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“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”
When I first came across these pictures I was a little surprised that I had never heard anything about it before. The United States Pledge of Allegiance as originally written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy a Baptist minister and writer.
He wrote the Pledge for the September 8th issue of The Youth’s Companion, which was the Readers Digest of its day. Included with Francis’s original Pledge of Allegiance was what he described as the proper salute of the flag to go along with the pledge.
The proper salute, which was called the “Bellamy salute” after it’s creator. He modeled his hand salute after that of the Romans. The salute consisted of one arm stretched out toward the flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The Bellamy Salute was used by school children all over the United States for almost 50 years.
Then in the early 1940’s it was noticed that the salute bore a resemblance to a certain other salute being used in Germany at the time, which was based on the same original Roman salute. As a result Congress replaced the Bellamy Salute in June of 1942 with the Hand-On-Heart Salute.
The three photographs below were taken by Charles Fenno Jacobs, which are now in the Library of Congress. They were taken one month before the new salute became official in Southington, Connecticut.
Here is another old picture with a slightly different salute taken in 1899 along with a few other pictures throughout history.
Civil War Veterans saluting the flag
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February 10th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Great post and fascinating pics. However you might be interested to know that it was not an ancient Roman salute (that is a popularly repeated myth), and that the USA Pledge of Allegiance WAS the origin of the stiff armed salute adopted later by the National Socialist German Workers Party, as shown by the historian Dr. Rex Curry (author of “Pledge of Allegiance Secrets”).
Dee May Says:February 14th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Surfer Jerry,
Thanks for this post. I must tell you that this pledge was modified twice from the original. This version with “UNDER GOD” was adopted in 1954. I remember standing in the sunshine by the flagpole when the principal of our school
taught us this “new” version. Funny (SAD) that the ACLU et al want it taken back out…………most of them don’t know that it has not always been there. Thanks again, Dee