were pretty much in agreement. The eugenics movement of the early 20th century was also so pervasive that you had everyone in mainstream politics (with exception of maybe the Catholics) speaking in its language and talking about improving "national stock." Look at Socialist Party mouthpiece Upton Sinclair and the racist shit he wrote into the Jungle. Early feminism, birth control - look at Margaret Sanger and her plans to exterminate the black race by selective breeding. The eugenics movement, indirectly, was actually instrumental in creating the modern model of femininity that leftists today love to hold on a pedestal. In order to justify their forcible sterilizations, prominent eugenicists argued that womanhood was no longer based in reproduction but in the pleasure of sex.

This is the kind of messy history that we are dealing with, the kind that can't be neatly folded into neat categories of "leftist" and "reactionary" nor disaggregated into their individual components. One has to evaluate these movements as a whole and understand their diverse legacies, both (in our present-day sensibilities) good and bad. The progressive movement and the early utopian socialists were inextricable from their xenophobic, eugenic social climate. However, on the grounds of the regulatory state that they helped usher in, they were a step up from the even more xenophobic and eugenicist conservatives at the time. Yes, they helped push forward the infamous 1924 National Origins act, but without them the American welfare state would be even more underdeveloped.

So,

1. I don't give a shit that a "socialist" wrote the Pledge of Allegiance.

2. The people calling Francis Bellamy a fascist have no idea what they are talking about.

*Oddly enough, the Italian American press opposed Asian restriction due to solidarity on the grounds that they too came from an ancient and proud civilization. This was before they realized that they could assimilate as whites, haha.

[Sir Comradical]

Also on that page:


The recital was accompanied with a salute to the flag known as the Bellamy salute, described in detail by Bellamy. During World War II, the salute was replaced with a hand-over-heart gesture because the original form involved stretching the arm out towards the flag in a manner that resembled the later Nazi salute.
:confused:

[khad]

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_f3-VceaOjXQ/SOEynaQMAXI/AAAAAAAAAKw/-W2z1rlvopA/pledge-utah2.jpg

[Le Libérer]

FYI, he was also a flag salesman and later admitted he wrote the poem we know as the Pledge largely as a sales pitch to get more schoolhouses to buy flags from him, not necessarily as an expression of personal belief.

[Red Commissar]

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_f3-VceaOjXQ/SOEynaQMAXI/AAAAAAAAAKw/-W2z1rlvopA/pledge-utah2.jpg

Rex Curry? Isn't that the guy who tries to says progressives=socialism=fascism=nazi=communism?

[Fulanito de Tal]

FYI, he was also a flag salesman and later admitted he wrote the poem we know as the Pledge largely as a sales pitch to get more schoolhouses to buy flags from him, not necessarily as an expression of personal belief.

LMAO! Socialist my ass!

[syndicat]

i thought he was a preacher? or am I confusing him with his cousin, Edward? anyway, Edward Bellamy was not only a utopian socialist but also an authoritarian state socialist. he wanted the state to run the whole economy. Bellamy's ideas were a big fad in the 1890s, particularly with middle class readers. there were a huge number of Nationalist Clubs (as Bellamy groups called themselves) in Southern California in particular. altho they were utopians, they were also related to the fabians in Britain. when the Socialist Party was formed in 1901, the Bellamy groups went into that party.

[MarxistMan]

This might be a little off-topic but related to US history. Go to this link
http://www.brianwillson.com/ to find out how USA founding fathers were fascists and evil just Bush and Cheney, and how they did an ethnic cleansing of millions of american indians, and how USA was founded as an oligarchic nazi empire by default in 1776, and not as a Republican-Democracy like so many US Constitutionalists like Ron Paul and other worshippers of the USA founding fathers who were oligarchis and fascists think



.



He apparently was anti-immigrant, but that doesn't make him fascist. The problem is that he considered the US a "democracy" worth guarding and that he was a christian. No one ever mentioned communism, but "socialism" in the non-Marxist, incoherent sense.

He was a utopian socialist.

[Nolan]

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_f3-VceaOjXQ/SOEynaQMAXI/AAAAAAAAAKw/-W2z1rlvopA/pledge-utah2.jpg

Rex Curry is a habitual falsifier. The nazis likely got it from their Italian mentors who pulled it from a supposed Roman military salute, however:



I made it the salute of the Party long after the Duce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duce) had adopted it. I'd read the description of the sitting of the Diet of Worms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Worms), in the course of which Luther (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther) was greeted with the German salute. It was to show him that he was not being confronted with arms, but with peaceful intentions. In the days of Frederick the Great (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great), people still saluted with their hats, with pompous gestures. In the Middle Ages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages) the serfs humbly doffed their bonnets, whilst the noblemen gave the German salute. It was in the Ratskeller at Bremen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ratskeller_in_Bremen), about the year 1921, that I first saw this style of salute. It must be regarded as a survival of an ancient custom, which originally signified: "See, I have no weapon in my hand!" I introduced the salute into the Party at our first meeting in Weimar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar). The SS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel) at once gave it a soldierly style. It's from that moment that our opponents honoured us with the epithet "dogs of Fascists".
—Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Table_Talk)


It had nothing to do with Bellamy.

[Cheung Mo]

Actually it sounds like what a modern-day conservative bonehead would say

Meh...I'd rather welfare state-loving, progressive tax conservatives like True Finns than "socialists" :laugh::laugh: like Wall Street Barry.