e should acknowledge the Creator, as did the Founders, in ceremony and word. He should remain in our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history," said Mitt Romney last week as he tried to convince fundamentalist Christians they shouldn’t be afraid of him or his Mormon religion.
But if, as Romney suggests, we acknowledge the Creator as the Founders did, "in our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history," we would be getting the history part wrong.
That’s because the Founders — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison and the rest — had nothing whatever to do with having the Creator on our money or in our pledge of allegiance. In fact, they’d been dead for a century before we even had a pledge and for a century and a half before we had a pledge with a nod to the Creator.
God did make an appearance on some American currency in the 19th century, but that was Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase’s doing, not Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s.
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Our currency did not proclaim "In God We Trust" until a Protestant minister wrote to Chase at the start of the Civil War to suggest that if the war destroyed American civilization, it might be a good idea if our surviving coins contained "the recognition of Almighty God in some form."
Chase thought that was a splendid idea and the words "In God We Trust," his motto, appeared on 1- and 2-cent coins before the war was over. But it took until 1938 to get the nation’s trust in God onto the final coin, the Jefferson nickel, and all of our paper money didn’t include the motto until 1957, when Romney was 10.
The pledge was written in 1892 as a promotion for a magazine called "The Youth’s Companion" to give school children something to recite during the 400th anniversary celebrations of Columbus’ discovery of America. The religious right may be thrilled to learn the author of the pledge was a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy, but not so thrilled that he was working for the magazine because he had been fired by his Boston congregation because of the socialist themes of his sermons.
Bellamy’s text contained some serious omissions, later corrected by patriots of various persuasions. It originally read, "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Bellamy had first tried, "equality, liberty and justice for all," but some sponsors, who were superintendents of schools, feared stirring up the blacks, so equality was eliminated.
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But editing the pledge had just begun. In the 1920s, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion, fearing some immigrants might interpret "my flag" as the flag of their fathers, changed the text from "I pledge allegiance to my flag" to "the flag of the United States of America." This left real Americans secure in the knowledge that when making the pledge, they weren’t allying themselves with the Russians or the French.
The final edit — up to now — came during the McCarthy excesses of the 1950s when the American Legion, which never seemed to give the pledge a moment’s peace, teamed up with the Knights of Columbus and the Hearst newspapers to lobby Congress to insert "under God" between "one nation" and "indivisible." Congress found this to be a pleasant alternative to tackling real issues and was happy to mess with the pledge once more.
Since then, there have been halfhearted attempts by some right-to-lifers to change the pledge once again by having it end, "with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn." It’s surprising this crowd pleaser hasn’t been picked up and woven into the Iowa campaign by the likes of Huckabee, Giuliani and Romney.
Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.
