Power  /  Book Excerpt

Why Do We Pledge Allegiance?

Few democracies require children to make a daily declaration of fealty to country.
Associated Press/Seth Perlman

In August and early September, millions of U.S. children return to school. For most, their mornings begin with them standing, hand over heart, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag. This is not, however, an antique custom. The Constitution specifies an oath of office for the president, and witnesses in court are customarily administered an oath that binds them to tell the truth. Average Americans, though, were not expected to perform any oaths of allegiance for the first century of the country’s existence, nor, in particular, were children required to make such pledges. Indeed, historian Richard Ellis, whose deeply informative To the Flag (2005) informs much of my writing about the pledge, has noted that “democracies generally do not require their children to pledge allegiance to the nation on a daily or even regular basis.” How, then, did the Pledge of Allegiance come to be seen as such a key patriotic exercise that we require it daily of our children?

The origins of the pledge cannot be understood apart from the “flag movement” of the 1880s, which itself cannot be understood apart from the Civil War. Just as U.S. (that is, Union) flags became more omnipresent during the war, so “loyalty tests” also spread. People suspected of disloyalty were often arrested, eligible for pardon if they submitted to an “oath of allegiance” swearing to “support, protect and defend the Constitution and Government of the United States against all enemies, whether domestic or foreign,” and to “bear true faith, allegiance and loyalty to the same.” Such oral and signed performances were thought to be rehabilitative, making real Americans out of those whose devotion was questionable or had wavered.

During the war, the practice of oath-taking and pledging did not extend beyond captured Confederate soldiers and their suspected Northern sympathizers, but the “cult of the flag” that emerged two decades later began to stir a desire in many Americans to have more citizens—maybe all citizens—demonstrate their respect for the flag. Schools, in particular, became a site for organizing around this impulse.