'God' not part of 1st pledge
Leepson
FREELANCE WRITER
Oct. 16, 2005 12:00 AM
The nation's highest courts for the second time in two years are wrestling with the constitutionality of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. If the Supreme Court deletes the words, it will be the fifth change in the pledge since millions of schoolchildren first recited it as part of the nationwide Oct. 12, 1892, 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus' voyage.
The words those children spoke that day were: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." The words came from the pen of 37-year-old magazine editor Francis Bellamy, who wrote them for the 1892 commemoration, officially known as the National Columbian Public School Celebration. Bellamy, then an assistant editor of the Youth's Companion magazine, also happened to be an ordained Baptist minister.
Bellamy, whose father also was a Baptist minister, was born in Rome, N.Y., and graduated from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1876. He went on to practice his ministry at the BaptistChurch in Little Falls, N.Y., and then at the DearbornStreetChurch in Boston before turning to magazine editing.
Despite his long involvement with the church, Bellamy wrote the pledge without any reference to religion. That's because the pledge's origins had nothing to do with religion. The pledge was an integral part of what was known as the schoolhouse flag movement, a campaign led by patriotic and veterans groups - spearheaded by the nation's first politically powerful veterans' service organization, the Grand Army of the Republic - to put the Stars and Stripes in all the nation's schools. The idea was to gain the allegiance of millions of immigrant schoolchildren and the children of immigrants to their new nation.
"We are all descendants of immigrants, but we want to hasten that day, by every possible means when we shall be fused together," future President Theodore Roosevelt, a strong backer of the pledge and the schoolhouse flag movement, wrote to Bellamy in 1892. "Consequently, by all means in our power we ought to inculcate, among the children of this country, the most fervent loyalty to the Flag."
Bellamy chose the words "one nation indivisible," he later explained, to promote post-Civil-War reconciliation. As for "liberty and justice for all," Bellamy said he was inspired by "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," the "historic slogan of the French Revolution, which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends."
The first change in the pledge's wording was a minor one. It came after Bellamy heard thousands of students in Boston recite the pledge on Oct. 12, 1892. On that day, he changed the words slightly to read, "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic . . . "
Six years later, New York became the first state in the nation to mandate that students recite the pledge, then primarily known as the Flag Salute, in public schools at the beginning of the school day. Other states soon followed suit.
The second and third changes in the pledge's wording came in 1923 and 1924. They were made at the National Flag Conference in Washington, D.C., in which dozens of veterans and patriotic groups, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, met to draw up a national Flag Code. Delegates to the conference replaced the words "my flag" with, first, "to the flag of the United States," and, then later with "to the flag of the United States of America." On June 22, 1942, Congress officially recognized the pledge by including it in the U.S. Flag Code, which was adopted that year. In 1945, it became known officially as the Pledge of Allegiance.
The third, and by far most controversial, change in the pledge, adding "under God," came about in 1954 as the result of a national campaign waged by the Knights of Columbus and with the strong support of President Eisenhower during the Cold War.
Bellamy, who died in 1931, adamantly opposed the 1923 and 1924 changes to his Pledge of Allegiance. He was miffed at not having been consulted about the changes, and he regarded his original words as sacrosanct. The changes "incensed me more the more I cannot say," Bellamy's biographer quotes him as saying. "Robbed of my authorship, my Salute was changed and revamped with not even the courtesy of consultation on the revisions." I "never acknowledge these changes," Bellamy said, "My Salute contains only twenty-three words."
It's a safe bet, therefore, that Francis Bellamy would be on the front lines with those working to delete "under God" from the pledge. It's difficult to speculate, though, what he would have thought about an earlier Supreme Court ruling on the pledge. In 1943, the court ruled on an 8-year-old case involving a young Jehovah's Witness who refused to salute the flag. In a landmark case, the court found that schoolchildren cannot be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, a ruling that still stands.
Marc Leepson is the author of "Flag: An American Biography," a history of the American flag from the beginnings to today. His Web site is
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13 October 2005
Dear ********,
Thank you for writing me again so soon. It’s good to hear from you. You’re right that I don’t really need your news updates, as I do receive the ArizonaRepublic regularly. Sometimes I am reminded of an article I read a long time ago, and sometimes there are articles from other sources, so its not totally useless. The other inmates would not be interested in your news summaries. They are surprisingly pro-government for a bunch of people the government is locking up for many years. I have heard many uttering pro-war sentiments.
Mostly what I do all day is read and watch my cellmates television. I can’t hang around in the prison yard, because we are locked down all day. They only let us out for recreation, food, and medical appointments. Recreation is three times a week.
I have never actually seen someone taking drugs or dealing drugs here, but from what I hear it does go on, and the Aryan Brotherhood is involved with it. One inmate asked to borrow ten stamps from me (postage stamps are a de facto currency in here), and I was told later by my cellmate that he needed the stamps to pay a cocaine debt. I don’t know what the attitude of the guards is to drugs. There aren’t enough guards here to monitor everything, so I imagine if one is discreet it is possible to get away with taking drugs.
You have my permission to post my letters on other the Indymedia site or other websites as you feel fit.
There are definitely dangers her, but it would be an exaggeration to say that I fear for my life in on a daily basis. 90% of the inmates here are nice and friendly. It’s a few inmates in a few circumstances that cause the trouble.
There are nine housing units (HUs or “houses”_ on the yard (the Rincon Unit). I am in HU6 or “House Six”. Each house has three corridors or “Runs”, A, B, and C. I am in B run or “Baker Run”, as the guards call it.
Each run is governed by a representative of the Aryan Brotherhood. For my run, HU6 B, the representative is an inmate named Todd Huston. (inmate number 115953, DOB 12/28/1977 ) If anyone wants to submit any kind of paperwork to the prison authorities, even a request for medical treatment Todd has to see it to make sure no one is snitching. My paperwork has been examined closely this past week because Todd is afraid I will report what happened in the recreation field when I refused to enter the lottery the Aryan Brotherhood was conducting. The Aryan Brotherhood doesn’t insist on examining letters going to people outside the prison, however, and so I can be perfectly frank about what goes on here. Still I prefer to write these letters when my cellmate is at work and finish before he comes back.
Todd also collects a tax of one stamp (37 cents) per month from each of us – supposedly it goes to help the white inmates who are being held in the Supermax yard in Florence. Supposedly that lottery they wanted me to enter goes to that also.
I am glad that Laro was able to defy the will of the Aryan Brotherhood while he was being transferred. It would be very dangerous for him to sit next to a black man here.
Thank you for telling me about Krystin Sinama. I am glad we have someone in the anti-war movement in the House of Representatives. I’m also glad she sticks it to the religious folks as well.
The television here has four channels devoted to Department of Corrections material. Channel 2 has a lot of fundamentalist Christian garbage on it, but now that it is Ramadan, they have Muslim shows on it so I suppose they let different religions take turns.
I am surprised to learn that all my letters have been opened and read. They did not do that to the outgoing mail when I was in jail, only incoming.
Yours,
Kevin
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Volunteers get cold reception in Vermont
They run into protest and walk through wild to watch Canada border
By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff | October 16, 2005
NEWPORT, Vt. -- It's hard to save the United States from illegal immigrants when you can't find the border.
At noon yesterday, some volunteers in the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps were in this bucolic town in northern Vermont, trying to do both.
Eleven members of this citizens group had come to the Vermont-Canada border to patrol for illegal immigrants. They had intended to station themselves in Derby Line, a quaint village that straddles the border.
But these Minutemen were forced out of town by a larger crowd of protesters, who denounced their opposition to illegal immigration as a front for racism.
So the volunteers set off to watch a stretch of border on a bike path that runs along LakeMemphremagog.
Only they got lost.
Some of the men stood at a break in the path, which is crossed by the Canadian border close to where they stood. But the group's leader, Bob Casimiro of Weymouth, Mass., was not sure which way to send them.
He pointed down the path toward a footbridge. The Minutemen started walking.
''Stay within sight," he told them. Within minutes, they were out of sight.
The Minutemen were formed in Arizona by ordinary citizens who believe that the federal government is not doing enough to secure the country's borders. In April, they stationed themselves along the southwest border with Mexico, armed with binoculars and cellphones.
They alerted border patrol officers whenever they saw people crossing illegally into the United States, hoping to deter others from trying.
Last month, they announced they would start patrolling the border with Canada.
Border patrol officers are careful not to criticize the Minutemen directly. But they do point out that the officers are best qualified to watch the border.
Others were more openly critical this week. Yesterday, about 40 men and women stood in the pouring rain on the village common in Derby Line to protest the arrival of the Minutemen in town.
''They are outsiders, and we don't want them here," said David Van Deusen of Moretown, Vt., who helped to organize the protest. ''We don't want their racist policies in Vermont."
The Minutemen's efforts are as much about public relations as apprehending illegal immigrants. They hope to make the issue of immigration more prominent nationally and to pressure the Bush administration into providing more funding for border patrols.
Casimiro spent three weeks in Naco, Ariz., earlier this year. He alerted authorities to one illegal immigrant, but he said he saw more important results than that.
''What we saw in Arizona is our presence certainly has energized [border enforcement] down there, because they don't want to be embarrassed," he said.
John Pfeifer, assistant chief patrol agent for Customs and Border Protection in the sector that includes Vermont, defended the agency.
''Our resources are obviously not unlimited," Pfeifer said. ''But we work with what they give us, and I think we do a really good job of monitoring and enforcing the laws on the border."
A couple of miles from the road where Casimiro left them, three of the Minutemen were still walking, grand houses on their left, the lake on their right. The rain quickly soaked them.
''This is really nice," said Weymouth police officer Bob Johnson. ''We get a foliage tour thrown in for no extra cost."
The border in this part of Vermont is nothing like the mostly flat and open one that separates Arizona from Mexico, where the Minutemen staged a high-profile border watch that brought them to national prominence in April.
This northern border is a slash through thick forest or a tree line a few yards from a road in the town of Holland, Vt. In Derby Line, it is narrow Lee Street, dotted with pretty Victorian houses, or the building at 209 Main St., where apartment 2A is in Canada and 2B is in the United States.
It is the thin, black line that runs along the floor of the Haskell Free Library. It is a small obelisk in a field or in the backyard of a run-down house high on a hill.
It is Canusa Avenue in the town of Beebe Plain, where residents on one side of the street are Canadians and those on the other are in the United States, and crossing the road to borrow a cup of sugar means passing through a checkpoint at the end of the street. It cuts through the middle of LakeMemphremagog.
Border patrol officers arrested 1,927 people along the 195 miles of border in the Swanton sector, which includes Vermont and part of New York, between Oct. 1, 2004, and Sept. 30. Of those, 856 were crossing the border illegally. Others were picked up on expired visas and other violations.
Along the 4,000-mile border between the United States and Canada, 7,340 people were arrested in the last fiscal year, 2,100 of those in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Those numbers are minuscule compared to arrests along the 1,951-mile border with Mexico, where over the same period about 1.2 million people were arrested by border patrol officers.
Watching the northern border is far more complicated than it is in the South. Border patrol officers are constantly in motion through the border towns in this region, policing the boundary in all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, boats, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft that use infrared technology to survey the area at night.
They also rely on residents to report anything suspicious.
''The residents are critical," Pfeifer said. ''The border goes through people's backyards and through buildings. Obviously, we can't put a camera and a sensor on every inch of the border, so we rely on the residents to call us. [Derby Line] is a real small town, so people know who belongs there and who does not."
Residents in Derby Line were mostly opposed to the arrival of the Minutemen.
''I don't think they're needed," said Buzz Roy, a pharmacist. ''The border patrol does an ample job. I don't think we need a bunch of yahoos enforcing the law."
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the federal government has tripled the number of officers patrolling the border and tightened the rules: It used to be easier for locals to cross the border, but now everybody in Derby Line has to check in every time they pass over it.
''I don't know why [the Minutemen are here]," said Florence Joyal, a sales assistant in Brown's Drugstore. ''We've got border patrol beaucoup. Security is tighter now."
''It's just another form of vigilantism," said James Griffin, 62, who came to Derby Line eight years ago. ''I think their agenda is racist, and they're just trying to impose their will. They're just another form of militia. I don't like their very presence, and I don't think Vermonters are going to be too happy to have them crossing over their land."
Those criticisms are unjustified, said Casimiro, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform and leader of the 11 volunteers from Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, and Connecticut.
''It's very simple," he said. ''I'm just trying to save my country."
''National security is a big part of this," said Casimiro, 67, a retired design and project engineer. ''As far as I'm concerned, I don't care where it is, I just want the border secured. We cannot survive as a nation with porous borders like that. It affects our economy, and it affects our culture. We're just rapidly becoming a nation other than the one I grew up in."
Casimiro had heard that people in Derby Line had defended the border patrol. He pointed out that the Minutemen were observers and that their aim is to call border patrol whenever they see illegal border crossers.
''Until the border is 100 percent secure, they're not doing a good job," Casimiro said.
Back on the bike path, the three Minutemen trudged on in the rain. Finally, they knocked on Amy Audet's door to ask directions.
The border, she told them, was in the opposite direction.