Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached India.

Exactly two hundred years later, a letter from Massachusetts Governor William Phips ended the Salem Witch Trials.

On this date in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance was first recited by students in many U.S. public schools, as part of a celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage.

The Pledge had been composed that year by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist minister, and was first published in Youth’s Companion magazine, the issue dated September 8, 1892. The recital was accompanied with a salute to the flag known as the Bellamy salute. During World War II, the salute was replaced with a hand-over-heart gesture because the original form (described in detail by Bellamy) involved stretching the arm out towards the flag in a manner that resembled the later Nazi salute. The original form of the Pledge was somewhat less involved than later versions:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

In October an editorial addition occurred, the word “to” prefixing “the republic.”

October 11, 1890, marks the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

On the same date in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford approved a congressional joint resolution Public Law 94-479 to appoint, posthumously, George Washington to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.

John J. Pershing is the only other American to attain this high title, and the only one to achieve it while alive.

On October 10, 1973, Austrian-born American economist, Ludwig von Mises (pictured above) died.

Two-hundred fifty-nine years earlier, the French law-maker and Jansenist Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert (pictured below right) died.

Both economists were known for their defenses of freer markets: le Pesant for pioneering the critique of mercantilism, arguing that a nation’s wealth consisted in what its people produce and trade; Mises for systematizing economic theory and advancing the critique of both socialism and latter-day mercantalism (what he called “interventionism”).