A salute to flag etiquette and history

“Have a nice day (afternoon, evening, night, you name it)” has become ubiquitous — I love that word — in our world.

If making a grocery purchase, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, having a colonoscopy, etc. that is the way the person attending you sends you off. I like Steven Wright’s response “Thank you, but I have other plans,” and share it on occasion when I’m feeling whimsical.

So, ubiquitous means “being or seeming to be present everywhere.”

Another gesture that falls into the ubiquitous category is saluting the flag during the National Anthem or saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

It takes a very small athletic event (little league baseball or ponytail softball) to not hear the Star Spangled Banner. Both the anthem and the pledge require salutes to the flag (unless you’re hitting a capitol policeman with the flag).

Veterans like me have had a lot of practice saluting so it comes natural.

Flag etiquette allows veterans and active duty personnel to salute it as we learned; nonveterans and other civilians are asked to remove their caps and place their hands over their hearts.

As I have observed at most events this protocol is followed, but I learned that the form of the salute has not always been the one we now recognize. The “flag salute” has a fairly recent history.

The Bellamy Salute was first demonstrated on Oct. 21, 1892 according to Bellamy’s published instructions for the “National School Celebration of Columbus Day” as the “400th Anniversary of the Discovery of America.” NOTE: Bellamy chose to ignore Leif Ericson’s presence in North America not the Caribbean several centuries earlier.

Francis Bellamy had revised a pledge of allegiance written in 1885 by a Civil War veteran Captain George Balch.

Bellamy had an ulterior motive. He was the circulation manager for The Youth’s Companion magazine. He persuaded then-president Benjamin Harrison to institute Columbus Day as a national holiday and lobbied Congress for a national school celebration of the day.

Not coincidentally, the magazine sold flags. So, the premium department came up with the idea of sending schoolchildren flag cards, each to be sold for a dime apiece and representing 1% of a school flag. Sell a hundred cards and your school got a flag.

At this point, James Upham (head of the premium department) thought what if we came up with something for the kids to do with the flag besides fly it. That’s the prod which caused Bellamy to plagiarize the Balch pledge and invent a salute.

Historians record the Bellamy Salute as the right hand touching forehead, palm down then extending on “to my flag” toward the colors.

That approach didn’t seem offensive until the fascists in Germany and Italy developed their model, which appeared at Hitler rallies with the accompanying “Heil Hitler.”

As early as 1935, the newsreel footage of the fascist salute (copying Bellamy’s) caused concern among Americans.

The Nazi-sympathizing German American Bund decided they could salute the American flag and that of the Third Reich with the same motion.

The U.S. was still technically neutral when interventionists used pictures of Charles Lindbergh giving the Bellamy Salute to infer that he was in actuality using the fascist gesture. The controversy bubbled until Congress passed a public law stating the pledge “be rendered by standing with the right hand over the heart.”

Oddly enough, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United States Flag Association felt it inappropriate for Americans to have to change thetraditional salute because foreigners had adopted a similar gesture. The ensuing war may have changed their collective mind.

The world has taken a few spins since then and respect for the flag varies.

I am saddened when I see grown men (with ball caps) stand haphazardly during the national anthem. I suspect that none ever served their country in the military.

So, I salute during the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner” and when the flag passes in front of me. Old habits die hard.