American Myths
We Were All Taught

The Pledge of Allegiance: Born as a Flag-Selling Marketing Campaign

Francis Bellamy (1855–1931)
The Pledge was published Sept. 8, 1892,
in The Youth's Companion magazine.

The Pledge of Allegiance has nothing to do with the Founding Fathers. It was written in 1892 — more than a century after the Constitution — by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister working as an editor at a children's magazine called The Youth's Companion. The magazine was running a campaign to sell American flags to public schools.

The Youth's Companion had begun selling flags to schools in 1888, but administrators weren't displaying them. What the magazine needed was a ritual that would make those flags indispensable. Marketing director James B. Upham devised the plan: create a patriotic pledge for children to recite while facing the flag. The pledge was published in the September 8, 1892, issue of the magazine as part of a Columbus Day promotion timed to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By year's end, the campaign had sold flags to more than 26,000 schools across the country, and the magazine's circulation jumped from 400,000 to 600,000.

Bellamy himself was a Christian socialist who had been pushed out of his Boston congregation for preaching about wealth inequality and the rights of working people. He originally wanted to include the words "equality" and "fraternity" in the pledge, but his editors killed that language — because state school superintendents opposed equal rights for women and African Americans. He settled on "liberty and justice for all" as a compromise.

Claim vs. Reality
What the documented record shows

The original salute designed to accompany the Pledge — the "Bellamy salute" — required students to extend the right arm straight toward the flag, palm upward. In the 1920s, the Italian fascists and then the Nazi Party adopted a nearly identical gesture. During World War II, Congress quietly replaced the Bellamy salute with the hand-over-heart gesture still used today.

Then, in 1954 — sixty-two years after Bellamy wrote it — President Eisenhower signed legislation inserting the words "under God" into the Pledge. Those words never appeared in any version Bellamy wrote. Bellamy was an advocate for the absolute separation of church and state and deliberately excluded any reference to God. The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, had lobbied for the addition for years. The Cold War climate — the need to contrast America with "godless Communism" — gave them their opening. Congress acted in six days.

What is recited in American classrooms every morning? A marketing jingle written by a socialist minister to sell magazines and flags — modified 62 years later with Cold War religious propaganda — that most children have been taught to treat as a founding document. None of that history is in the script they recite.

The War on Drugs: A Political Weapon Dressed as Public Health Policy

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one" and launched what became one of the most expensive, far-reaching, and racially devastating domestic policy initiatives in American history. The official story was public safety. The private story was something else entirely.

John Ehrlichman was Nixon's Chief Domestic Policy Advisor and a key figure in the Watergate scandal who served time in federal prison. In 1994, journalist Dan Baum interviewed him for a book on drug prohibition policy. Ehrlichman — with what Baum described as "the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect" — described exactly what the War on Drugs was actually about.

The Nixon campaign's two political enemies, Ehrlichman explained, were the anti-war left and Black Americans. They couldn't criminalize political opposition or race directly. But by associating those communities with specific illegal substances in the public mind, and then enforcing those drug laws selectively and aggressively, they could disrupt, arrest, and discredit both groups — without ever having to say openly what they were doing.

The statistical record bears this out across decades. Despite comparable rates of drug use across racial groups, Black Americans are arrested for drug offenses at dramatically higher rates than white Americans. ACLU data shows Black Americans are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white Americans — even in states and counties with roughly equal usage rates. The War on Drugs produced mass incarceration. The male incarceration rate in the United States, remarkably stable at roughly 200 per 100,000 for the fifty years before the War on Drugs began, exploded afterward and has never recovered.

Reagan dramatically escalated the War on Drugs in the 1980s. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act established mandatory minimum sentences and created the infamous 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine (associated with Black communities) and powder cocaine (associated with white communities) — for what was pharmacologically the same substance. In 1989, drug czar William Bennett announced a $7.9 billion anti-drug plan; 70% of that money went to law enforcement and prison construction, not treatment.

Fifty years and over a trillion dollars later, the drugs are still there. The communities targeted by the policy were devastated. And one of the policy's architects, on the record, told us it was never about the drugs.

The Thanksgiving Myth: A National Story Manufactured Centuries After the Fact

Nearly everything American schoolchildren are taught about Thanksgiving is historically inaccurate, and the myth as we know it today was largely constructed centuries after the fact — primarily to serve political purposes and build a usable national origin story.

What actually happened in 1621: There was a three-day harvest celebration at Plymouth colony. Only one eyewitness account survives — a brief letter from Pilgrim Edward Winslow. That account never uses the word "thanksgiving." It doesn't describe a joint celebration between friendly peoples. It records that Wampanoag warriors arrived at the colony alarmed, after hearing celebratory gunfire, believing the settlers were under attack. They were not invited. Wampanoag leader Ousamequin ultimately brought 90 men and stayed for three days, but his decision to do so was political calculation — his people had lost up to 90% of their population to European epidemics between 1616–1619 and needed allies against the rival Narragansett tribe. It was diplomacy under duress, not brotherhood.

The friendly, sanitized version of this story began to take shape in the 1760s, when a group of Pilgrim descendants — worried that New England was losing cultural authority within the growing colonies — started promoting the idea that the Pilgrims were "the fathers of America." In 1841, a footnote in a Reverend's published history mentioned the 1621 gathering and called it "the first Thanksgiving." That footnote launched the myth.

Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular Godey's Lady's Book magazine, campaigned for decades for a national Thanksgiving holiday. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared it one — but not to honor Pilgrims and Native Americans. The country was in the middle of the Civil War. Lincoln needed a unifying symbol. His proclamation didn't mention Pilgrims. The "First Thanksgiving" story was attached to the holiday afterward, as Manifest Destiny sentiment romanticized westward expansion and needed a founding myth of peaceful coexistence.

What happened after 1621 is almost never taught. In 1637, English settlers burned a Wampanoag village and killed approximately 500 men, women, and children. In 1676, King Philip's War resulted in colonists nearly exterminating the Wampanoag. The head of Ousamequin's son, Pumetacom, was displayed on a spike in Plymouth for 25 years. The Wampanoag have marked Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning since 1970. They gather at Cole's Hill near Plymouth Rock each year to grieve what actually happened.

As historian David Silverman of George Washington University, who collaborated with Wampanoag communities on his research, has written: a myth that treats American colonialism as a bloodless affair is more than bad history — it prevents Americans from understanding themselves critically, and it is harmful to Native people whose real history it erases.

Trickle-Down Economics: The Political Sales Pitch That Never Worked — And Its Own Architects Admitted It

Trickle-down economics isn't new. It's an old theory that has failed repeatedly, been discredited, and been rebranded for each new generation. In the 1890s it was called "horse and sparrow theory" — the idea that if you feed horses enough oats, sparrows benefit from what passes through. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith later noted this theory contributed to the Panic of 1896. The same approach was revived in the 1920s, producing the Roaring Twenties for the wealthy and stagnant wages for workers — culminating in the Great Depression.

Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1980 under the name "supply-side economics." We know this was a deliberate rebranding because Reagan's own budget director said so. David Stockman, in a now-famous 1981 interview with journalist William Greider published in The Atlantic, admitted openly: "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory." Reagan's own team understood what the policy was. They simply couldn't sell it with honest language.

Reagan slashed the top marginal income tax rate from 70% to 28% over his two terms — while reducing the bottom rate by just a few percentage points. The promise was that the tax cuts would pay for themselves through economic growth. Instead, by the time Reagan left office, the federal budget deficit had nearly tripled and government debt as a share of GDP rose from 31% to 50%. Reagan's own Vice President and Republican primary opponent George H.W. Bush had called the approach "voodoo economics" before joining the ticket.

In 2020, economists David Hope and Julian Limberg at the London School of Economics published the most comprehensive study ever conducted on trickle-down tax cuts. Analyzing data from 18 countries over 50 years, they found that major tax cuts for the wealthy reliably increased income inequality, and had no significant effect on GDP growth or employment. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz reached the same conclusion: the evidence supports "trickle-up economics," where money in working people's hands stimulates broader growth, not the reverse.

Despite this record, the pitch was revived in 2017. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act promised average households a $4,000 wage increase. Real wages remained flat. Corporations directed the windfall primarily to stock buybacks and executive compensation. The top 1% captured an outsized share of the gains. The pattern held exactly as the research predicted.