"I pledge allegiance to the flag..."

Were these stirring words bequeathed to us by the truthful Washington? The honest Lincoln? The jingoistic Decatur? No, the "pledge of allegiance" was written by a normal, modern American: an advertising executive named Francis Bellamy, whose only other signed contribution to American letters was an introduction to a volume titled Successful Magazine Advertising. (1909)

"Here is your manufacturer or merchant, who is stocked with some article which he wants the public to buy. They will not buy it unless they feel a want for it. They may not want it, or perhaps anything like it-- unless he convinces them they want it. Before they want it, he must make them think about it; he must catch their attention, and catch it definitely."

There is no commodity without a customer, no customer without a suitable want. Everything the merchant offers-- suits, carriages, corsets, hats and pins, and social orders-- is worthless without wants, and the public cannot be counted on to want what is offered. Wants are just as important as the commodity itself.

Enter a new type of merchant-- the merchant of wants, the advertising man, whose role in the economy is no less entrepreneurial and heroic than that of the industrial baron. The advertising man must extract his raw material from as harsh and unyielding an environment as any mine owner ever knew, and fashion it into want-- a stuff more precious than all the treasures of the Earth.

"The only safe estimate he can make on the public's attitude towards him is its indifference and caprice. Consequently, if he can reckon on no existing eagerness to hear his news, he must calculate that if his story is to have a news interest, it is for him to make it himself. In other words, he must know how to create the state of mind out of which a purchaser may happily be produced."

From nature's raw material, the merchant of wants processes the finished state of mind from which the purchaser is produced. Wants, like fruits and berries, were formerly gathered willy-nilly as they grew. In the new order, they are to be cultivated, harvested, processed, as surely as the corn of the plain; and purchasers are to be produced as predictably and efficiently as chickens.

The author knew what he was talking about. The public had certainly been "indifferent" to a "pledge of allegiance to the flag." After all, Washington and other storied patriots had not needed such a pledge for themselves, nor had they demanded it of others. They had not pledged allegiance to any flag. Indeed, they had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in an act of open rebellion against the flag of their country. They, and millions of Americans since, had thrilled to the old story about the great Swiss patriot William Tell, who had struck a blow for Liberty by refusing to pledge allegiance to the imperial hat.

However, a shrewd advertising campaign had transformed this raw republicanism into a finished state of mind, suitable for the emerging corporate empire. Bellamy had distributed little flags to schoolchildren, asking them to bring in their pennies for the campaign-- "pennies for the flag," pennies for "America." Public want had been manufactured by this shoestring entrepreneur with a brilliance hardly matched in merchandising history. Within a few years, the public had wanted a "pledge of allegiance to the flag."

And now, generations later, the pledge defines "patriotism" as Frigidaire defined the refrigerator or Xerox the copier. It drones in auditoriums and nurseries where by law Yahweh himself may not proselytize; it is emblazoned upon the cortexes of illiterates, preliterates, schoolteachers, and all who seek profit or honor in civic affairs. A typical subject of the republic bellows or mumbles the pledge thousands of times from cradle to grave and never asks from whence it comes, any more than a chicken ponders the origin of omelettes. We only know that it fulfills our wants-- our mysterious and inexplicable wants.