Everybody Pledge Now

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

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4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Children say it every day in school, but have you ever wondered why we recite the pledge of allegiance? We journey back to the late 1800s to understand how a massive wave of immigration and sagging magazine subscriptions gave rise to this vow of patriotism. From the Civil War to anti-immigrant nativism and Cold War politics, this one pledge tells many stories.

Guests:

Debbie Schaefer-Jacobs, curator for the history of education collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Marc Leepson, author of Flag: An American Biography

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.
0:13.5	I'm Lizzie Peabody.
0:27.3	There are a couple of sounds that immediately take me right back to school.
0:31.6	And the school bell is one of them.
0:40.5	This is one of many school bells that we have that has an eagle on the top.
0:42.6	This is Debbie Schaefer Jacobs.
0:47.2	She's curator for the History of Education Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
0:48.5	So we have them with eagles.
0:50.6	We have them with Liberty Bells.
0:52.7	We have, you know, a lot of patriotic school bells.
0:57.5	Debbie's showing me some of the things you might find in a classroom in the late 1800s. Things you'd also find if you go poking around the Smithsonian's permanent exhibition, many voices, One Nation. Classrooms of Yore were bursting with patriotic paraphernalia.
1:13.0	Pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, little American flag papers that you
1:17.4	wrap around your pencil. See, public school, or common school, as it was called back then,
1:23.4	was a relatively new thing in the 1800s. And a big part of its mission was to educate America's youngest citizens
1:30.3	about what it meant to be an American,
1:33.0	in the language of kids, colorful pictures and songs.
1:36.5	Here's an example of Uncle Sam's school songbooks.
1:40.1	And more explicitly, like in this magazine, The Youth's Companion.
1:45.5	It's basically the size of a large, like, Life magazine, something your grandparents would
1:52.8	probably recognize in format.
1:55.5	The Youth's Companion was a magazine for kids and families.
1:59.5	The issue Debbie's showing me is dated September 1892.
	...

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