The Pledge of Allegiance Scam 🇺🇸

Morning Americans!

You know that weird thing you do every day at school?

You say hi to your teacher…

Sit in your little chair…

And then..

Pretty weird right…

Why do we do all that??

Well, it was actually just a marketing scam to sell more American flags…

Ya, really…

So, it was the late 19th century…

And we had this guy, James B Upham.

The marketer for a popular children’s magazine “The Youth’s Companion”

And he had a crazy idea…

(See, he was very patriotic)

(He also liked money) 

So, Upham, along with magazine writer Francis Bellamy, came up with a plan… 

Basically, there was this giant celebration coming up.

The 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.

A BIG deal.

They thought maybe they could use this event to promote their flag campaign, to sell more flags.

But how?

That's the tricky part.

And then, they came up with it…

Their idea was that Francis could write some sort of pledge for students to recite while saluting a flag. 

It would both promote patriotism AND sell a whole bunch of flags!

So Francis wrote up a little pledge and called it:

The pledge of allegiance!

And guess what? 

The schools loved it! 

And flag sales soared!! 

Now, over the coming decades the pledge was tweaked a bit…

Adding “ the flag of United states of America” and “under god”.

Oh… and the salute was also tweaked…

Yeah, probably for the best…

BTW, we here at Smart Nonsense didn’t like school so much.

So we’re in pursuit of making a ~new~ school (okay an iPhone app..)

One where learning is ~fun~ 🌈

Check it out on BrainBlast.com!

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan

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