Bellamy was a masterful promoter, wrangling a meeting with President Harrison and roaming the halls of Congress until his pleadings on behalf of patriotism and citizenship produced a joint resolution to declare Columbus Day a national holiday “with suitable exercises in the schools.” His pledge appeared in the September 8, 1892 issue of the Companion in its shorter original form: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Bellamy’s Columbus Day promotion was a commercial success, capitalizing on the patriotic mania that swept America in those years: standing when the flag passed became customary during the Spanish-American War in 1898, and by 1900 nineteen states required schools to fly the flag. Although his Pledge emerged as the preferred salute out of dozens of contenders, he had little control over its fate (indeed, he battled challenges to his authorship until his death in 1931). As state and local laws requiring recitation of the Pledge multiplied in the 1920s and 1930s, the American Legion and other patriotic groups urged children to pledge allegiance not to “my flag,” but to “the flag of the United States of America,” lest any Polish or Italian child imagine his own national standard in place of Old Glory. The change pained Bellamy, whose authorial ego apparently prevailed over his nativism.

Local officials and higher courts dismissed early challenges to the compulsory Pledge. In 1918, when a Mennonite father appealed the twenty-five-day jail sentence he had received for instructing his daughter not to recite the Pledge out of deference to his church’s opposition to violence and oath-taking—which led her teacher to send her home as a truant—the judge rejected the appeal. There was nothing religious about the Pledge, said the judge, who warned that “Such conduct on the part of our citizens … is the forerunner of disloyalty and treason.” In 1940, Justice Felix Frankfurter led the way in the Supreme Court’s overturning of a lower court’s decision that patriotism might indeed violate religious belief. “Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law,” wrote Frankfurter, an immigrant who had migrated from Austria at age twelve, a co-founder of the ACLU and non-practicing Jew who presumably knew something about religious intolerance.

Violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses (whose rejection of the Pledge as a form of political involvement elicited the Supreme Court decision) erupted in hundreds of towns across the nation. In Wyoming, a mob tarred and feathered a Witness. Public officials permitted beatings in Texas and Illinois; in Nebraska, self-appointed patriots castrated another. Horrified by the bloodshed, three justices recanted their decisions, but it was not until 1943 that West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette finally protected conscientious objectors from saying the Pledge. The Court reacted in part to embarrassing comparisons between the Pledge and the patriotism of the Nazis, who were also inclined to persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses. Only a year before, Franklin Roosevelt had encouraged Americans to replace the original salute—an outstretched arm that looked uncomfortably like a counterpart to “Sieg Heil!”—with the now familiar hand over heart.

Dwight Eisenhower, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness but gave up that faith for the Army and, later on, Presbyterianism, believed strongly in the unifying power of the oath that his erstwhile co-believers called a tool of Satan. In one Sunday sermon, his new minister preached that the current Pledge “could be the Pledge of any Republic. In fact, I could hear little Muscovites repeat a similar Pledge to their hammer and sickle flag in Moscow with equal solemnity.” Abraham Lincoln himself had declared America “one nation UNDER GOD.” Eisenhower had heard enough. He signed those two additional words into law on Flag Day, June 14, 1954.