October 21, 1892: The Introduction of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag

October 21, 1892: The Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag is introduced.

The first version of the Pledge written in 1885 by Captain George Thatcher Balch, a Union Army officer in the American Civil War, who later wrote a book on how to teach patriotism to children in public schools. In 1892, Francis Bellamy -- a Socialist, with retroactive irony -- revised Balch's verse as part of a magazine promotion surrounding the World's Columbian Exposition, a World's Fair in Chicago that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas.

Bellamy, the circulation manager for The Youth's Companion magazine, helped persuade then-President Benjamin Harrison to institute Columbus Day as a national holiday, and lobbied Congress for a national school celebration of the day. The magazine sent leaflets containing part of Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance to schools across the country. On October 21, 1892, over 10,000 children recited the verse together.

Bellamy's version of the pledge, though his authorship of it is contested, is largely the same as the one formally adopted by Congress 50 years later, in 1942: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

In 1923, the words "my flag" were replaced with "the Flag of the United States." Quickly, in 1924, it was altered again, to "the Flag of the United States of America." And so, for 30 years, it read: "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The official name "The Pledge of Allegiance" was adopted in 1945. The most recent alteration of its wording came on Flag Day, June 14, in 1954, when the words "under God" were added. This is the version pretty much every American alive today has used, with spacing tending to make it sound like a poem, as follows:

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.

The Pledge is accompanied by a salute. Originally, it was one suggested by Bellamy, based on one used in ancient Rome, and it became known as the Bellamy Salute. But in 1942, with the U.S. having entered World War II, it was deemed to be too close to the salutes used by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and it was replaced by holding the right hand over the heart for civilians, the Boy Scout salute for Scouts, and a traditional military salute for the armed forces.

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October 21, 1892 was a Friday. With the baseball season having ended a few days earlier, the only sport then in season in North America was college football, and these 4 games were played, with most of the games for that weekend being played the next day, Saturday:

* Princeton beat the New York Athletic Club, 40-0 at the 1890-1911 version of the Polo Grounds.

* The University of Pennsylvania beat Williams College, 50-0 at the University Athletic Grounds in Philadelphia.

* Lafayette College beat the Columbia Athletic Association, 10-0 at the Berkeley Oval in The Bronx.

* And the University of Illinois beat Washington University, 22-0 at the 1881-1898 version of Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.