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Pledging Allegiance to the All Powerful
State
by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The US Supreme Court's
recent decision to review the constitutionality of the "under God" wording
in the Pledge of Allegiance provides an occasion to educate Americans about
the ideological purpose of the Pledge. A good place to start would be John
Baer's book, The Pledge of Allegiance: A Centennial History, 1892-1992
(Free State Press, 1992). In it one would learn that the author of the
Pledge was one Francis Bellamy, a defrocked Baptist minister from Boston who
identified himself as a Christian Socialist and who preached in his pulpit
that "Jesus was a socialist."
Bellamy was the cousin of Edward Bellamy,
author of the extremely popular 1888 socialist fantasy,
Looking Backward. In this novel the main character, Julian West,
falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 when the socialist
"utopia" has been achieved: All industry is state owned, Soviet style;
everyone is an employee of the state who is conscripted at age 21 and
retires at age 45; and all workers earn the same income.
Francis Bellamy said that one purpose of the
Pledge of Allegiance was to help accomplish his lifelong goal of making his
cousin's socialist fantasy a reality in America. He further stated that the
"true reason for allegiance to the Flag" was to indoctrinate American school
children in the false history of the American founding that was espoused
first by Daniel Webster and, later, by Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln falsely claimed that the states were
never sovereign and that the union created the states, not the other way
around. (But as Joe Sobran has remarked, the notion that the union is older
than the states makes as much sense as the idea that a marriage can be older
than either spouse. It is impossible for a union of two things to be older
than either of the things it is a union of).
The truth is that in all of the American
founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Articles
of Confederation, and the Constitution, the states refer to themselves as
"free and independent." The Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War
was a treaty with the individual, free and independent states, not "the
whole people" of the United States.
The citizens of the states understood that
they were sovereign over the federal government, not the other way around,
as Lincoln absurdly claimed. The sovereign states delegated a few enumerated
powers to the central government, as their agent, while maintaining
sovereignty for themselves.
Despite Lincoln's effort to destroy the
system of federalism and states' rights that was championed by Jefferson and
other founders by waging total war on the South, many Americans still
believed in the Jeffersonian states' rights ideal as of the 1880s. Despite
all the death and destruction of the war, and several subsequent decades of
Lincolnian propaganda about the alleged evils of states' rights, many
Americans still viewed federalism and states' rights as a safeguard against
federal tyranny - just as the American founding fathers, especially
Jefferson, had done.
Francis Bellamy was alarmed by this, for he
understood perfectly well that the first step along the way to his socialist
utopia was a consolidated or unitary state, just like the one Bismarck had
created in Germany through "blood and iron," and the one Abraham Lincoln
championed in the U.S. Monopoly government, in other words, was a necessary
first step on the road to socialism. All semblances of the Jeffersonian
philosophy of federalism and states' rights must be destroyed. In Bellamy's
own words:
The true reason for allegiance to the Flag
is the "republic for which it stands." ... And what does that vast thing,
the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation - the
One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One
Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and
Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. (See John W. Baer, "The
Pledge of Allegiance: A Short History)."
Bellamy considered the "liberty and justice
for all" phrase in the Pledge to be an Americanized version of the slogan of
the French Revolution: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The French
revolutionaries believed that mass killing by the state was always justified
if it was done for the "grand purpose" of achieving "equality." In an 1876
commencement speech Francis Bellamy praised the French Revolution as "the
poetry of human brotherhood." And "what we call the Civil War," Donald
Livingston has remarked, "was in fact America's French Revolution, and
Lincoln was the first Jacobin president" (Donald Livingston, "The Litmus
Test for American Conservativism," Chronicles, Jan. 2001).
Bellamy intended the Pledge of Allegiance to
be a vow of allegiance to the state, a quintessentially un-American idea. He
stated that he got the idea from the "loyalty oaths" that were imposed on
Southerners during Lincoln's invasion of the Southern states and afterward,
during Reconstruction. During the war, adult male civilians in the South
were compelled to take a loyalty oath to the federal government or be shot.
During Reconstruction almost all Southern white adult males were
disenfranchised by the requirement that in order to vote or hold political
office, they must take the following oath: "I ______ do solemnly swear (or
affirm) that I have never voluntarily borne arms against the United States
since I have been a citizen thereof; that I have voluntarily given no aid,
countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility
thereto . . ." (Baer, The Pledge of Allegiance, Chapter 4). Few if
any Southern men would dare to take this public pledge in the post-war
years.
Francis Bellamy first published the Pledge of
Allegiance in the September 1892 issue of The Youth's Companion,
which has been described as "the Reader's Digest of its day." By
that time, Bellamy had been forced to leave his Boston pulpit because of his
practice of preaching socialism rather than the Gospel.
In addition to his work at the magazine,
Francis Bellamy was the vice president in charge of education for the
"Society of Christian Socialists," a national organization that advocated
income taxation, central banking, nationalized education, nationalization of
industry, and other features of socialism. In his classic book,
Socialism (p. 223), Ludwig von Mises characterized Christian
socialism as "merely a variety of State Socialism." Its advocates, like the
Bellamy cousins, held that
Agriculture and handicraft, with perhaps
small shopkeeping, are the only admissible occupations. Trade and
speculation are superfluous, injurious, and evil. Factories and
large-scale industries are a wicked invention of the "Jewish spirit"; they
produce only bad goods which are foisted on buyers by the large stores and
by other monstrosities of modern trade to the detriment of purchasers.
The Bellamy cousins decided that American
youth needed to be taught "loyalty to the state" because they realized that
the individualism and the love of liberty of the American founding fathers
would always stand in the way of achieving the socialist utopia that was
described in Looking Backward. America supposedly suffered from too
much liberty and not enough equality, said the author of the Pledge of
Allegiance.
The "one nation, indivisible" wording was
especially important to the Bellamy cousins, for if secession were
legitimized, their pipe dream of socialism through a consolidated, monopoly
government would be destroyed. This was the thinking of all the worst
tyrants of the twentieth century, including Hitler and Stalin. (Hitler even
quoted approvingly Lincoln's "union created the states" theory from his
first inaugural address in Mein Kampf in order to make his own case
for destroying federalism and states' rights in Germany.)
The public schools must be used to teach
blind obedience to the state, the Bellamys reasoned, and the National
Education Association was pleased to help them accomplish this goal. They
planned a "National Public School Celebration" in 1892, which was the first
national propaganda campaign on behalf of the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a
massive campaign that involved government schools and politicians throughout
the country. The government schools were promoted, along with the Pledge,
while private schools, especially parochial ones, were criticized.
Students were taught to recite the Pledge
with their arms outstretched, palms up, similar to how Roman citizens were
required to hail Caesar, and not too different from the way in which Nazi
soldiers saluted their Führer. This was the custom in American public
schools from the turn of the twentieth century until around 1950, when it
was apparently decided by public school officials that the Nazi-like salute
was in bad taste.
The Pledge of Allegiance is an oath of
allegiance to the omnipotent, Lincolnian state. Its purpose was never to
inculcate in children the ideals of the American founding fathers, but those
of two eccentric nineteenth-century socialists. (Not surprisingly, among its
staunchest contemporary defenders and promoters are the Straussian neocon
Lincoln idolaters at the Claremont Institute.)
If the Supreme Court decides that the "under
God" wording in the Pledge is unconstitutional, it will be doing the right
thing for the wrong reason (it does not "establish a religion").
The Pledge itself is an oath of allegiance to the central state, and the
"under God" language only serves to deify the state. From the perspective of
a Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or James Madison, nothing could be
more un-American. After all, they and their contemporaries had fought a long
and bloody war of secession to sever their forced allegiance, complete with
loyalty oaths, to another overbearing and tyrannical state, namely the
British empire.
October 17, 2003
Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com
  Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor
of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. His book,
The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an
Unnecessary War, will be published in February.
History of Banking Fraud:
The Coming Battle
By M. W. WALBERT
The Coming Battle
documents from Congressional records, newspaper reports and writings by
the founding fathers and others a chronology of events long forgotten that
shaped our fledgling nation from 1776 to 1899. Read about the manipulation
of our money and its supply, the intentional creation of recessions,
depressions and panics, manipulation of the stock markets, and the
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Secrets of the Federal Reserve
by Eustace Mullins
Eustace Mullins' carefully
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control of the money supply and the economy and
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The
World Order
How control of the world's money has inexorably led to an ever tighter
grip on control of the world's people.
Uranium Wars by Leuren Moret
How control of the world's people has inexorably led to wider use of
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water, air, and the human genome.
Taking Back Your Power
by Allen Aslan Heart
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© 2007, Allen Aslan Heart / White Eagle Soaring of the Little Shell Pembina Band,
a
Treaty
Tribe of the Ojibwe Nation
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