Under God: The Evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance

On June14, 1954, President Eisenhower signed an order adding words "under God" to the Pledge. An excerpt from the article:

"For its first 60 years, the Pledge of Allegiance was a nonsectarian American vow, conceived to foster love of country in youths and among immigrants, and to heal the nation’s wounds in the wake of a vicious civil war. But in 1953, another conflict—the Cold War between democracy and communism—was on, and Congress decided the deity had a place in the pledge.

Following the War Between the States, the Union flag emerged as a popular American symbol. Admirers undertook to establish an official Flag Day. Many school systems embraced the concept, but decades would pass before the event achieved national holiday status. Nonetheless, by the 1880s affection for the Stars and Stripes had grown so enthusiastic as to interest The Youth’s Companion. The Boston-based weekly, in business since 1827, had 475,000 readers; subscribers paid $1.75 a year and anyone who signed up received a premium. To honor the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, publisher and editor Daniel Ford decided to hand out tricolors with subscriptions. That campaign had been under way for two years in 1890 when Ford heard minister Francis Bellamy preach at Bethany Baptist Church in Boston. The temperance advocate impressed Ford with his elucidation of Christian Socialist theology, which looked warily on capitalism and expressed sympathy for the workingman. Bellamy’s views drew on the philosophy of his novelist cousin, Edward, famous for the utopian ideas in his futuristic 1888 best seller, Looking Backward.

In 1891, Francis Bellamy quit Bethany Baptist over money. Ford hired him for The Youth’s Companion Columbus quadricentennial project. As part of the increasingly prominent promotion, James Upham, Ford’s nephew, was struggling to compose a pledge to the flag."