1945 Congress Recognizes the Pledge of Allegiance
The U.S. Congress officially recognizes the "Pledge of Allegiance," and urges its frequent recitation in all of America's schools. The original pledge was composed in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister who was influenced by the ideas of his first cousin, Edward Bellamy, an author who had written the American socialist utopian novel, Looking Backward. Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance read as follows: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." At the time, Bellamy was chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education, and several public schools adopted his Pledge of Allegiance as part of the Columbus Day quadricentennial celebration that year. Over the next few decades, recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance rapidly increased in practice, and in 1924, against Bellamy's objections, the National Flag Conference changed the words, "my Flag," to "the Flag of the United States of America." In 1955, a decade after its official adoption by Congress in 1945, Bellamy's original pledge is altered again after the Knights of Columbus religious organization successfully persuades Congress to add the words, "under God," to the official Pledge of Allegiance.
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