Seventy-four years ago today, lawmakers passed an amendment to the U.S. Flag Code, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had approved just a few months earlier, instructing Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to do so while “standing at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart.”
This may have been the earliest federal rule addressing what civilians should do to accompany the recitation of the Pledge, but it was by no means the first time someone had thought about it. That distinction goes to Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist minister who, in 1892, was working at Youth’s Companion magazine. He came up with a physical component to the Pledge because, in fact, he was the guy who wrote it.
A few years earlier, another staffer at the magazine, James Upham, launched a campaign to encourage the display of American flags in classrooms. The goal was to promote “American patriotism” and, perhaps more importantly, to sell flags to schools through the magazine.
Ultimately, the magazine staff came up with a plan to make October 12, 1892, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, a national holiday in public schools—one whose celebration would, naturally, require a flag in every classroom. Bellamy was instrumental in getting Congress, and President Benjamin Harrison, behind the idea.
Bellamy was also in charge of creating an official “program of exercises” for the upcoming Columbus Day, which included “a lofty ode by Edna Dean Proctor, an original song by Hezekiah Butterworth, and a declamation on the ‘Meaning of the Four Centuries’ by Bellamy himself.” The highlight was to be a brand new pledge to the flag, which Bellamy was forced to invent after his colleagues refused to do it.