| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance. By Richard J. Ellis. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. xx, 297 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1372-2.)

The history of the Pledge of Allegiance begins and ends in rich irony. As narrated by Richard J. Ellis in this engaging book, the paradox of its origin is that a pledge so often deployed by anticommunists and denounced by secularists as having been corrupted by the 1954 addition of the words "under God" was written by a Christian socialist. The closing paradox is that a pledge originally intended as a ritual of American unity has in our own time become a divisive "wedge" issue, cynically used by Republicans to impugn the patriotism of Democrats. In between, Ellis meticulously examines the origins of particular phrases and parses the reasoning of judges in the many suits brought by resisters. The book is at once an intervention in a current political controversy and a sound legal and cultural history of an important civic ritual.

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