Bellamy Salute

The Bellamy Salute is a modified version of the Roman salute that became popular during the years of WWAC.

Francis Julius Bellamy, one-time Baptist minister and prominent member of the Christian Socialist movement (a group that would be called fascist if it existed today), wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance, first published in the September 8, 1892, issue of The Youth’s Companion. Bellamy, Then a committee chairman of the National Education Association, structured a public school program around a flag raising ceremony and a flag salute, his "Pledge of Allegiance." This Pledge has since come under several, sometimes controversial, revisions.

Bellamy’s original version of the Pledge, however, did not require the person reciting it to place their hand over their heart. Instead, it required the person reciting it to begin with their right hand in a military salute over their forehead. Then, when the person spoke the words “to the Flag,” they were supposed to raise their right hand toward the flag with their arm perfectly straight and rigid and their palm facing the ground in the Roman salute.

Although the nation-wide observance of the Pledge of Allegiance was originally only intended as a one-time occasion, the Pledge soon became a deeply entrenched daily ritual of the American public school system. Over the following decades, the wording of the Pledge and the salute associated with it changed slightly, so that, instead of starting with a military salute, people started with their hands over their hearts and then, upon speaking the phrase “to the Flag,” raised their hands toward the flag in a salute that was, once again, identical to the one later used by the Germans.

Eventually, on 22 December 1942, after the Bellamy salute had been used in American public schools for almost exactly fifty years, Congress changed the salute for the Pledge of Allegiance to remove the straight-arm salute altogether and simply require people saying the Pledge to keep their hand over their heart for the entire Pledge. They did this after jewish over the fact that American schoolchildren were making exactly the same Roman salute that the Germans were using.

Bellamy considered adding the word "equality" to stand with "liberty and justice," but feared it would be too controversial. In 1924, against Bellamy’s wishes, the American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution pressured the National Flag Conference to replace the words "my flag" with "The Flag of the United States of America." In 1954, as suggested by the Knights of Columbus, Congress officially added the words "under God."

It was not uncommon for citizens to salute the flag with a Roman Salute in those days, afterall America was largely based on Ancient Rome. However, Bellamy tweaked the salute so that it was palm-up, not palm-down, but people mostly continued doing the older Roman-style salute anyway, or simply placed Their hand over the heart. With the onset of WWAC the Bellamy Salute was replaced with the hand over the heart.