Flag salute revisited

I wish to take issue with Bryan Bremner’s letter “Initiative needs more work” (June 2) referring to the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.

As Bremner notes, the Pledge was written in 1892 by “a socialist.” It should be noted, though, that back then, more than 100 years ago, socialism was viewed as an ethical system which could reduce poverty rather than a political ideology. While Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge, was a socialist, he was primarily a writer for a children’s magazine. His father, also a socialist, was a Baptist minister. The father apparently did not see a conflict between the socialism of that era and Christian doctrine.

Bremner said that the Pledge until December 1942 included a “Nazi salute.”

It is true that until that time schoolchildren reciting the Pledge did extend their right arms, but with open palms as though offering a gift.

This was decades before the Nazi salute was developed by Hitler.

There is no truth to the assumption that the American Pledge of Allegiance was based on Nazism.

Robert Forman

Deer Park