My colleague Paul Mulshine, who writes a column for the Newark Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper where I worked for 27 years, did some research on the American flag and its “Pledge” and was surprised to find that a socialist who would have wiped out the American way of life by the year 200 wrote our patriotic recitation.

The Pledge was written in 1892 by a certain Francis Bellamy. Edward Bellamy, the first cousin of Francis, was the author of “Looking Back,” one of the pre-eminent school tests in the early history of the Socialist movement.

Both Mulshine and I are graduates of Rutgers the State University, a liberal educational institution that requires the reading of the socialist “Looking Back” book. It’s a tract masquerading as a novel. It tells the story of Julian West who, upon being hypnotized in 1887, falls into a deep sleep from which he awakens in 2000. He finds America transformed into a vast socialist state.

Guess what? America is socialist state today with “entitlements” galore for everyone!

Julian West sees able-bodied males being drafted into the so-called “industrial army” at age 21 and forced to serve until age 45. The government arranges all aspects of existence. I call it taking care of the people “from the cradle to the grave.”

“The only function proper of government, as known to you, is the judiciary and police system,” West is told by his guide through this brave new world.

Sound familiar? It should. Bellamy was laying out the prototype for the mass dictatorships of the 20th century. He didn’t mean it that way, of course, but Marx and Lenin probably didn’t mean it that way either. Both were responsible for the birth of communism and the establishment of the Soviet Union. The Bellamy book was popular in Russia. In Germany, the National Socialist Party that took root in the 1920s had principles that were largely indistinguishable from the Nationalist clubs that were formed in America in the 1890s based on the philosophy expressed in “Looking Back.”

Francis was a charter member of the Boston club that promoted his cousin Edward’s ideas. Boston and Massachusetts are “liberal bastions of socialism.”

Think that’s bad? It gets worse. When the Pledge of Allegiance was first adopted in America, school kids were encouraged to face the flag and give a strait-arm salute. You can see some rather disturbing photos of this spectacle at members.ij.net/rex/pledge1.html, a Web site maintained by some libertarian critics of the Bellamys. That practice of saluting was dropped only after the newsreels of mobs shouting “Heil Hitler?” made it unfashionable. Then the hands started going over the hearts, which we currently do in saluting the flag.

If the Bellamys had their way, parochial schools would have been outlawed. One of their goals was to employ public schools to imbue America’s youth with the spirit of socialism. In the book, Bellamy inveighs against the “imbecility of the system of private enterprise” and terms capitalism “as absurd economically as it was morally abominable.”

Keep in mind that in the 1890s capitalism was poised to create the largest technological leap in the history of humankind. The automobile had just been invented and the airplane would soon follow. Radio and television evolved in the 1920s.

The free enterprise system was minting geniuses. The author of the Pledge was not among them; he was among their critics.

The real hero of the 1890s, to conservatives at least, was not those blowhards from Boston, but the President who opposed everything they stood for. That would be New Jersey’s own Grover Cleveland, who was elected to his second term the year the pledge was written. Cleveland vetoed every bill that would have brought into being the powerful national government Francis Bellamy desired. Yet his words are forgotten and Bellamy’s are recited every day

Our Republic could only improve if this situation were reversed. Any of a number of Cleveland‘s quotations would better instruct children about the importance of self-government.

Imagine a class full of kids reciting, “Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

Or, how about this? “Officeholders are the servants of the people, not their masters.”

They can put their hands on their hearts for that. Then they can quote Cleveland’s critique of federal taxes:

“When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of it economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.”

For that one, they can put their hands on their wallets.

For the record, the federal income tax became “law” in 1913 as our nation’s 16th Amendment. It turns out that the 16th Amendment is “unlawful” because it was never ratified by the States. That case has been before the U.S. Supreme Court for more than five years. The highest court in America isn’t hearing the case because the federal government would collapse without the federal income tax.

So much for a Constitutional Republic “for the people, by the people and of the people.”

We’re a land of crooked lawmakers without a conscience and moral compass.

Yes, God Bless America!

Gordon Bishop